Gerrymandering the Hierarchy

Liberalism is liberal. It is an emancipation philosophy, and a joyous celebration of the creative energy of diverse people near and far. The liberal order is about a framework of rules that cultivates that creativity and encourages the mutually beneficial interaction with others of great social distance – overcoming such issues as language, ethnicity, race, religion, and geography.--Boettke

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The chess scandal: A report, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, alleges that Niemann likely received illegal assistance in more than 100 online games, as recently as 2020. Those matches included contests in which prize money was on the line.

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The left likes to present religious liberty as a bigotry loophole for intolerant white Christians, so it’s worth highlighting another case that’s an ideological scrambler: Last month a federal appeals court ruled that a male Muslim prisoner in Wisconsin can have an exemption from strip searches involving a transgender guard who is biologically female.

“The moral tenets of his faith” prohibit him “from exposing his body to a woman who is not his wife,” writes Judge Diane Sykes of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. When the inmate objected to a 2016 strip search, the warden responded that the transgender guard “is a male and is qualified to complete these duties.” Prison officials threatened discipline if the inmate raised more complaints. (WSJ)

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According to the U.S. government, some of the left-wing groups are being funded by Russian influence operations to “sow discord, spread pro-Russian propaganda, and interfere in elections within the United States.”

On July 29, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the indictment of a Russian national for working on behalf of the Russian government to sow discord in the United States.

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Biden expands efforts to lower gas prices and secure energy independence. This is an actual headline from the NYT.

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Gerrymandering the Hierarchy

Some young women threw tomato soup on Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" in protest of the production of oil. They are members of Just Stop Oil, which wants the British government to halt new oil and gas projects. The two protesters also glued themselves to the gallery wall. The exact relationship between the painting and oil production is unclear. Perhaps they objected to it being an oil painting. Every little bit of symbolism helps. They certainly think that art is at least superfluous to the world's problems.

That is to say, they see a hierarchy in the world.

In a time of increasing unruliness, the assumption of a hierarchy in our thinking is probably good news. But a hierarchy in energy raises some serious questions. Because shortages imply allocation differences. Since everyone is admitting hierarchies, how will those shortages be resolved? What will the method of distribution be through the 'hierarchies?'

Planned energy contraction implies some agreement, a general and widespread self-sacrifice. Shutting down the world's energy will create circumstances considerably deeper and more serious that can be born by a stiff upper lip. Without energy, production will decline. Living standards will decline. Economies will implode. Agricultural and industrial production will be reduced, sometimes to nothing. People will die. Some cultures will suffer disproportionately. Some will be unhappy with their allocation and the suffering they will experience. 

What if some resist? Or, worse, what if they see their energy-less neighbors as an opportunity for exploitation? Or revenge?

What if everybody sees the 'hierarchy' differently? 

What if some see it to their advantage?

Illegal Stunts

 

Illegal Stunts

The criticism of the illegals being sent to D.C. and N.Y. is that it is a stunt. As if American politics is some ideal, some virtue in practice, and is not all a 'stunt.' The Bill to stop inflation, the Bill to renege on tuition, the endless gun Bills, EV gimmicks, economic shutdowns, facemasks, the Supreme Court Nominations, the solemn rotating impeachments, Not one of these programs was conceived with an ounce of sincerity or pursued with an ounce of expertise. But they all have a certain... je ne sais quoi, no?

Makes you long for the days of the WIN button, doesn't it?

Mosaics and Chaos

Mosaics and Chaos

Homelessness. Criminality. Violence. Inexplicable government behavior for inexplicable motives. Schools that don't educate. Ignoring that a border implies national integrity.

Now the President of the United States stands in front of the Press and the American people and whispers "Zero." He says that the inflation rate in the country is "zero." This is simply idiotic.

So much in the nation requires holding your nose, watching where you put your foot as you get up and go to work. Terrible problems engender no comment. Idiocy is put in context. Dangerous processes are ignored. We have become a nation that holds its breath and hopes for the best.

At what point does tolerance become approbation?

And when do those problems become institutionalized?

Decisions

Decisions 

We continue to suppress our own petroleum production, preferring instead to rely on dirtier sources provided by people who hate us and technologies that will not be available in any significant production for decades. We continue to buy dirtier oil products from the Russians who then use that money to fund an almost unbelievable planned murderous mugging of a smaller defenseless country that is being reported as a military operation. We are negotiating with a partner in the Middle East murder-suicide pact so we can buy their oil rather than use our own and give them more nuclear weapons potential. And, of course, we are negotiating with the Venezuelan kleptocracy. 

Fortunately, we have a Scandinavian child and an adult heavyweight like John Kerry to keep things in perspective.

Fodder for the Greater Vision

Fodder for the Greater Vision

The Ministry of Truth is on 'pause.' Maybe go underground for a while. Work on its mask. But something revealing has occurred in the Ministry mess. What about The Tsarina?

What about the Disinformation Governance Board’s director, Nina Jankowicz?

Mayorkas struggled to answer questions about the board’s work in front of lawmakers on Capitol Hill earlier this month. He had no idea who this woman was or why anyone would be upset. So she was just destroyed, destroyed by the casual indifference that her leaders showed.

Senate Democrats abruptly canceled a hearing last week, where Jankowicz was scheduled to testify, after a multiple of her videos went viral, including one showing her bragging about being the "Mary Poppins of disinformation." Democrats were reluctant to have Jankowicz face questioning from Republicans, prompting them to scrap the event altogether, which led to the board being disbanded.

She has a rather weird history, working for a CIA front and for a right-wing group in Ukraine. It is a shadowy and peculiar story but the real story is that she is an airhead. How could this silly woman with her Mary Poppins songs be in any government position at all?

The only thing worse is how she was sacrificed and butchered by her resumed friends in the government. They just rolled her out to the potential criticism. No justification. No defense. Exposed and left on her own. Like the Russian U.S. President Joe Biden nominated Saule Omarova.

“Until I came to the US, I couldn't imagine that things like gender pay gap still existed in today's world. Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn't always ‘know best.’” This person, a professor at Cornell University, was picked to be America’s next comptroller of the currency. The comptroller of the currency! A 2020 article written by Omarova suggests the need for a government-controlled “people’s ledger” that would “end banking as we know it”

When criticism mounted, “I am an easy target," she said. "An immigrant, a woman, a minority. I don’t look like your typical comptroller of the currency. I have a different history. I am easy to demonize and vilify.”

These people have a religious certainty in their righteousness and simply cannot conceive of an honest, thoughtful differing opinion. Disagreement is always stupid and ugly. And they are always angry at their critics and not their leaders who sacrifice them so casually and ineptly.

Buffaloing the People

Buffaloing the People

Taking the outlier as representative of large groups misunderstands the basic idea of 'outlier.' 

President Biden traveled to Buffalo, N.Y., to visit the scene of Saturday's insane massacre at a grocery store. Strangely, he called on Americans to reject white supremacy and criticized the racist conspiracy theory that inspired the shooter, as if this madman had a philosophy deserving opposition.

"White supremacy is a poison. It's a poison running through our body politic, and it's been allowed to fester and grow right in front of our eyes. No more," Biden said in remarks Tuesday at a community center alongside local leaders. "We need to say as clearly and forcefully as we can that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America."

House Democrats plan to vote this week on a bill to combat white supremacists and other domestic extremist groups.

"What happened here is simple and straightforward: Terrorism. Terrorism. Domestic terrorism," Biden said, calling the shooting a "murderous, racist rampage" carried out in the name of a "hateful and perverse ideology."

In America, evil will not win, I promise you. Hate will not prevail. White supremacy will not have the last word," Biden said.

But this is is simply and straightforwardly not true. This crazy man is not a conspirator, he is a public health failure.

Biden--and Schumer--have taken a lunatic and made him emblematic of a larger threat to the nation. When you purposely use the outlier to create a false world to rally your brownshirts, you are a despicable politician.

Wrong More Often Than Dictated by the Laws of Chance

Wrong More Often Than Dictated by the Laws of Chance

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, when asked if government spending is fueling the rise in government indebtedness as well as inflation, answered “No, it isn’t. The government spending is doing the exact reverse, reducing the national debt. It is not inflationary.”

This is quite a statement--maybe not the idiocy of the 'tilting Guam' worry, but close. There is nobody--or at least not many--who would say that increased deficit spending does not increase the national debt. And, unless you are a fan of MMT, deficit spending is inflationary. Adding dollars to the exchange market cheapens them. What one of the most important people in the world is saying is just gibberish.

An element of American politics is that a politician--with the exception of Trump--can say anything, regardless of how stupid, without the risk of correction or criticism. This says as much about the observers as the politicians themselves. Frighteningly, there is no reason for us poor working slugs to assume that these stupid statements do not correlate directly with stupid government. 

The inescapable camera and microphone may require the quality of these people to rise. Now that would be change.

Opening Hearts and Minds

 

Opening Hearts and Minds

We have been trying to mainstream outliers over the last years and it must be working. Lia Thomas is winning championships. The NYT stands behind 1619. National office in America is open to anybody.

Here's one I found in USA Today.

Russian parliament member Oleg Matveychev on a TV program addressed waves of sanctions against Russia in response to the country’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, saying leaders should “think about reparations.”

“The harm these sanctions caused us cost money. Return of possessions, including possessions of the Russian Empire, Soviet Union and even parts of Russia that are now occupied by the United States,” Matveychev said on Sunday, according to the Anchorage Daily News.

The host of the show asked Matveychev about the return of Alaska and Fort Ross, which was established by Russians in California, according to the California Department of Parks and Recreation.

“This is my next point – recognizing Alaska, Fort Ross and Antarctica,” Matveychev responded, according to the Anchorage Daily News. “We actually discovered it, so it rightfully belongs to us.”

The Americans on the Phone? Don't Answer

The Americans on the Phone? Don't Answer

The Chinese Communist Party has announced that it will begin increasing domestic coal production while reducing reliance on foreign suppliers. The news comes despite President Joe Biden’s climate czar, John Kerry, repeatedly begging China for the past year to join their comrades in the U.S. government in the fight against climate change and for the green energy revolution.

On Monday, Bloomberg News reported that China is looking to add to its record-setting year in 2021 in terms of coal production, by increasing production capacity by hundreds of millions of tons.

It’s hard to overstate the importance to China of coal, the most polluting fossil fuel. The nation produces and consumes more than half of global supply, and it’s the biggest contributor to its world-leading greenhouse gas emissions. China has said that coal consumption should begin to fall off in the second half of this decade as it strives to peak emissions across the economy by 2030.

In September 2021, Kerry flew to China to discuss potential deals regarding the climate. The meetings reportedly did not go so well.

Voice of America reported that Anders Corr, a longtime China observer and publisher of the Journal of Political Risk, stated that “the Taliban got a better reception” from the CCP, in reference to a delegation from the Islamic extremist group that met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing last summer.

Likewise, the CCP refused to even meet with Kerry in person and sent a low-level staffer to conduct the talks, something that Corr noted was not a sign the Chinese were taking Kerry seriously...(This is from the conservative Daily Wire)

The Saudis wouldn't take a call from Biden.

The Iranians speak with us only through the Russians.

Are you noticing a pattern here?

A horse! A horse!

 

A horse! A horse!

We need a little downtime between the Covid apocalypse, the nuclear apocalypse, and the climate apocalypse.

Just a little bit of a missile attack on the U.S. embassy. Not much. We continue to seek common ground.

There is a recurring theme in political interviews, the notion that the Russians, the Iranians, and the Chinese are American "partners." If true, that makes our response to them much more complicated. And naive.

An invasive species of spider the size of a child's hand is expected to “colonize” the entire East Coast this spring by parachuting down from the sky, researchers at the University of Georgia announced last week

My favorite:
On Thursday afternoon, 30 top TikTok stars gathered on a Zoom call to receive key information about the war unfolding in Ukraine. National Security Council staffers and White House press secretary Jen Psaki briefed the influencers about the United States’ strategic goals in the region and answered questions on distributing aid to Ukrainians, working with NATO, and how the United States would react to a Russian use of nuclear weapons.

We are banning Russian dancers, conductors, and Tolstoy. Is this sort of "liberty dogs" for dachshunds? Or is this just foolish identity politics?

My second favorite: Kamala in Europe.
Is this a risk we all take in democracies? Is this an outlier? Or, the scariest, is this the norm, and are we regularly shielded from it?
Volodymyr Zelensky's former press secretary tweeted then deleted a post on Thursday saying it would be a 'tragedy' if Vice President Kamala Harris were to one day be president after she awkwardly laughed through questions at a press conference in Poland when asked about the Ukrainian refugee crisis. 'It would be a tragedy if this woman won the presidency,' Iuliia Mendel, who served Zelensky's administration from June 2019 until July 2021, wrote on Twitter before quickly deleting the post.

Fog

 

Fog

Apparently, there is also a "fog of peace."

We continue to suppress our own petroleum production, preferring instead to rely on dirtier sources provided by people who hate us and on technologies that will not be available in any significant production for decades, we continue to buy dirtier oil products from the Russians who then use that money to fund an almost unbelievable planned murderous mugging of a smaller defenseless country that is being reported as a military operation, we are negotiating with a partner in the Middle East murder-suicide pact so we can buy their oil rather than our own and give them more nuclear weapons power.

Fortunately, we have a heavyweight like John Kerry to keep things in perspective, otherwise one would think our leadership is stupid, deranged, or not on our side.

What Are These People Thinking?

 

                                    What Are These People Thinking?

Ms. Harris met with Guatemala’s former Attorney General Thelma Aldana, despite Ms. Aldana’s two outstanding Guatemalan arrest warrants on charges of corruption.

Former Guatemalan high-court judge Gloria Porras was at the same meeting, though there are scores of legal complaints against her at home for allegedly refusing to obey the constitution. These include complaints from a qualified majority of the association of representatives who drafted the constitution in the mid-1980s.

In 2014 and 2015, insiders at Guatemala’s National Registry of Persons and at the attorney general’s office presented evidence to Ms. Aldana suggesting that permanent residency cards were fraudulently issued for people from places like Kazakhstan, Russia, China, Iran, Libya and Syria. Such cards can be used to secure Guatemalan citizenship, which can then be used to apply for U.S. visas. Rather than investigate the person who signed those documents, Ms. Aldana promoted her to deputy attorney general.

Now Vice President Kamala Harris visits Guatemala as part of her laughable effort to address the “root causes” of migration from Central America’s Northern Triangle. Root causes are apparently not known by these people. And one of Ms. Harris’s "goals" is to drum up investment for the region.

Imagine. 

Presumably, investors will join right in with the corruption. And they will not be alarmed the fact that all the native citizens are trying to leave.

Methods in Madness

 

                                                   Methods in Madness

From Henderson's review of Casey Mulligan’s new book, You’re Hired: Untold Successes and Failures of a Populist President.

"Like many people who have been appalled by some of Trump’s tweets, I had assumed that he was up in the wee hours carelessly knocking out his bombastic messages. I’m still not a fan of many of Trump’s tweets, but a chapter titled “I Wish That He Would Stay Off Twitter” tells two important things about the economics tweets. First, Trump’s economic advisers gave him a lot of input on the economics tweets. Second, whereas I had thought that Trump’s exaggerations undercut him, Mulligan argues, with evidence, that they were part of a strategy for getting good news covered. If Trump told the truth about good economic news, the media would often not cover it. But if he exaggerated, “the press might enjoy correcting him and unwittingly disseminate the intended finding.” My Hoover colleague John Cochrane, in a recent post about the book, notes that Trump’s tweets are his version of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats. Recall that, hard as it is to imagine today, FDR faced a largely hostile conservative press. Trump faces hostile left-wing media."

So there is no way to get covered honestly in the American Press except by dishonesty?

War Crimes

I am not young enough to know everything.--Oscar Wilde

Good morning. The Ides of March.

Mom got in to Florida easily. Saw the Stewarts last night.

The murders in New Zealand show how fragile the bonds among men are. Real danger prowls along the edge of the Bell Shaped Curve, and no one group has a monopoly on it.

The serious problem exposed by the college cheating scandal is the unclear identity of the university in America. It has become a staging area for adolescents, a pleasant holding area away from and before the arduous real world. It is a four year golf day. It is hard to defend---so it isn't. After eighteen years or so of obsessive management of our children's welfare and development, we hand them off to disinterested strangers for four years. 

From an article in "Science" on dna  from the Bronze Age in the Iberian Peninsula: Starting in about 2,500 B.C., genes associated with people from the steppes near the Black and Caspian seas, in what is now Russia, can be detected in the Iberian gene pool. And from about 2,500 B.C. much of the population’s DNA was replaced with that of steppe people.

The “Steppe Hypothesis” holds that this group spread east into Asia and west into Europe at around the same time—and the current study shows that they made it to Iberia, too. Though 60 percent of the region’s total DNA remained the same, the Y chromosomes of the inhabitants were almost entirely replaced by 2,000 B.C. That suggests a massive influx of men from the steppes, since Y chromosomes are carried only by men.  

Bordeaux on running for office: "I do understand the lust for acclaim, fame, and material wealth that often are the spoils of power. I condemn this lust as immoral, but I understand it. What I don’t understand is the lust to ‘help’ strangers by using force to prevent them from doing A, B, and C, and to compel them to do X, Y, and Z."

Gold and the Dow were both 800 in 1980. Today Gold is $1,300/ounce, the Dow is near 26k. So, Cash flows > commodities.  

Rep. Maxine Waters called for the removal of Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan after news that he received a $2 million bonus as part of his 2018 pay package. Waters is certainly one of the people I would pick to improve the businesses of the country.

The Guinness Book of World Records recognizes Rajveer Meena as the champion memorizer of digits of pi. On March 21, 2015, at VIT University in Vellore, India, Meena recited pi to 70,000 places past the decimal point.

At the low in 2009, U.S. stocks were back to where they were in 1996.  

In 44 B.C. on this day, Julius Caesar was murdered.

                                   War Crimes

In 1942, Attorney General Francis Biddle and Secretary of War Henry Stimson said “there has been no substantial evidence of sabotage” by people of Japanese extraction living along the United States’ West Coast. But California Attorney General Earl Warren said the “very absence of sabotage” was “the most ominous sign in the whole situation”: “I believe we are just being lulled into a false sense of security.” 

So the absence of evidence proved the crime.

This kind of logic led to the Japanese internment of over 120,000--mostly American citizens.

Anyone looking for examples of the danger of government power need go no further than this.

Ethics, Burnt to a CRISP

A Chinese researcher with an American assistant has announced an effort using the CRISPER gene editing technique to delete the  gene that allows expression of the CCR5 protein that appears on the surface of the white cell. This little protein has an extraordinary story. CCR5 is a receptor for chemokines through which the white cell is attracted to tissue and organs to do its anti-infective and inflammatory work. Ironically CCR5 is used by some HIV strains to enter and destroy white cells but there has emerged in relatively recent human history a mutation of the CCR5 gene/protein that incidentally provides protection against some of the strains in the HIV attack. This mutation is not geographically universal (it suspiciously follows the geographic pattern of Viking raids) and may have emerged as a protective adaptation to bubonic plague.

So....the Chinese researcher deleted the gene completely in an IVF twin set. Expect a patent application.

This, if true, is a scary step for serious scientists. These deletions are not accurate as yet and can cross into unintended sites. Most deletions have been aimed at expression genes, not germ cell genes which can be passed on and inherited. And does anyone know what happens if the gene is knocked out, not just altered?  One can only guess at what the scientists at Biopreparate are musing.

There is a creepy sorcerer's apprentice quality about all this. Recall, even the Chinese' major CRISPER researcher several years ago said such activity was unethical. But the curiosity of the entrepreneur--and the weapons maker--has no bounds.

The Origins of the Caravan

An article in Reason has an explanation of the mystery caravan moving through Mexico toward the U.S. border.

"The real story begins during the Cold War in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the United States and the Soviet Union turned these three countries into an ideological battlefield. Cuban dictator Fidel Castro started funneling Soviet weaponry and money to not just prop up Nicaragua's left-wing Sandinista regime, but also to use that country as a launching pad for a broader regional insurgency to topple the right-wing governments in its three neighbors, as University of Virginia's John Norton Moore has written. President Ronald Reagan, eager for a showdown with the Evil Empire, responded in kind, funding the Contra insurgency against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and paramilitary operations to prop up the U.S.-friendly regimes of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

The upshot was civil war and a complete social breakdown from which these countries have never recovered."

So now, after a tiny isolated period in Central America's unending homicide Olympics, fifty years later, this is all your fault.

Testing--and Not

An interesting perspective, especially in the light of Caplan's book on the low value of education.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act banned pre-employment tests that were not “a reasonable measure of job performance.”

In 1971, the US Supreme Court decided a case called Griggs vs. Duke Power Co. The subject was employment requirements. Duke had an intelligence test it gave to its job applicants. They were sued on the argument that such tests are racially discriminatory. Duke lost.

The court ruled that Duke’s tests were too broad and not directly related to the jobs performed, which made them illegal.

Furthermore, the court said employers had the burden of proving employment tests were necessary for business purposes and not racially discriminatory. That’s hard to prove, so many US companies stopped using pre-employment tests at all.

Now what do they do? How does Duke test its employees for competence? They turned to college degrees. They decided that it would be a good indicator of intellectual competence and grit.

Fascinatingly, colleges test for admission, something Duke was not allowed to do. Colleges essentially became a proxy--government approved--for testing.

And this created the college gold rush where every potential employee felt he had to take out a loan and go to college--and he did.

For want of a nail....

Charlottesville

It is hard to understand what is going on in the country now. And that difficulty is apparent in the commentators who presume to understand it. We seem to be generally intolerant of diverse opinions but take all opinions deadly seriously, as if they all have great inherent power.

The Charlottesville fiasco was the meeting of a few hundred neo-Nazi outliers, concentrated and brought to a boil. They were opposed by a few hundred outliers who thought the incoherent message of the neo-Nazi outliers needed countered. Two totally insignificant elements were added together resulting in combustion.

Neither of these two groups are a movement, they are a spasm.
What is worse is confusing these morons as a base of anything. The disaffection in this nation is real and profound. These people have little or nothing to do with it.

It was commented recently that there are more dwarves than transgenders in this country but we have included them at the center of our national discussion. So it is that we seemed doomed to focus in on the peripheral and try to learn and govern from intimations gleaned from the edge of the bell curve.

November 22 and Kennedy

The Thanksgiving holiday, one of the best holidays and certainly the best secular one, has been spoiled for everyone who was awake and thinking in the mid 60's by the assassination of Jack Kennedy. That promising shift from the generation of Eisenhower to its sons, to youth and its potential, to the charismatic and the virile was just stopped cold by Oswald in Dallas. We defaulted back to the older, ponderous Lyndon Johnson, a true guardian of the Old Guard. That loss--of youth, of hope, of promise, of beauty--has never been overcome and we are reminded of it every Thanksgiving. One only wonders how much of the unrest in the 60's and 70's was a result.

An aspect of the assassination that has dogged its shadow has been the shameless exploitation of the atrocity by writers, politicians and artists. This exploitation, which has become almost a cult, believes--or says it believes--that the assassination was a conspiracy of a number of men, groups or organizations. Every aspect of the event has been picked over, every inconsistency of life magnified, every possibility made a probability. The result is that the event, right before many of our eyes, has been completely recreated and, like an alternative universe, continues without interference with its own laws, experts and history. It is very like those academic musings run wild. "If, instead, you assume that history and archeology was 300 years wrong--or falsified--and Moses was actually alive in the court of Akhenaton...." "If, instead, you assume there is a unexplained and unexplainable driving force in history..." "If, instead, you assume that everyone is possessed at birth by sexual urges towards their immediate family...." It is another victory of the Art of the Plausible.

This is nowhere more revolting than is seen in the movie "JFK" where a seemingly respectable director rewrites the assassination story according to a man whose grasp on the event is dangerously close to psychosis. Oliver Stone writes a story of the assassination through the eyes and the belief set of James Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans, who had arrested, charged, indicted and tried a local community figure, Clay Shaw, for involvement in the Kennedy murder. Shaw's arrest was virtually random. There was no evidence against him other than the word of a psychiatric patient who failed a lie detector test and refused to testify. How an American citizen could come under such unreasonable, whimsical charges has never been explained. But Garrison persisted and then Stone followed up after the laughable trial (where the jury took longer to find their seats than to find "not guilty") with a movie inexplicably presenting the Garrison thesis as within the same time zone as reason. Of course, all the facts of the assassination were changed to implicate the innocent, the shooting presented was almost a complete fiction and this all was delivered by Kevin Costner, a credible actor, with certainty and outrage. Anyone who knew anything about the assassination walked from the theater with their collective heads spinning. But many with less of a good grasp left alarmed and resentful. This constant barrage of misinformation has done a lot to undermine this country's credibility and value in the minds of its people who, after all, own and run it.

There are two bad lessons here. The first is there are people and industries in the world who, even in those cultures with the highest of ideals, will do anything, say anything, publish anything to make a buck. If possible they will take the Plausible-made-Art and create an industry of it with historians, academics, and franchises. The second is that they often hide their entrepreneurship in the gowns of Art. How many of our greatest artists have questioned the reliability of memory, the interaction of history and art--even to the point of their blending? So Stone calls Julian Barnes and Cormac McCarthy as witnesses for his defense.

Stone is more Goebbels than John Huston here. He is everything that is wrong with businessmen gone rogue. His product is harmful to the society, toxic to the young and delivered without an ounce of social conscience. The real story about Garrison is how is it possible that Clay Shaw could be treated like a Kafka character in the United States. Another would be a clarifying and cleansing explanation of all the facts and evidence that has been gathered over the years about the murder. This might set the country at ease. But there's probably not much money, or return on arrogance, in this. Instead why not take advantage of the distressed and confused citizens, contribute to their malaise and cash in.

In 1976 the U.S. House of representatives created a commission, The House Select Commission on Assassinations, to investigate all the evidence in the murder again. This time they applied all the newer technologies available as well. Aside from the single and erroneous "fourth bullet thesis" not a single new conclusion was reached. Instead this august deliberative body concluded there was no evidence of a conspiracy--but they believed one existed anyway

Diversity and Not

There are limits to our drive for diversity.

Four recent studies found that the proportion of professors in the humanities who are Rube-publicans ranges between 6 and 11 percent, and in the social sciences between 7 and 9 percent.

Conservatives can be spotted in the sciences and in economics, but they are virtually an endangered species in fields like anthropology, sociology, history and literature. One study found that only 2 percent of English professors are Rube-publicans (although a large share are independents).

In contrast, some 18 percent of social scientists say they are Marxist. Marxist!

Rube-publicans may just be dumber but discrimination may actually be involved. One peer-reviewed study found that one-third of social psychologists admitted that if choosing between two equally qualified job candidates, they would be inclined to discriminate against the more conservative candidate.

A test preparation company for the Law School Admission Test offers test-takers a tip: Reading comprehension questions will typically have a liberal slant and a liberal answer.

The discrimination becomes worse if the applicant is an evangelical Christian. According to Yancey’s study, 59 percent of anthropologists and 53 percent of English professors would be less likely to hire someone they found out was an evangelical.

George Yancey is a sociologist who is black and evangelical. “Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black,” he said. “But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close.”

“Of course there are biases against evangelicals on campuses,” notes Jonathan L. Walton, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard. Walton, a black evangelical, adds that the condescension toward evangelicals echoes the patronizing attitude toward racial minorities: “The same arguments I hear people make about evangelicals sound so familiar to the ways people often describe folk of color, i.e. politically unsophisticated, lacking education, angry, bitter, emotional, poor.”

Jonathan Haidt, a centrist social psychologist at New York University, cites data suggesting that the share of conservatives in academia has plunged, and he has started a website, Heterodox Academy, to champion ideological diversity on campuses.

“Universities are unlike other institutions in that they absolutely require that people challenge each other so that the truth can emerge from limited, biased, flawed individuals,” he says. “If they lose intellectual diversity, or if they develop norms of ‘safety’ that trump challenge, they die. And this is what has been happening since the 1990s.”

From an article by Kristof in the NYT