Subverting Democracy in the Name of Democracy

On this day:
1689
The Battle of Dunkeld in Scotland.
1770
James Cook formally claims eastern Australia for Great Britain, naming it New South Wales
1808
Battle of Vimeiro: British and Portuguese forces led by General Arthur Wellesley defeat French force under Major-General Jean-Andoche Junot near the village of Vimeiro, Portugal, the first Anglo-Portuguese victory of the Peninsular War.
1831
Nat Turner leads black slaves and free blacks in a rebellion.
1863
Lawrence, Kansas is destroyed by Confederate guerrillas Quantrill’s Raiders in the Lawrence Massacre.
1879
The Virgin Mary, along with St. Joseph and St. John the Evangelist, reportedly appears at Knock Shrine in Knock, County Mayo, Ireland.
1918
World War I: The Second Battle of the Somme begins.
1942
World War II: a Nazi flag is installed atop the Mount Elbrus.
1942
World War II: the Guadalcanal campaign: American forces defeat an attack by Imperial Japanese Army soldiers in the Battle of the Tenaru
1945
Physicist Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. is fatally irradiated in a criticality incident during an experiment with the Demon core at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
1961
Motown releases what would be its first #1 hit, “Please Mr. Postman” by The Marvelettes.
1963
Xa Loi Pagoda raids: the Army of the Republic of Vietnam Special Forces loyal to Ngo Dinh Nhu, brother of President Ngo Dinh Diem, vandalises Buddhist pagodas across the country, arresting thousands and leaving an estimated hundreds dead.
1968
Soviet Union-dominated Warsaw Pact troops invade Czechoslovakia, crushing the Prague Spring; on the same day, Nicolae Ceauşescu, leader of Communist Romania, publicly condemns the Soviet maneuver, encouraging the Romanian population to arm itself against possible Soviet reprisals.
1991
Coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev collapses.

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A bullet broke the glass in Andy Reid's practice facility office while the Chiefs' coach was working alone in it last year, The Kansas City Star reported Wednesday night. In all, three gunshots struck the three-story facility that night, sources told the Star.

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De Blasio packed New York’s rent guidelines board and instructed it to freeze all regulated rents on three occasions, in 2015, 2016, and 2020. Did that help New York's apartment 'affordability crisis?' Is Mamdani just more of the same?

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Two-time major champion and current world No. 3, Coco Gauff, has fired her coach Matthew Daly, just days before the start of the 2025 US Open.

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When someone is said to be "giving back to his community," what exactly is he returning?

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So, during the 'peace talks,' Russia fired over 600 missiles and drones at Ukraine overnight. 

Could we just give Trump the Nobel Peace Prize so some reality can descend on the conditions of this invasion?

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Subverting Democracy in the Name of Democracy

Voting is but a part of democracy. The Russians have a national vote, too.

The good Mr. Gerry, for whom this disgraceful process is named, was no hack. Born into a wealthy merchant family, Gerry vocally opposed British colonial policy in the 1760s and played an active role in organizing the resistance during the early stages of the American Revolutionary War. Elected to the Second Continental Congress, Gerry signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. He was one of three men who attended the Constitutional Convention in 1787 but refused to sign the Constitution because it initially did not include a Bill of Rights. After its ratification, he was elected to the first United States Congress, where he actively participated in drafting and passing the Bill of Rights, advocating for individual and state liberties. Gerry was at first opposed to the idea of political parties(wiki). He was the Governor of Massachusetts and was elected Vice President under Madison in 1812. He died in office.

Nor was this practice new. Manipulating voting districts to secure political power existed even before the nation. In 18th-century England, political operatives created “rotten boroughs” with only a few eligible voters, making it easy for politicians to buy votes and win seats. 

After English colonists founded the United States, gerrymandering “began almost immediately,” says Thomas Hunter, a political science professor at the University of West Georgia.

Gerrymandering is a deliberate attempt to disenfranchise certain voters and distort elections. Its intent is to benefit the political class and to spite the voter. Amazingly, it is illegal to do this based on race, but only on race. What honest citizen would want this? And why?

It can only be that the disenfranchised voter is thought to deserve to be.

Voting is a contest of beliefs. One votes to express a belief, with the many beliefs available, you will vote for the superior one. But inherent to the democracy is the belief that you will accept the result of the vote, that the majority may not see your way as the best.

The Americans have a structural advantage; they have a Constitution that limits the power of the state, carefully considered guidelines that channel votes within a confining framework. The American vote is a nuance within that structure.

With gerrymandering, like voting fraud, a thief attempts to distort the system for his own benefit. He always disguises the motive as a need to defeat an evil opponent or philosophy--the 'no effort is too much' argument--but the objective is to benefit the politician and his organization. The voting box is no longer a contest, it is a command.

So, gerrymandering, voter fraud, and court manipulation are all means to subvert the letter and the spirit of America's founding documents for the betterment of a political few. Any abuse is allowed to advance the kingdom of the righteous. And the righteous thief.

And in modern America, it is brandished proudly.

 

 

Centralized Repurposing

It was [in the late 1930s] a little-known oddity of American life that the United States, unlike other nations, actually had no “national” holidays established by law. Under the federal system the legalizing of holidays had been left to the states.

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In fact, however, a reasonable consensus of experts on NPOs [non-profit organizations] agrees that their governance is generally abysmal, worse than that of for-profit corporations. NPO directors are mostly ill-informed, quarrelsome, clueless about their proper role, and dominated by the CEO — as proponents of shareholder primacy would predict.--a paper

***

Inequalities between human beings in general, in the West, have increased at the same rate as the decrease in inequalities between men and women. This paper implies the rise of women's influence has paralleled anti-collectivism, which they champion.

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Centralized Repurposing

The Biden administration last month began laying the groundwork for a misguided plan that threatens to misallocate vast amounts of capital, encumber natural resources, and destroy rural economies by removing land from productive use in the name of solving climate change.

On Sept. 27, the New York Stock Exchange quietly submitted a substantial and financially material proposed change to its rules. The proposal would allow the formation of a new type of company. Natural Asset Companies, or NACs, would purchase the rights to control public and private lands, such as parks, forests and farms. But a NAC wouldn’t be able to put the land to economic use. Instead, it would preserve its acquisitions to maximize the value of the land’s “ecological services.”

NACs would register to go public on the NYSE. The money raised would purchase land and effectively lock it away from human impact. Grazing, energy extraction and other economically critical activities would disappear on NAC-protected land. Farmland used to feed the nation and world would go back to natural landscape, erasing human activity. The resulting conversion of investor money into unusable wildlands has the potential to be one of the most significant misallocations of capital in history.

Normally, corporations are formed for investors to make money. But since NACs are clearly noneconomic, a rule is required to allow their formation. The land placed in a NAC, a private entity, must support only “replenishable” activities. Since no economic activity can occur, the property is assigned an arbitrary value and traded on that basis. In any other situation, this proposal would be identified as sanctioning fraud.--oaks

And so the unelected Left's war against productivity inches along in always innovative ways toward its grim, hungry, and cold utopia.

The Motives of the State

A recent article stated the notion of “average global temperature” is meaningless. Average global temperature is a concept invented by and for the global-warming hypothesis. It is more a political concept than a scientific one. The Earth and its atmosphere is large and diverse, and no place is meaningfully average.

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those who want to blame the legacy of slavery for outcomes today are overlooking the legacy of the welfare state, which grew dramatically beginning in the late 1960s. The Great Society programs implemented under President Lyndon B. Johnson subsidized counterproductive behavior that took a huge toll on the black family. Subsequently, many of the positive trends among blacks in the first two-thirds of the 20th century—from declining crime rates to educational and economic gains that were narrowing the gap with whites—either stalled or reversed course.--Riley

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South Korea are refining their customer base.

A restaurant in Seoul is “politely declining” people over 49 (on the basis that men of that age might harass female staff), while in 2021, a camping ground in Jeju sparked debate with a notice saying it did not accept reservations from people aged 40 or above. Citing a desire to keep noise and alcohol use to a minimum, it stated a preference for women in their 20s and 30s.
Other zones are even more niche.
Among those to have caused a stir on social media are a cafe in Seoul that in 2018 declared itself a “no-rapper zone,” a “no-YouTuber zone” and even a “no-professor zone”.

 


The Motives of the State

No policy can be constructed on the all-embracing principle that everything depends on everything else. Those cause-and-effect relations that are immediate and direct must be distinguished from those that are remote, indirect, and generally unpredictable. In that sense, a [national] security-oriented policy should be conceived as one designed to cope with clear and present external forces directly threatening preservation of our form of government and way of life.

To go beyond this specific purpose is to take upon ourselves a moral duty beyond our borders, whether to right wrongs as we perceive them, to spread freedom and democracy as we conceive them, or to liberate others from oppressions forces as we see them. It is to presume that we have a right or obligation to intervene directly in the internal affairs of other nations, provided only that our cause is just. If that presumption were warranted, other nations would have a similar right or obligation, and the only point of contention would be justness of cause, an issue not easily settled by consensus.--Nutter

On the surface, this seems to be a reasonable position but it does imply, unlike the evangelical fascist and communist countries, that the state is an immoral beast. So, which is worse?

Tradeoff

Tradeoff

The migraine-inducing news peaked last week with the announcement that California, the sixth largest economy in the world, was going to outlaw all vehicles except 'zero-emission vehicles.' Note there is nothing said about the source of power here because EVs use electrical battery-charging from all sources, 80% of which is carbon-based. That is to say, carbon energy, once removed. They are not going to ban the cheap wellspring of the modern world, they are going to make it less visible, more expensive, less reliable, and less convenient.

California is outlawing the internal combustion engine, a power so integral to man's development it sounds like the outlawing of gravity.

Somehow, this craziness has caused us to flail about in our criticism and focus on the bizarre risk-reward conflict: do we know this is worthwhile, especially when the real change is not the energy source but only its location? Is this pain being endured for symbolism and virtue-signaling?

But there is a much larger point: How does the California governor get to do this? What business is it of his what kind of car we drive? The point is not that California is a huge and important market, it is that the governor is not that market, we are. His opinions might be interesting--even valuable. But they can not be edicts. Unless, of course, the notion of limited government and power ceded to the state is no longer a foundation of the nation. And that, along with the concept of the equality of peoples, is sort of the essence of the land.

Dying in Darkness

Dying in Darkness

Sometimes, in clandestine conflict, true colors fly.

The Russians are said to be setting up their own troops in Ukraine disguised as Ukrainian troops to initiate outbreaks of violence against local Russians. This will allow the Russian troops on the border to enter and attack Ukraine to 'save the day.' This raising of an incident by your own agents, so you can respond to it, is called a 'false flag' operation, a time-honored surreptitious and dishonest way to justify violence against a people.

The Department of Education asked for--solicited--a letter from a local school board stating that parents' behavior at a meeting frightened them and asking for help. The Board of Education received the letter and forwarded it to the Department of Justice for further, aggressive response.

Are these two episodes similar? Does the Department of Education look like the Russians? Does the group of parents look like Ukraine? Does the Department of Justice look like the Red Army?

If any of these comparisons are fair, are you scared to death?

The Gravity of the Law

Science does not enjoy or encourage error; nor does it despise or reject it. Science does learn from error, as error directs its thinking. That is not true for politics. Error in politics is a disaster and the focus of vilification and ridicule. White-coated scientists on the dais with politicians is an oxymoron.



                                     The Gravity of the Law

This is from Munger.

I told the story of a federal government scientist who entered a DC Metro station eating a candy bar. A DC Transit cop noticed this (they were passing on escalator, down vs. up) and admonished the scientist. Scientist nodded, ate the last bite of the candy bar, and headed toward the subway platform.

The cop hurried back down the escalator, and aggressively confronted the scientist. (Both cop and scientist were African-American women, if it matters). The cop roughed up the scientist, and then aggressively searched her, going so far as to put her hand up and feel around inside her bra.

Some people at the time thought the cop had just gone crazy. That view makes the mistake of “falling out only with the abuse.” This was not an abuse of the system; it is the system. To paraphrase Chris Rock, “That cop didn’t go crazy. That cop went cop!”

What I mean is that violence and literal enforcement of the law is not a distortion or perversion of state power, but is rather the essence of state power. The law said “no eating.” The person was eating. That person must be aggressively prevented from flouting the law. I’m not sure exactly what the scientist should have done, since she couldn’t spit out the candy bar. But when she ate the rest of the candy bar, after being told that eating was illegal, the state had to come down hard.

In the past few weeks, we have seen videos of police violence targeted at civilians. I started to say “innocent civilians,” but that’s not true. In an environment where a police order to “get off the streets, move away” has been issued, the failure to move away is very much like popping the rest of the candy bar in your mouth. The state, in the form of police violence, is asserting its power to control the population. Once you begin to see like a state, you recognize that failing to use violence to exert control would deny the nature, and in fact the very self-justification, of the enforcement power.

A government does other things also, of course, but the ability to survive and to use violence to force citizens to obey, is the core function of the state.

Your Government

The 3.2 Trillion dollar HEROES ACT  will give astonishing amount of national money to the incompetent state governments. So what comes first with these guys, the idiotic bill or its deceptive name?


                              Your Government

Will the new campaign be, are these guys worse than Trump?
From an article by Kimberley A. Strassel:

"Mr. Rosenstein didn’t know that the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee had funded the infamous Christopher Steele dossier, which formed the bulk of the accusations against the Trump campaign. He didn’t know the FBI in late 2016 had interviewed colleagues of Mr. Steele who cast doubt on his credibility. He didn’t know Mr. Steele’s primary source had disavowed the dossier’s central elements by January 2017.

Mr. Rosenstein wasn’t told that the FBI recordings of targets George Papadopoulos and Carter Page provided exculpatory information. He wasn’t told that the FBI had moved to drop Mike Flynn, who became White House national security adviser, from its investigation in early January for lack of any evidence of collusion. He wasn’t made aware of the recent exculpatory evidence the Justice Department turned over in the Flynn case.

Mr. Rosenstein wasn’t even told that Mr. Comey kept memos of his conversations with the president. According to an inspector general report, Mr. Comey wrote the memos to “protect” the FBI and shared them with Mr. McCabe, his chief of staff, Jim Rybicki, and the FBI general counsel, James Baker.

Mr. Rosenstein made clear that his major decisions—to reauthorize the surveillance warrant against Mr. Page, to proceed against Mr. Flynn, even to appoint special counsel Robert Mueller—might have been different if he’d been briefed about all these different facts. That would explain why FBI leaders kept Messrs. Sessions, Boente and Rosenstein in the dark. This is shocking—and in keeping with Mr. Comey’s insubordination during the Clinton investigation. It suggests the attitude that the FBI was a law unto itself was widespread."

A charming balance between innocence and malice.

The Coronavirus Cover-Up

                  "The Coronavirus Cover-Up"   

The Critic is a conservative British magazine with an arresting article sent by Don called "The Coronavirus Cover-Up" By Kapil Komireddi.

These are some sample paragraphs and, if accurate, may predict an entirely new post-virus debate. It is appalling. If true we are in the hands of monsters and morons.

"The calamity unfolding all around us did not emerge from a void. It originated in China. And its eruption into a global pandemic is inseparable from the nature of the regime that has ruled China since 1949. Had the authorities in that country intervened early to contain the fresh strain of the Chinese coronavirus, COVID-19, there would likely have been 95 percent fewer casualties. Instead, China’s one-party state created the conditions for the spread of the virus. For weeks, it suppressed information and punished those who shared it.
........

Once the virus made its inevitable outward march, claiming lives beyond China’s borders, the CPC mounted a major public relations exercise that exploited common human decencies to evade accountability. Criticism of the Chinese government was equated with racist prejudice against ordinary Chinese people. The result: rather than confront China, precious energies were exerted to avoid the trap set by China. In February, the Mayor of Florence launched a campaign encouraging Italians to “hug a Chinese”, describing it as a “fight of solidarity and unity against virus”. The People’s Daily, a mouthpiece of the CPC, applauded young Italians advertising their virtuousness on the Internet with photos of themselves hugging Chinese tourists without mentioning a word about the mortal perils of human contact.

China didn’t owe an apology or an explanation to the world: the world owed China proof of its anti-racism. There was no time, of course, to ponder the irony of the most xenophobic despotism in the world, which has interned a million ethnic Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, cleansed Tibetan Buddhists from their homeland, and deluged restive regions with Han settlers, setting itself up as the certifying authority on what constituted anti-racist behavior. There was no time to remember that, just three years ago, the state museum in Wuhan had put on an exhibition likening Africans to wild animals."

The link:

https://thecritic.co.uk/the-coronavirus-cover-up/?fbclid=IwAR2WsS3LbuOKjepMV0RTN33_4pdC8YcV07P1Op7QazY4vZG_gs54422K1WI

ARPA and DARPA and Not

                                  ARPA and DARPA and Not

The Spectator has an article on Dominic Cummings’s plan to hype the British economy through the creation of another ARPA. 

The first Advanced Research Projects Agency was created in the US in 1958. The previous year the Soviets had launched the world’s first artificial orbital satellite, Sputnik. The thought was that only if the US immediately copied the brilliant engineers who ran the Soviet Union could the West hope to keep up. What emerged was the basis for digital technology.

In his 2002 book Digital Culture, Charlie Gere reveals that crediting those inventions to ARPA isn’t so simple:

‘The first head of XeroxPARC was Bob Taylor [of] ARPA’s computing research arm… The Mansfield amendment and the presence of Taylor at XeroxPARC meant that many talented computer scientists and researchers who had been ARPA-funded were drawn to the Centre [ie, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center].’

The Mansfield amendment was the amendment by which Senator Mike Mansfield, in 1973, stopped ARPA from doing any further pure research. Thereafter it was to be limited only to applied defense work. Its name subsequently changed to DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.) 

The article called the amendment "infamous." There is an interesting argument over the success and productivity of focused research programs rather than those more free-range.

The researchers streamed out of ARPA to the private sector and XeroxPARC, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, to create all of those technological advances. So it was only because the U.S.’s ARPA was depopulated that the U.S. pioneered today’s tech revolution.

What model is Mr. Cummings advancing?

Trust vs. Reliance

                          Trust vs. Reliance

Declines in trust of government correlate strongly with calls for more government regulation in more parts of our lives. "Individuals in low-trust countries want more government intervention even though they know the government is corrupt," explain the authors of a 2010 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper. That's certainly the case in the United States, where the size, scope, and spending of government has vastly increased over exactly the same period in which trust and confidence in the government has cratered. In 2018, one of the paper's authors, Andrei Shleifer, a Harvard economist who grew up in the Soviet Union before coming to America, was asked, why do citizens ask a government they don't believe in to bring order? "They want regulation," he said. "They want a dictator who will bring back order."

While this might be a simplistic--or Russian--explanation, the correlation is curious.

Counterintuitively, the relative size and spending of government in the United States actually flattened or dipped during periods when trust and confidence in government picked up:

From 1994 to 2001, Pew data show upticks in the number of people who trust the government to mostly do the right thing…. Using inflation-adjusted dollars, the feds spent about $250 billion more in [Bill] Clinton's last year than in his first, a small increase compared to the spending surges seen under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Viewed as a percentage of GDP, federal spending fell significantly during that period. In 1991, it equaled 21 percent. By 2001, it equaled just 17.5 percent.

It could also be that lack of confidence in government is taught, that it rises when government action is more prominent. On the other hand, in a crisis people may just turn to the seemingly strongest solution.

Separation of Powers

The only commercial activity the Left seems to have any regard for is prostitution.--me

According to the 2017 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, since 2005 annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have declined by 758 million metric tons. That is by far the largest decline of any country in the world over that timespan and is nearly as large as the 770 million metric ton decline for the entire European Union.

By comparison, the second-largest decline during that period was registered by the United Kingdom, which reported a 170 million metric ton decline. At the same time, China's carbon dioxide emissions grew by 3 billion metric tons, and India's grew by 1 billion metric tons.

Halcyon, n. and adj.

1.‘In classical mythology: a bird, usually identified as a kingfisher, which brooded around the time of the winter solstice in a nest floating on the sea, charming the wind and waves into calm. In later use also (chiefly poetic): a kingfisher, esp. the common kingfisher, Alcedo atthis.’

2. A period of calm, happiness, or prosperity; (as a mass noun) calm, tranquillity. Also: a period of calm or pleasant weather; spec. = halcyon days n. 1. Usually in plural.

On December 23, 1783, following the signing of the Treaty of Paris, General George Washington resigned as commander in chief of the Continental Army and retired to his home at Mount Vernon, Virginia.

                       Separation of Powers

For a while now, the Press and the Dems have been excoriating Rep. Nunes with personal attacks. I have not been paying very close attention to these Whack-A-Mole, revolving impeachment hearings because they are so obviously insincere but, when the Dems deny smoke, there is usually fire. This is from the hard-eyed Kim Strassel in the WSJ (from Clarkey):

On Feb. 7, 2018, Devin Nunes, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sent a letter to Judge Collyer informing her of its findings in his probe of the FBI’s Page application. He wrote that “the Committee found that the FBI and DOJ failed to disclose the specific political actors paying for uncorroborated information” that went to the court, “misled the FISC regarding dissemination of this information,” and “failed to correct these errors in the subsequent renewals.” Mr. Nunes asked the court whether any transcripts of FISC hearings about this application existed, and if so, to provide them to the committee.

Judge Collyer responded a week later, with a dismissive letter that addressed only the last request. The judge observed that any such transcripts would be classified, that the court doesn’t maintain a “systematic record” of proceedings and that, given “separation of power considerations,” Mr. Nunes would be better off asking the Justice Department. The letter makes no reference to the Intelligence Committee findings.

Mr. Nunes tried again in a June 13, 2018, follow-up letter, which I have obtained. He told the court that Congress “uncovered evidence that DOJ and FBI provided incomplete and potentially incorrect information to the Court,” and that “significant relevant information was not disclosed to the Court.” This was Mr. Nunes telling FISC exactly what Inspector General Michael Horowitz told the world—18 months sooner. Mr. Nunes asked Judge Collyer to “initiate a thorough investigation.” To assist her, the same month he separately sent FISC “a classified summary of Congress’s findings and facts” to that point. The letter was signed by all 13 Republican members of the Intelligence Committee.

Judge Collyer blew him off. Her letter on June 15, 2018, is four lines long. She informs Mr. Nunes she’s received his letter. She says she’s also received his classified information. She says she’s instructing staff to provide his info to “the judges who ruled on the referenced matters.” She thanks him for his “interest” in the court.

Indeed, the Separation of Powers in the Constitution is an ingenious creation but it implies several things, integrity and honesty among them. If the entire system is too stupid or too dishonest to abide by the high ideals created in that astonishing document, the Constitution probably doesn't matter much. This is especially true if incompetence and mendacity is in the very marrow of the entity whose job it is to interpret and enforce the Constitution itself.

Trump's importance in history may not have anything to do with what he does in office but rather the mind-blowing revelations about government itself that his election has stimulated. We now seem to be subject to the same self-importance, arrogance, short-sightedness, and mendacity that would have made the 18th Century  Royal Court proud, a system of government and bureaucracy whose raison d'être is itself and whose loyalty goes no further. The original Constitution was a blueprint created by men with high aspirations for others. Unfortunately, today the ship of state has smaller men at the wheel.

Who's Your Big Brother?

Price is what you pay, value is what you get.--Warren Buffett

Mom had her first relaxing day in a while.
I did not. I went to the feared book group on The Plague. I have always thought the modern history of the European states was one of how they adapted to the homicidal mania of the two great wars and the French have adapted the worst. Their modern philosophies seem to me to be a jumble of rationalizations, with the Camus "Existence precedes essence" notion looking to me little more than a sports half-time exhortation. But the book is brilliantly written, really beautiful.

A new bill to prevent “social media addiction” would have the government manage social media website design.

Chinese officials are blaming the United States for the enormous political protests  in Hong Kong in recent weeks.

"…socialist experiments usually go through three stages, in terms of their reception by Western intellectuals. The first is a honeymoon period, during which they are widely held up as a glorious example of “real” socialism in action. The second is a period of angry defensiveness, during which some of the 
system’s failures are acknowledged, but blamed on external constraints. The third stage is the stage of retroactive disowning: intellectuals now claim that the country in question was never socialist, and that it is a cheap strawman to even mention it. The Western reception of the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Vietnam and, more recently, Venezuela followed this pattern to a tee. Cuba, in contrast, is a bit of an outlier, in that the country seems to be permanently stuck somewhere between stages two and three. It may no longer attract widespread enthusiasm, but Cuban socialism has never completely gone the way of Soviet, Maoist, Vietnamese or North Korean socialism."--Niemietz

The NFL says its fan base is increasingly made up of women and girls, up to 45% now of the NFL’s overall total. Antonio Brown being the face of the next weekend--and the league--would be a real PR nightmare.
On the other hand, why is his accuser meeting with the league?

I’m in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.--Freidman
What about the problem of contagion though? If you value individual decision making to the exclusion of contagion risks, you could argue against vaccines.

Over the past 50 years, Ashkenazi Jews have consistently tested well above the norm in almost every IQ study. Some the findings were startling. Looking at worldwide population groups, Jews appear at the top of the IQ charts, followed by East Asians, Whites, Arabs, other Asians, Indians, Blacks and Australian Aborigines. Studies have set average Ashkenazi IQ at anywhere from 107 to 117, which would rank them as the highest tested population in the world, as much as a full standard deviation above the general European average of about 101.

There are signs that the United Kingdom is at the start of a sterling crisis that could have serious implications for global financial markets and the European economy. 

On this day in 1862, Union soldiers found a copy of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s orders detailing the Confederates’ plan for the Antietam campaign near Frederick, Maryland.

               Who's Your Big Brother?

A recent article in the WashPo claimed  “big business is a greater threat to liberty than big government.”
This is usually met with the equally lame "No business can force anyone to buy its products. Only the government can force me to do anything." But life is more complicated than that.
The government may have been the enabler, but it was the banks that invested in derivatives and in subprime mortgages and and the result was an economic disaster that trapped us all. The publishing companies certainly gives us enough misinformation to impair our decision-making. And how much information gathering and storage is too much?
So the basic question is, on the current large scale, does it matter who is doing the gathering, the misinforming and making the financial errors?

Bubble, Bubble

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.--Chesterton

Alyssa got in last night and Chris picked her up.
My weight is up 4 pounds.
Federer lost and Mom stayed up to watch.

I spoke to a geologist about the Marcellus and the Utica formations. he says there is 250 years of energy in the Marcellus and 350 years in the Utica. He says that Putin will be destroyed.

Darrell Silver is the cofounder and CEO of Thinkful, a coding academy that currently has about 1,600 students. Online. No real estate. Part-time teachers.
Lean.
Thinkful trains mostly young adults (the average student is about 30) in computer programming and related skills needed by American business. The cost is somewhere between $10,000 and $14,000. But if you are struggling financially and if Thinkful believes you have the desire and the ability to succeed (and only 10 to 20% of interested students do), they will make you a deal: pay nothing, but sign a contract giving them somewhere between 10 and 14% of your post-training income for two or three years. It is the ultimate “skin in the game” model—both the student and Thinkful have enormous incentives for the student to successfully complete the program and get a job utilizing newly acquired skills. Unlike in traditional higher education, the student’s interests are very closely aligned with that of the school. Mr. Silver says about 85% of participants get a full-time job within six months of completing the academy’s program. 
He thinks a five to ten fold growth in scale over the next few years is highly reasonable and, indeed, expected. Now expansion will eventually outstrip demand but would the coding academy model work in other occupations as well, for example learning skills like welding or becoming experts in hospital patient information system management?


After months of stonewalling, Amazon's smart doorbell company, Ring, revealed last week that it's working with over 400 law enforcement agencies across the United States. Facial recognition?


The U.S. is projected to experience a shortage of between 46,900 and 121,900 physicians in both primary care and specialty care by the year 2032, according to a report published in April by the Association of American Medical Colleges.

The maniac who shot the people in El Paso was not the guy describes initially. He wrote--like the Unabomber--a crazy philosophy. There are two main themes. First, he hates non-whites and wants them exterminated. Second, he despises commercial capitalism. This is a crazy portion of it:
"Consumer culture is creating thousands of tons of unnecessary plastic waste and electronic waste, and recycling to help slow this down is almost non-existent. Urban sprawl creates inefficient cities which unnecessarily destroys millions of acres of land. We even use god knows how many trees worth of paper towels just [to] wipe water off our hands. Everything I have seen and heard in my short life has led me to believe that the average American isn't willing to change their lifestyle, even if the changes only cause a slight inconvenience."
His positions, such as they are, have been cherry-picked to fit an anti-Trump narrative.


Hundreds of women have joined Birthstrike, a group for those who have decided "not to bear children due to the severity of the ecological crisis." But isn't the advance of the world the result of human intelligence and creativity? How could anyone deny the contribution of the human species? There is some serious pessimism out there. And self-hatred.
The Talmud records that when the enslavement of the Hebrews in ancient Egypt grew unbearable, their leaders advised couples to stop having babies — why raise more children to face a life of slavery? Eventually one of those leaders was persuaded he was wrong, and that child-rearing should go on even in the teeth of murderous oppression. So he and his wife had another baby. That baby, named Moses, became the liberator who led his people to freedom.
So there!


                          Bubble, Bubble

Tired of worrying about the American culture? Or warfare in the Middle East. Try Kashmir.

Kashmir was once the most dangerous place in the world. Disputed between India and Pakistan—two nuclear weapons states—the stunning Himalayan redoubt is India’s only Muslim majority state. Until the arrival of India’s Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, tensions in Kashmir were on the wane. Terrorist incidents and deaths were down, tourism was up and the erstwhile nuclear flashpoint was as close to peaceful as it had been in decades. That peace is now over.

Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government took the drastic step of abolishing the constitutional provision that guaranteed Kashmir’s autonomy. The government also announced a plan to partition Kashmir and downgrade it from a full-fledged state to a federally administered “Union Territory.” It deployed over ten thousand soldiers, blocked internet access, and placed leading Kashmiri politicians under house arrest. The separatist insurgency, which has accelerated under the BJP government after a period of relative calm, is now poised to explode.

The roots of Kashmir’s conflict are deep, embedded in the acrimonious partition of the South Asian subcontinent and mired in on again off again India-Pakistan military tensions. Pakistan does its part to stoke flames, funding Kashmiri separatists while its intelligence services train them. Terrorists who enjoy safe haven in Pakistan cross the border to conduct attacks in India while religious groups in Pakistan recruit young men to join the jihad. Groups involved in the conflict have hijacked airliners, attacked India’s parliament, and kidnapped and killed American and European tourists. In short, Pakistan’s hands are far from clean.

Prior to 2014, Pakistan’s Islamist insurgency consumed the Army’s attention at home while India’s government continually engaged with Pakistan and the Kashmiris. The result was a relative quiet on the subcontinent. Yet as Pakistan’s insurgency died down and the army reasserted itself over the country’s politics, increasing numbers of Pakistan-based militants crossed into India. Relations between the countries again started to deteriorate. (Frost)

Kashmir is a convenient cauldron for a couple of malignant witches

Work for its Own Sake

If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?--Steven Wright


Went to Casbah last night with Kelly Meade.
Chris made cinnamon buns this morning. Terrific.


President Donald Trump and China's Xi Jinping agreed to a cease-fire Saturday in their nations' yearlong trade war, averting for now an escalation feared by financial markets, businesses and farmers.


Passive investments control about 60% of the equity assets, while quantitative funds -- those relying on trend-following models instead of fundamental research -- now account for 20% of the market share, according to estimates from J.P. Morgan.
Passive funds have attracted $39 billion of inflows so far this year, whereas active funds lost a whopping $90 billion in 2019, according to J.P. Morgan.


At one point in the Thursday "debate" the candidates were asked regarding health care plans to “raise your hand if your government plan would provide coverage for undocumented immigrants”, and every single one of them raised a hand. 
That is quite a commitment. I wonder why geography makes a difference. If people deserve medical coverage or disability payments, why should it matter where they live? We are a wealthy country. Why shouldn't we just pay for all of it, regardless of who you are or where you live? Why should location matter?


Speaking of the debate, at one point the esteemed candidates were shouting over one another in the voter auction, trying to out-bid each other. Kamala Harris jumped in with a since oft-quoted line:. 

"Hey guys, you know what, America does not want to witness a food fight," the California senator said. "They want to know how we're going to put food on their table." 

So the government is a farmer? A delivery system? Who do these people really think they are?

Today is the birthday of Frédéric Bastiat:
Thanks to exchange, a strong person can do without genius up to a certain point, and an intelligent being without physical strength, for each person would receive the benefit of the distinctive qualities of his fellow-men through the admirable community that it establishes between men.


I wonder if these guys think that reading the Mueller report aloud will make it different?

The wife of Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum has left him — and taken £31 million--to start a new life, "it is understood." Princess Haya, who had not been seen since February, is said to have fled to Germany with her son and daughter.

It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medications somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medications and a government bureaucracy to administer “universal health care.”--Sowell

When you examine the full extent of the poverty, inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on in this country, it can feel crushing. We still have a lot of work to do.--Jill Richardson, on the Fourth if July. This reminds me of the preoccupation of those plastic surgery addicts.

Schiller’s Pharmacy has become Schiller’s Apothecary. The business on the corner of South Aiken Avenue and Walnut Street was purchased in April by New Jersey-based Apotheco Pharmacy.

Small numbers are important over the long term. Over 20 years, a compound return of 5.6% will turn $10,000 into $29,736; at 7%, that $10,000 would grow to $38,697. Over 30 years and starting with $50,000, that “small” difference in return is the difference between $256,382 (5.6%) and $380,613 (7%).

 Recent gains have helped the Dow Jones Industrial Average  to ring up its best June gain of 7.2% since 1938 when the blue-chip benchmark surged an eye-popping 24.3% on the month, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

Even through most of the 1990s, the Big Three’s market share was above 70% and they didn’t go below 50% market share until 2008. Ford and GM sales combined represented more than 50% of US car sales in every year until 2001, and subsequently fell below 33.33% for the first time in 2012. By 2016, the combined market share of the Big Three fell to an all-time low of 44.2%.

The Globe Theater, where most of Shakespeare’s plays debuted, burned down on this day in 1613. The Globe was built by Shakespeare’s acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, in 1599 from the timbers of London’s very first permanent theater, Burbage’s Theater, built in 1576. Before James Burbage built his theater, plays and dramatic performances were ad hoc affairs, performed on street corners and in the yards of inns.

                       Work for its Own Sake

Griswold has a review, forthcoming in the Cato Journal, of Oren Cass’s new book, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. Here’s a passage from the review:

Cass flatly rejects Adam Smith’s fundamental observation that “consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.” He argues instead that production comes first: “Production without consumption creates options; consumption without production creates dependence and debt.” 

 
Smith felt that consumption (and the freedom to consume) created value of a product and guided production. On the other hand, the value of a commodity, according to Marx in volume one of Capital, can be measured according to the amount of socially necessary labor-time that was invested in its production. Value can only be expressed in relation to other commodities and manifests itself in exchange-value. For example, bartering.

The idea that production is the linchpin in the economy is an effort to dignify labor above all--a preoccupation of the Nineteenth Century--and to deny the economy's commercial  and social nature. The worker's efforts are of value regardless of how it is priced. (If this sounds familiar, it should. This is the essence of "Art for its Own Sake," where the act of creation is beyond critical evaluation.) But there is more at stake; its motive, from a political view, is crucial. If the value of things is in the consumer, then the effort to manage and direct production is useless; the economy can not be shaped and managed--or only can be influenced by such as crass advertising.

And if the economy can not be managed, what's a poor power-hungry politician to do?

First Amendment

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. -Jean-Paul Sartre, writer and philosopher

We and the McGraws could not get tickets to the Holmes play at the Foster.
I've made some progress with my diet; sort of level 2 of three. But broke down last night with some of Chris' great bread.

Do you get the feeling the Press was furious that Trump did not attack Iran?

During Buttigieg’s recent appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd read him a statement from the Reverend Rodric Reid, an African-American pastor in Indianapolis. “I guarantee,” Reid had told the Indianapolis Star, that Buttigieg’s marriage to another man “is going to be an obstacle. . . . That is really still a touchy subject, specifically and especially in the African-American church.” Todd also noted that he’d talked to black congressmen who said Buttigieg’s homosexuality could be a problem with segments of the African-American vote.
Why is that opinion so accepted when if it were, say, from a Mormon, it would not?

The dates on our food labels do not have much to do with food safety. In many cases, expiration dates do not indicate when the food stops being safe to eat — rather, they tell you when the manufacturer thinks that product will stop looking and tasting its best. Although some foods, such as deli meats, unpasteurized milk and cheese, and prepared foods such as potato salad that you do not reheat, probably should be tossed after their use-by dates for safety reasons.
84 percent of consumers at least occasionally throw out food because it is close to or past its package date, and over one third (37 percent) say they always or usually do so. That food waste in landfills generates carbon dioxide and methane, a greenhouse gas 28 to 36 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. And you are not just wasting calories and money. You are wasting all the resources that went into growing, packaging and transporting that food.

In Britain last year, generously using the Final Energy Consumption metric, 4 per cent of energy came from wind and solar, 3 per cent from nuclear and less than 1 per cent from hydro, the three zero-carbon sources. The common misconception that wind and solar are bigger contributors comes from forgetting that electricity is just 20 per cent of energy: the rest is heat, transport and industry. (Think firing a steel furnace with wind.)

AbbVie struck a deal to buy Allergan for about $63 billion.


From a brutal interview with the feminist Dr. Phyllis Chesler by Louise Perry:
In 1979, Chesler was raped by her then-employer, Davidson Nicol—a senior official at the United Nations and dignitary from Sierra Leone. She tells me that this rape proved to be less traumatic than the subsequent behaviour of her fellow feminists. When Chesler disclosed what had happened to Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem—some of the most powerful women in the movement at the time—they refused to support her in confronting her attacker. Chesler writes that Morgan told her that it would “look bad for feminism” for a “white feminist to charge a black man with rape and sexual harassment,” and that Steinem backed up this decision. Even Andrea Dworkin failed to stand up for her, telling Chesler that in her opinion “accusing a black man would make feminists look like racists.” This, despite the fact that several women of colour were supportive of Chesler’s desire to confront Nicol, particularly given that he was well known to be predatory.

Big companies are scrambling to grab a share of the $150bn (£119bn) global cannabis market, eyeing products as diverse as beer and dog treats according to a report by Standard & Poor's which predicts further expansion as legal cannabis becomes acceptable.The report by the ratings agency says growth may be volatile, because of the changing regulatory framework. Two of the biggest investments in the sector have come from Altria, owner of Philip Morris cigarettes, and Constellation Brands, owner of Corona beer, which have each invested more than $1bn in such products.

Republican Roy Moore—who narrowly lost to Democrat Doug Jones in a 2017 special election for the U.S. Senate in Alabama—announced he will run again. This country is reasonably concerned about surplus and scarcity. Now look at the 2020 presidential candidates. Why should a country of this size and competence have so much difficulty attracting good leaders? 


On this day in 1876, American Indian forces led by Chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull defeat the U.S. Army troops of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer in a bloody battle near southern Montana’s Little Bighorn River.


                             First Amendment


The First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Writing about NPR and PBS, Bordeaux raises an interesting question that is new to me.

"Note that among the freedoms guaranteed by this Constitutional provision are freedom of religion and freedom of the press. The authors and ratifiers of this amendment wisely sought, among other goals, to prevent the federal government from exercising influence over religion and over the press.

If the First amendment is violated when federal taxpayer funds are channeled to schools operated by churches – channeled with no intention by the state (or anyone else) either to give any religion an advantage or to deny the people of any religion the freedom to worship as they please – why is the First amendment not violated when federal taxpayer funds are channeled to organizations that are part of “the press”?

Put differently, if it is Constitutionally permissible for Uncle Sam to have a policy through which some of its tax revenues are channeled to support some media outlets, why is it Constitutionally impermissible for Uncle Sam or the states to have policies through which some of their tax revenues are channeled to support religious schools?

Indeed, if there is any Constitutionally relevant difference between the two cases, it seems to me that federal-government funding of NPR and PBS – funding made through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting – is more Constitutionally dubious than are school vouchers. NPR and PBS were created by the CPB, itself created by the federal government and whose funding comes almost entirely from Congressional appropriations. In contrast, none of the religious schools, or religions, that receive, or that would receive, funding through school vouchers are creatures of the state.

The principal purpose of school vouchers is to promote schooling, not religious belief or churches. Any promotion of religious belief or churches is indirect. In contrast, the principal purpose of government funding that goes to NPR and PBS is to promote journalism. Government funding that goes to NPR and PBS is meant to affect the operation of the press in a rather direct manner, while government funding that goes to churches through school vouchers is not meant to affect the operation of churches or the acceptance or rejection of any theology."

So, why are government subsidies of the Press tolerated? Is it that the Press is seen as more pure than religion?