Potpourri

 

Potpourri

I'm off for a while and likely will not have internet access so...here is a collection of notions that have been stewing for the past week, delicately placed for their fragrance and aesthetics.

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Someone tried to firebomb Sam Altman's home (the CEO of OpenAI). The Bell Curve has two ends. A silly with a Molotov cocktail can, if fortunate, cancel the life and production of one of humanity's high achievers, trading the very productive end of the curve for one on the other end.
This is the Bell curve of intelligence and productivity. And it is the "Curse of the Colt." The unemployed moron with a demonic vision can murder the CEO of an important health care company. Death to the hierarchy and the dreaded quality! And power to the drone.
"God made all men, but Colt made them equal"--Samuel Colt

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A Minnesota fraud suspect involving $11 million fled the country days before his trial.
Despite warnings from prosecutors, the judge offered Abdirashid Said $150,000 unconditional bail, and he booked a flight undetected.

We are unsure which is the moron here or how many there are.

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A signal of the bureaucratic obsession with mortal tinkering: The Trump administration said on Friday that it would allow firing squads and readopt lethal injection as part of a broader push to revive the death penalty.

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One thing we can all agree on is the despicable ethical and legal outrages of the graft and theft in the welfare state programs and the NGOs and non-profits. So, how are the investigations going? What is the conviction rate, and what judgments have been rendered?

 

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National Socialism, Stalinism, Pol Pot's Year Zero, the Chinese Kleptocracy, and the like don't always benefit those with the guns, but they never benefit anyone other than those with the guns.
Those grim countries with suppression, gulags, and citizen-murder, whose horizon never extends beyond the graveyard, do not send their wide-eyed immigrants to America for relief or therapy; they send them for revenge. Many are truly inculcated with the value of the static confines of their home's repressive limits. Others, as is becoming clear, are simply stupid. Piker thinks he gets points for frankness, AOC goes to the European trade summit expecting an inauguration from those royalty-worshipping Europeans.
The arc of history does not bend toward justice; in this life, there is no justice. The arc of history bends toward truth.
The problem in life is who must suffer--and for how long--while history works out the Gordian knot of 'justice' to reveal the completely unrelated underlying truth.

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A California winery owned by Representative Ilhan Omar's husband was shut down weeks after Congressional Republicans demanded answers about the reported wealth of the Minnesota Democrat's family.

Wait for the follow-up justice.

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Back to the Bell Curve. Do the 97% of us average guys owe everything to the 3% the morons are victimizing and harassing? Will that 3% retaliate?

Musk currently controls the world’s largest space force. He sends rockets to orbit more than 100 times/year. They are reusable. One Falcon 9 has been reused 30 times so far. He has quite detailed, feasible plans for colonizing the Moon and Mars in the next decade.  

Musk currently controls a global internet provider with >10 million worldwide users, and it's growing fast. At the beginning of the war, he shut off the internet to Ukraine’s military, which probably would have let Russia win the war quickly if he had not turned it back on.

Musk currently controls one of the world’s largest social media sites, X (it’s about 15% as big as Facebook), with 550 million users. He has control of the algorithms.

Musk is building a robot army through his company, Optimus.

Musk is implanting computer chips in human brains (Neuralink brain-computer interfaces). He is actually doing human clinical trials.

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And from a podcast, an explanation from Maessheimer of the current Progressive position on Iran:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMg6_jGfjzM

Thoughts

On this day:

1794
Branded a traitor during the Reign of Terror by revolutionists, French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who was also a tax collector with the Ferme Générale, is tried, convicted, and guillotined all on the same day in Paris.
1902
In Martinique, Mount Pelée erupts, destroying the town of Saint-Pierre and killing over 30,000 people. Only a handful of residents survive the blast.
1945
Hundreds of Algerian civilians are killed by French Army soldiers in the Sétif massacre.
1945
World War II: V-E Day, combat ends in Europe. German forces agree in Rheims, France, to an unconditional surrender.
1978
First ascent of Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen, by Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler.

***

Thoughts 

The noble human search for knowledge continues.
The Russian site, called Sergiev Posad-6, has been quiet for decades, but it had a notorious Cold War past: It had once been a major research center for biological weapons, with a history of experiments with the viruses that cause smallpox, Ebola, and hemorrhagic fevers.

Satellite imagery— collected by commercial imaging firms Maxar and Planet Labs — shows construction vehicles renovating the old Soviet-era laboratory and breaking ground on 10 new buildings, totaling more than 250,000 square feet, with several of them bearing hallmarks of biological labs designed to handle extremely dangerous pathogens.

A 2023 Compliance Report, prepared by the United States Department of State, alleges that “Russia maintains an offensive [biological weapons] program and is in violation of its obligations under … the [Biological Weapons Convention] (BWC).”

But don't worry. As COVID has shown, you can always count on governments--especially aggressive, paranoid ones with homicidal philosophies--to do the right thing.

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Sausage making, once an artisan’s craft, has become a compliance exercise that perhaps only corporations can realistically manage.--Tabarrok

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 Donald Rumsfeld, who was serving at the time as the secretary of defense under former U.S. President George W. Bush, made a speech on Sept. 10, 2001. It is often referenced as stating that the Defense Department was a center of fraud. This is a misrepresentation.
At the 14:15 mark, Rumsfeld says, “Our financial systems are decades old. Some estimates show we cannot track 2.3 trillion dollars in transactions. We cannot share information from floor to floor in this building. Because it's stored on dozens of different technological systems that are inaccessible or incompatible.”

He was referencing technical deficiencies, not theft.

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Major League Baseball has never been a socialist utopia. But as a result of its wealth-sharing, the financial disparity between the sport’s 30 teams has never been greater, alienating fans and distorting the game. It is a teaching case on socialistic abuse as the whole sacrifices itself to support an inept segment and enrich a favored few.
Is a long work stoppage inevitable?

BTW, I think this might be the worst Pirate lineup and bench I've ever seen.

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President Biden could argue that the lawful-but-unethical pardon precedent is now so deeply established, not least by his predecessor, that granting clemency to his own son could hardly be considered beyond political norms. If you doubt that, consider the pardon granted to Ivanka Trump’s father-in-law, Charles Kushner, who is now on track to enjoy a stint in the ultimate offender rehabilitation program as U.S. ambassador to France.--(someone)

This opinion apparently calls upon the time-honored belief that crime and immorality can be made normal by repetition, essentially grandfathering criminality into the social norm. (This is not to be confused with the equally time-honored defense, "But Billy did it, too, Mom.")

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Progressivism’s challenge to the American legal order arises not from misunderstanding but from a deep-rooted opposition to the Constitution’s original design. The Constitution’s separation of powers and its layered legislative process are deliberate impediments to the rapid societal changes progressives desire. Progressives rally behind the banner of equality and have come to see rights, such as property and even free speech, as pretexts for inequality, because individuals possess varying abilities to wield them. They fear these rights can act like levees holding back the flow of political transformation, empowering citizens to resist the sweeping reforms that progressives advocate.--McGinnis

Worth remembering.

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My analysis reveals a significant change in political beliefs since being incarcerated. There is an increased effect of changing political beliefs for women and people of color incarcerated. The effect reveals that people of color are becoming, either for the first time or further aligned, with the Republican Party since being incarcerated.--a paper

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“I’m not sure I have a full model of how this works, but the situation where nearly 100% of credentialed experts are Democrats seems to me to have made both parties’ epistemics worse than they were 20 years ago.” — from Matt Yglesias.

Cab Thoughts

 

Cab Thoughts

Banning guns and oil reveals a foundational belief among the Left that malice and danger are circumstantial.

The U.S. dollar makes up 57% of the world currency, crypto 1%.

Why is shutting down Russian oil production damaging to Russia and shutting down American oil production not damaging to the United States?

Reverie

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. --Karl Marx 
Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. Capital in some form or other will always be needed. -- Gandhi

Watched the wrestling nationals last night. Really terrific. Penn State is a monster but Ohio State is very strong. Bo Nickel pinned into the finals at 197.

The Mueller report is in--so that will end all the bickering, right?

For those of you who are wondering why Trump keeps hammering the dead: “A longtime associate of late Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain provided a copy of the … Steele dossier to BuzzFeed News, according to an explosive court filing released Wednesday. David Kramer, a former State Department official who was an executive at the McCain Institute, met on December 29, 2016 with BuzzFeed reporter Ken Bensinger, according to a filing submitted Wednesday by U.S. District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro. BuzzFeed published the dossier, which was authored by former British spy Christopher Steele, on January 10, 2017.” (The dossier, paid for by the Clinton campaign, alleges that when Trump found out he was in the same hotel room that  Barack Obama had used,  Trump called and hired some prostitutes to come over and urinate on the bed. It was called “the golden showers” story.)
Our leaders.

Nearly 1,600 people were secretly recorded in South Korean motel rooms and live-streamed online for paying customers to watch in an unsettling, widespread scandal.

[H]istorians should approach capitalism not as a system of exploitation, which it clearly is not, but as a system of access. In the bad old days, only a tiny few had any access at all to large accumulations of capital or to the benefits that such accumulations could produce. Under capitalism, a revolutionary thing has occurred: anyone at all can get access to a share of the returns on capital. From the perspective of world and comparative history, this is an utterly momentous development, one whose implications have not yet been adequately explored owing to the discipline’s wasteful intellectual diversions, first to Marxism, and second to critical theory.---Kuznicki 

Mississippi’s Republican governor signed a bill Thursday that, with few exceptions, criminalizes abortions as early as six weeks into a pregnancy.

Something called The 2019 World Happiness Report  says that Finland remains the happiest country on Earth for the second year in the row, while the U.S. drops to No. 19, its worst ranking ever (it was No. 18 in 2018 and No. 14 in 2017). In the U.S., where prosperity is on the rise, researchers pin the blame on declines in social capital and social support and increases in obesity and substance abuse. Author Jean M. Twenge believes fundamental changes in how Americans spend their leisure time are also to blame, pointing a finger at the rise of digital media and the decline of face-to-face interactions.

From a Mallon essay in The New Yorker: “As we got deep into 2016, the Iraq insurgency and Hurricane Katrina came to feel almost like refuges. So did the political discourse of the early two-thousands: I invite you, in our current ghost-tweeted political era, to go back just eight years, to the Facebook postings of Sarah Palin, and tell me that they do not now read like a lost volume of ‘The Federalist Papers.’ ”

During a speech before the second Virginia Convention, Patrick Henry declared, “I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” Following the signing of the American Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, Patrick Henry was appointed governor of Virginia by the Continental Congress.


                                           Reverie

Jake Tapper asserted to Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post that "the Obama administration has used the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers who leaked to journalists ... more than all previous administrations combined.".

Only 37% support Medicare-for-All if it means raising taxes. And 57% of Americans oppose banning semi-automatics. And apparently the idea of the "Green Deal" requires the abolition of private car ownership (new to me.) So the Dems are creating powerfully unpopular notions as baseline political beliefs. Maybe the Russians are influencing their policy committees.

The West is confused about individuals. One white whacko is seen to represent all white people, a movement within Islam is seen not to represent Islam, and we are discouraged from even generalizing about the XX or XY genotype.

The enthusiasm for the Second Amendment repeal is characteristic of thin but symbolic thinking. There are 40 odd State Constitutions that have similar language you’d have to repeal as well.

More than 65 million Miles are driven by trucks in the U.S. every year.

When Sweden eliminated its wealth tax, The Financial Times reported, the elimination of the tax had "virtually no effect of government finances."

The U.S. government has spent well over $150 billion over the last decade on green renewables, according to the Institute for Energy Research, but today we get less than 10% of our energy from "green" renewable sources.

The Va. governor's PR problems are comic. The double standards in the Press have become huge, irrational blind spots.

Raise your hand if you believe that the likes of Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Marco Rubio can possibly know enough to plan and to run an economy that effectively serves the needs of 328 million people. But the deeper point is not that this task is beyond the abilities of venal politicians; it’s that this task is beyond – far beyond – the abilities of anyone. --Bordeaux

Medical direct to consumer ads make up 32% of pharma  advertising budget.

5G has a significant security problem that has not yet been fixed. When it is it will allow remote robotic surgery.

Lions can jump 15 feet high, 40 feet long and run up to 50 mph.

The odds that police will solve a shooting are low and dropping. Homicides and assaults carried out with guns lead to arrests about half as often as when the same crimes are committed using other weapons or physical for. The odds of an arrest are particularly low when victims survive, in part because those crimes tend to be assigned to detectives whose caseloads are exponentially higher compared to their colleagues in the homicide department, who are often overburdened themselves. The chances are even lower if the victims are people of color. When a black or Hispanic person is fatally shot, the likelihood that local detectives will catch the culprit is 35% — 18 percentage points fewer than when the victim is white. For gun assaults, the arrest rate is 21% if the victim is black or Hispanic, versus 37% for white victims.

These are just numbers; the factors are myriad.

 

The public phone calls after the SOTU were a strong argument against the idea of democracy. One girl from Pittsburgh called and thought that opposition to nine month abortion implied a violation of the separation of church and state.

Priest, of Epoch Investment Partners, summed up the social issue raised in Barron's Roundtable: “Democracy flowers when living standards are rising alongside it. But when you simultaneously challenge social norms and many of the values that anchor people—a sense of home, job security, and the prospects for growth—and amp it up with social-media networks, you get serious blowback.”

The Virginia governor for Kavanaugh! ‘‘Iphigenia for Helen!’’ "Agamemnon for Iphigenia!" "Clytemnestra for Agamemnon!"

College funding in the U.S.I is privately funded. In the US 69.7 percent of 2018 high school graduates enrolled in college. However, slightly over half will graduate.

• In Germany, where college is tuition wavered, 29.3 percent of high school graduates enrolled in college. Germany has a quota system, Numerus Clausus, which results in system where competition is high; students must be at the top of their class. So, the government does pay for college, but only pay for the best.

Reverie

Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.--Adam Smith

Good morning.

Watched some of the Pirates last night. Marte hit an ominous home run; he looks bigger again.

Last Tuesday, the long-awaited final season trailer for GoT arrived and was viewed 81 million times across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube combined in its first 24 hours.

MacDonald on the recent college cheating kerfuffle: 

The celebrity college-admissions cheating scandal has two clear takeaways: an elite college degree has taken on wildly inflated importance in American society, and the sports-industrial complex enjoys wildly inflated power within universities....None of this could have happened if higher education had not itself become a corrupt institution, featuring low classroom demands, no core knowledge acquisition, low grading standards, fashionable (but society-destroying) left-wing activism, luxury-hotel amenities, endless partying, and huge expense....Colleges should return to their true function: passing on, from one generation to the next, the inheritance of Western civilization. Students who do not yearn to immerse themselves in that legacy should find something else to do after high school, and professors who are not interested in preserving it should find another line of work.

Warren Buffett is the greatest investor of all-time. In the 20 months leading up to the dotcom peak, Berkshire Hathaway lost 45% of its value. 45%. The NASDAQ 100 gained 225% over the same time.  

From an article on the evolution of housing influenced by technology and the astonishing efforts being made: Airbnb and WeWork were early to capitalize on the demand for community, with one changing how we travel and the other redefining the modern office space. Co-working companies like WeWork, as well more targeted providers like The Assembly, The Wing and The Riveter, offer speaker series, classes and other free member events aimed at building connections. Airbnb, once focused only on lodging, has broadened its platform to include community-building shared experiences.
Shared living and hospitality startups are also investing in community to attract and retain customers. StarCity provides dorms for adults, Common and HubHaus rent homes intended to be shared by roommates and Ollie offers luxury micro apartments in a co-living environment. These companies are leveraging technology to foster in-person connections. For example, Common uses Slack channels to communicate with and connect members, and HubHaus uses roommate matching algorithms.

Within the hospitality sector, Selina offers a blended travel lodge, wellness and co-working platform geared toward creating community for travelers and remote workers, complete with high-tech beachside and jungle-side office spaces. Meanwhile, experience-driven lifestyle hotel company Life House connects guests through onsite locally rooted food and beverage destinations and direct app-based social introductions to other travelers.

According to data from the state’s Department of Labor, in 2018, full-service restaurants in NYC recorded a -1.6% job loss, which is their first recorded annual job loss in nearly two decades.

After a quarter century, ecommerce’s spread is slowing, 80% of 2018’s gains belonged to Amazon, and (in the U.S.) the top five online retailers own 64.7% of sales  

The road to wealth for a nation is quite simple. Use your resources wisely. By resources, I don’t just mean the traditional natural resources of fertile land, oil, and minerals, but the know-how, education, ingenuity, and drive of the people. Using your resources wisely means giving the people the incentive to work hard, to innovate, and to take risks. And opening your market to trade to allow your people to leverage the skills of the people in other nations. All rich nations where even the poorest people are relatively affluent have the rule of law, secure private property, relatively open borders to trade, and relatively free markets internally.--Russell Roberts.

This observation is usually overlooked, especially the notion that a nation's people are the wealth, not the burden, of the State.

This is the Vogelherd horse carving, the oldest of its kind. Sculpted from mammoth ivory this little horse is part of an originally more rounded representation with longer legs and tail. The head is complete and still shows the engraved mouth, nostrils and eyes. The ears are alert and the neck arched. The mane, back and sides are marked with crossed diagonal incisions. 4.8 cms wide; 2.5 cms high; 0.7 cms thick. Found in Germany. Believed to be 32,000 to 35,000 years old.




                                                         Reverie

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs is a slogan first used by Louis Blanc in 1851 (although an earlier version of the saying appeared in Étienne-Gabriel Morelly's The Code of Nature) and popularized by Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. The principle refers to free access and distribution of goods and services

In December, 2018, the average time a purchased stock was held was less than one second.

When I was in medical school, the definitive epidemiological study was the London study showing the disparity of the life expectancy between London and country residents. Londoners lived much shorter lives, a fact easily explained by smog. Settled science. Unfortunately for the narrative, the distinction disappeared when corrected for smoking. I mention this in the wake of a furor over marijuana laws. Some entrepreneurial reporter has a new book on the dangers of marijuana and is being lambasted. But to a segment of the population, the safety of marijuana is settled science.

There has been an uptick in traffic on the blog. The most read article was this one, from 2012:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/04/sinister-and-distaff.html

The DJIA has changed over the years. Gone from the Dow are former household names such as Goodyear, Alcoa, Eastman Kodak, Bethlehem Steel, and Union Carbide. In their place are the likes of Apple, Boeing, Johnson & Johnson, Nike and Pfizer. Governments must not be allowed to pick favorites, to protect Kodak and Union Carbide--and perhaps suppress Apple and Pfizer. Strangely it is in the preservation of dying workplaces where Progressives are the most "conservative."

Every time someone threatens to run as a third party candidate, the system stirs like a Kraken. Before anything else, the two party system 's primal urge is to defend itself.

Canadian and American fighter jets were scrambled to intercept two Russian strategic bombers heading for the North American coastline. "Nuclear Chicken." These fools play with our lives.

Texas discovered that 95,000 people identified as noncitizens had voter registrations. 58,000 of them voted in one or more Texas elections.

According to Real Clear Politics, Trump's favorability ratings now stand at just 41% — near-historic lows.

70%-75% of the progress people make in terms of their weight will be down to diet, and only 25%-30% relates to exercise.  

Scary numbers. According to the new GAO report, government priorities have shifted dramatically from defense to health care and retirement.  In 1969, defense represented 45% of federal outlays; Social Security and health benefits were 19%. For 2019, defense's share is 15% and the health care-Social Security share is 49%. By 2029, the defense share is projected at 11%, the health care-retiree share at 56%. This is not philosophical, it is demographic.