Marx Rumination

 
 
The “low-altitude economy” is a big trend in China. XPeng, one of China’s leading EV manufacturers, recently released a low-altitude flying car. Drone deliveries are becoming increasingly common in Chinese cities, and various regions are actively developing low-altitude transportation networks. Shanghai, for instance, plans to establish 400 low-altitude flight routes by 2027. But this is the first time a local government has monetized its low-altitude airspace

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The poorest US state's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita is higher than Europe's top five economies, except for Germany.

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Biden is sending billions to Syria. Syria!

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Marx Rumination

Utopia is an imaginary or hypothetical place, system, or state of perfection, often contrasted with reality. (Definition of "utopia" in OED)

Magness on Marx's peculiar popularity resurgence:

"The high level of Marx veneration in modern academic life makes for a strange juxtaposition with the track record of Marx’s ideas. The last century’s experiments in Marxist governance left a trail of economic ruination, starvation, and mass murder. When evaluated on a strictly intellectual level, Marx’s theories have not fared much better than their Soviet, Chinese, Cambodian, Cuban, or Venezuelan implementations. Marx constructed his central economic system on the labour theory of value – an obsolete doctrine that was conclusively debunked by the “marginal revolution” in economics in the 1870s. Capital was also riddled with internal circularities throughout, including its inability to reconcile the pricing of labour as an input of production with labour as a priced value onto itself. By the turn of the 20th century, Marx’s predictive claims about the immiserating forces of capitalism were confronted with the tangible reality of growing and widening levels of prosperity.

By every measure of its own merit, Marx’s economic system should have been relegated to the dustbin of intellectual history – and for a brief moment it was. Marx’s Capital struggled to find an audience in his own lifetime. He died in 1883 in relative obscurity and with little following outside of a small band of fanatical leftists led by his friend Friedrich Engels. Even among fellow socialists, Marx was a controversial figure. He spent the last decade of his life locked in endless internecine feuds with anarchists, non-revolutionary socialists, and even other competitor revolutionary factions. For decades after his death, he faced credible accusations of plagiarising his theories from other writers. The Manifesto has more than a few arguments that strongly resembled an 1843 pamphlet by French socialist writer Victor Considerant, and Marx’s doctrine of “surplus value” closely follows an earlier work by democratic socialist thinker Johann Karl Rodbertus."

Marx's failures have been examined to exhaustion. There are basic overarching truths. The essence of every utopian dream is the emphasis on results over process. Even the great revolutionary Christian promise hinges upon self-sacrifice. Social utopias, however, always involve the sacrifice of others. That process is arbitrary and messy---and often horrible. It is that process that revolutionary prophets downplay, preferring the wonderful arcadian endpoint over the mass grave intermediary.

There are so many examples of utopian failures that it's hard to imagine people would not be adequately immunized. Maybe that's the reason that utopians uniformly dismiss or change history. And allows for the greatest of Marxian ironies as Marxism claims its birth in the analysis of history.

Navalny

A former career US diplomat who had served as the US ambassador to Bolivia has pleaded guilty to working as an agent of Cuba for more than 40 years.
Victor Manuel Rocha, 73, was charged with secretly passing information to the communist-run Cuban government since 1981 while working for the US State Department.

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This is a most interesting observation. German writer Josef Joffe has noted, “America is dotted with biblical place names like Jerusalem, Shiloh, Zion, Canaan, and Goshen,” but “there is no Shiloh anywhere in Europe.”

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Navalny

Alexie Navalny was a lawyer and a man willing to stand up in opposition to the Putin government. He was buried several days ago.

In August 2020, Navalny was hospitalized in Russia in serious condition after being poisoned. (The source of the poison was revealed to be in the hotel water bottle.) He was medically evacuated to Berlin and discharged a month later. The doctors in Germany made an announcement, confirming that Navalny had been poisoned with a cholinesterase inhibitor. Navalny accused Putin of being responsible for his poisoning, and an investigation implicated agents from the Federal Security Service.(FSB)

In January 2021, Navalny returned to Russia and was immediately detained on accusations of violating parole conditions while he was hospitalized in Germany. Following his arrest, mass protests were held across Russia. In February 2021, his suspended sentence was replaced with a prison sentence of over 21⁄2 years' detention, and his organizations were later designated as extremist and liquidated.

In March 2022, Navalny was sentenced to an additional nine years in prison after being found guilty of embezzlement and contempt of court in a new trial described as a sham by Amnesty International, his appeal was rejected and in June, he was transferred to a high-security prison. In August 2023, Navalny was sentenced to an additional 19 years in prison on extremism charges.

In December 2023, Navalny went missing from prison for almost three weeks. He re-emerged in an Arctic Circle corrective colony in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. On 16 February 2024, the Russian prison service reported that Navalny had died at the age of 47.

Why would he go back to Russia after being poisoned there? Why would he stand trial? And who would be brave enough to go to his funeral?

And what does it say about a political system that would be indifferent to these investigations and demonstrations?

Marx and Lincoln

It sounds as if the government and the Department of Justice are bowing to public pressure and seem to be ready to indict Hunter Biden. That's a good thing, right? That's how justice works, right?

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The heart of a mother is a deep abyss, at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness. -Honore de Balzac, novelist (1799-1850)

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Casual restaurant chains, like Olive Garden and Applebee’s, have the largest positive impact on cross-class encounters through both scale and their diversity of visitors. Dollar stores and local pharmacies like CVS deepen isolation. Among publicly-funded spaces, libraries and parks are more redistributive than museums and historical sites. And, despite prominent restrictions on chain stores in some large US cities, chains are more class-diverse than independent stores. The mix of establishments in a neighborhood is strongly associated with cross-class Facebook friendships (Chetty et al., 2022).

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Marx and Lincoln

Marx is having another zombie resurrection, staggering around campuses, feeding on the young. It is accompanied by some false history, to modify how horrible the ideas are. One is a supposed relationship Marx had with Lincoln. But it's hard to get a successful graft onto the dead.

From Magness:

In the past several years, a number of academics and journalists on the political left have advanced various claims of an intellectual kinship between Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States. Some versions of this story – including a widely-circulated article in the Washington Post – allege similarities between Marx and Lincoln’s respective writings about the relationship between labor and capital. Others claim that Lincoln regularly read Marx’s journalism in the New York Tribune, and point to an exchange of letters in 1864 after Marx wrote to congratulate Lincoln on his reelection. Politics usually motivates these historical claims as well. By depicting Marx and Lincoln as 19th century pen-pals, they seek to legitimize the platforms of modern-day “Democratic Socialist” politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. If Lincoln truly maintained a transatlantic friendship with Marx, then Democratic Socialism must be as American as the Gettysburg Address!

In reality, Lincoln did not have the slightest clue who Karl Marx was, and certainly did not draw from the socialist philosopher for his economic theories. Lincoln’s writings on capital and labor arose primarily from his reading of other 19th century economic works, most notably Francis Wayland and John Stuart Mill. He never encountered Marx’s Capital, which was not even published until two years after Lincoln’s assassination. Marx’s writings for the New York Tribune consisted of second-hand news summaries from the European continent, and the vast majority were published anonymously. If Lincoln encountered them by chance while reading the Tribune, it is extremely unlikely he would have recognized the author or picked up any ideas about economic theory from Marx’s journalistic contributions.

Indeed, Lincoln’s economic assessments of socialism were highly critical. In 1864, the President wrote a letter to a New York City labor organization after the left-leaning group granted him an honorary membership. While Lincoln thanked the organization for the recognition, he strongly disputed their economic doctrines. As Lincoln wrote:

'Nor should this lead to a war upon property, or the owners of property. Property is the fruit of labor –property is desirable — is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich, shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise.'

What about the exchange of letters between Marx and Lincoln? It is true that Marx drafted a letter to Lincoln, congratulating him on his 1864 election victory. The letter was not presented under Marx’s name though. It came from the London-based International Workingmen’s Association, and was delivered under the name of the organization’s secretary, W. Randal Cremer. The response, also addressed to Cremer, did not even come from Lincoln’s desk. Charles Francis Adams, Lincoln’s diplomat to the United Kingdom, issued the letter from the American legation in London. It is little more than a 19th century form letter, a courtesy statement acknowledging that Cremer’s congratulatory note had been received and forwarded to Lincoln through the State Department along with thousands of other notes from well-wishers after the election.

Non-questions

 

Non-questions

Europe is clawing back to the Europe we all love and remember: Putin has moved into Ukraine. A big, well-armed country attacks a smaller, poorly armed one. Power attacks weakness. One plunders another's goods. No one is willing to say why--maybe in search of some Kulaks. And it reminds many of the Sudanland invasion right before Hitler invaded Poland. So the act has some historic symmetry. Maybe it has something to do with the Chinese, maybe there is a testing or diversion there. And, of course, one of the warring parties, is led by an autocrat who sounds a bit weird.

It's strange, all this surmising. There is really only one question here: how much will Putin be allowed to take? Many factors might be involved: price of gas, naval ports, grain. But some questions will not be asked: isn't this an independent country, how many will be killed, how many families destroyed, how many refugees created, how much rape and pillage, isn't the attack of civilian centers a 'war crime,' isn't the U.N. supposed to do something about this kind of international behavior?

And, of course, can a culture completely submerged in its own narcissistic masochism see real rather than manufactured evil in the world?

Cuba, Venezuela, Oil and Not

                 Cuba, Venezuela, Oil and Not

Cuba is promoting itself as a respite from The Virus, offering holidays with high quality medical backup.

The wonderfully vicious Mary Anastasia O'Grady has some comments in a recent WSJ article made available by Don. Here's some of it:

In a country where soap and water are luxuries, ramping up traffic from Europe was a precarious strategy. But desperate times spawn crackpot measures, and the Cuban economy is skating dangerously close to the edge. The regime needs dollars to maintain the police state that has kept it in power for six decades. Its problem today, in a word, is oil.

Cuba hasn’t done well on its own since Fidel Castro took power in 1959. It was a dependent of the Soviet Union until 1991. Havana was then forced to legalize the dollar and microenterprises and let foreign investors take minority stakes in regime companies. But the ruling elite didn’t like it.

The Castros found a new sugar daddy in Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, who came to power in 1999. A symbiotic relationship blossomed: Cuba would exchange its comparative advantage in repression for Venezuelan petroleum products. At the deal’s peak, from 2010-12, Havana received some $4 billion annually in oil subsidies from Venezuela.

Venezuela was pumping 3.4 million barrels a day before chavismo. Output is now around 750,000 barrels a day—and falling—thanks to poor well management, a scarcity of skilled labor and a collapse of investment.

Caracas has been eating big discounts because it’s difficult for buyers to get around U.S. sanctions. Russia’s Rosneft, formerly Venezuela’s key customer, is said to be put off by all that effort. Other former buyers can get heavy crude more easily from Saudi Arabia. With the international oil-price swoon, tar-heavy Venezuelan crude has plummeted to between $10 and $15 a barrel.

Venezuelan storage capacity on land and at sea is full up, so it is sending the excess to Cuba. This has boosted daily shipments back to 100,000 barrels a day from lows of around 20,000 before fall 2019. The Castro regime has been filling its storage tanks and selling what it can on the black market.

Yet more than crude, Havana needs gasoline, diesel and gas oil for electricity production, which Venezuela used to provide but no longer has the infrastructure to produce. Venezuela resorts to swaps when it can, but the terms are terrible. So despite the uptick in crude supplies, Cuba is still limping badly.

Meanwhile the effects of the coronavirus shutdown “are likely to be catastrophic for Venezuela,” Francisco Monaldi, an energy economist at Rice University, told me in a telephone interview last week. Running water and soap aren’t readily available in hospitals or even in many homes. Gasoline shortages make getting imported food to cities outside the capital difficult. Venezuela is heavily dependent on some $3 billion in annual remittances from citizens who fled, mostly to other South American countries, in recent years. If their jobs dry up in a deep regional recession, so will the flow of money. This will put more pressure on Venezuelan leadership to end subsidies to Cuba.

What’s more, it may be necessary to cap wells, and that’s unlikely to be temporary. Experts say it won’t be easy to restart them when human and financial capital is in short supply.

Reassessing That T-Shirt

What made us rich was liberty, not helpful nudges and lovely industrial policies and wonderful protections enforced by the government’s monopoly of coercion, on display in China in the hugely unprofitable governmental enterprises.--McCloskey

If the Astros cheated, I am going to be really unhappy.
Verlander wins Cy Young with deGrom.

I read an article that predicts a 70% increase in food production using less land. The big factors, vertical farming, 3D printing of food. 3D couldn't be any worse than Alexander's.

Interesting. Look who's tied with McGill:
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities


Historian Andrew Roberts, author of a bestselling biography of Napoleon, on the man himself:

"I’d set aside his military achievements—conquering half of Europe in the 16 years of his rule between 1799 and 1815—as all of those had completely disappeared by the time of the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Instead, I’d concentrate on those aspects of his rule that can still be seen in France and in much of Western Europe today. I argue that although he didn’t have much to do with the French Revolution itself, as he was too young, he nonetheless kept the best bits of the Revolution—equality before the law, religious tolerance, meritocracy—for France and the countries that France conquered. The Code Napoleon was still in effect in the Rhineland until 1900, for example, and it underlines modern European legal systems to this day. He got rid of the worst bits, like the mass guillotining, the Reign of Terror, the various mad ideas they had like the ten-day week, abolishing Christianity, and so on. He was the person who brought France into the 19th century with huge reforms of administration and finance. He was a moderniser."

It took over 200,000 years of human history for the world's population to reach 1 billion; and only 200 years more to reach 7 billion.

The Office of Management and Budget predicted that the US economy would grow at a 3.2 percent pace this year. That almost certainly won’t happen since the economy only grew 1.9 percent this quarter.
Models.

Have the Dems burned all their coup kindling?

A protest against poor conditions is not the same as a protest against inequality. Many Chilean complaints revolve around the pension system, health care, water rights, public transportation, schools and corruption. Are Chileans upset that their transport options aren’t better? That’s a complaint in absolute terms. Or are they upset that they are riding the subway while many of the wealthy have private cars with drivers? That’s a relative complaint. The answer will depend on the protester, and in virtually all protests around the world there will be those with both motives. But some North American commentators try to equate these two grudges and subsume them all under the heading of inequality. That just won’t wash.--Cowen

Capitalism = market-tested innovation (McCloskey) = more from less (McAfee).

They act as if spending our money is virtuous. 
Democrat Joe Biden would invest $1.3 trillion over a decade on electric car charging stations, high-speed railroads, clean-energy research and other public infrastructure if he is elected U.S. president next year, his campaign said on Thursday.
I'll see that and raise.....

On November 14, 1985, a volcano erupted in Colombia, killing well over 20,000 people as nearby towns are buried in mud, ice and lava.


                       Reassessing That T-Shirt

Here are some info bits about Saint Che in an article by Reed, drawn from Fontova’s book Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him and other sources:

• He publicly applauded the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and denounced the student protesters battling Soviet tanks in Budapest as “fascists.”
• Upon the victory of the 1959 communist revolution in Cuba, Che commandeered for himself one of the most luxurious mansions in Havana—complete with a yacht harbor, monster swimming pool, seven bathrooms, sauna and massage salon, and five television sets.
• Che played a leading role in the Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961 and, at the same time, helped direct the regime’s brutal policy of crushing dissenting opinion and opposition media. As Fontova documented in his biography, Che “promoted book burning and signed death warrants for authors who disagreed with him.” Communist despots routinely teach reading and writing but work even harder at making sure you only read and write what they want you to. Che’s first public book-burning set more than 3,000 books ablaze on a Havana street.
• Even Che’s adoring hagiographer, Jorge Castaneda, admits that Che “played a central role in establishing Cuba’s security machinery” in the early days of the Castro regime. In that capacity, Che supervised the torture and execution of untold thousands of Cubans without trial. He had a special affection for firing squads.
• Cuban poet and diplomat Armando Valladares, author of Against All Hope: My 22 Years in Castro’s Gulag, says Che “was a man full of hatred” who executed people “who never once stood trial and were never declared guilty” and who declared, “At the smallest of doubt we must execute.”
• Che was no equal opportunity oppressor. He held special dislike for gays, whom he incarcerated in multiple prisons. He was a well-known racist, as well.
• Fidel Castro appointed Che Guevara as communist Cuba’s first “Economics Minister” and president of the country’s National Bank. Within months, the Cuban peso was practically worthless. Castro appointed him Minister of Industries, too. In that job, Che proved equally incompetent. He once bought a fleet of snowplows from Czechoslovakia because he thought they would make excellent sugar cane harvesters but, sadly, the machines simply squashed and killed the plants.
• Che was Castro’s economic czar, though he knew nothing about economics beyond Marxist bumper stickers. His former deputy Ernesto Betancourt said Che was “ignorant of the most elementary economic principles.” Nonetheless, he actually wrote communist Cuba’s agrarian reform law, limiting the size of all farms and creating state-run communes. Production plummeted and is still lower today than before the revolution.
• The Soviet missiles in Cuba that nearly precipitated a world war in 1962 were Che’s idea. When the Soviets were pressured by the Kennedy administration to remove them, Che publicly declared that if the missiles had been under Cuban control, they would have been fired at the US because the cause of socialism was worth “millions of atomic-war victims.”
• Che left Cuba in 1965 to foment violent insurrections first in Africa and then back in Latin America. He was captured by the Bolivian military on October 8, 1967, and administered a dose of his own summary medicine the next day.
• Bottom line: Think twice (actually, just once ought to be enough) about adding a Che Guevara T-shirt to your Christmas giving this year.

Russians

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. Crichton



Yesterday was Murphy's 9th birthday.
Mom and I celebrated at Senti.

More than 8 million people tuned into Night 1 of the second round of Democratic primary debates for the 2020 cycle, according to preliminary numbers from Nielsen. It was a significantly smaller audience than that of the first round of debates that aired in June — which drew 15.3 million viewers on Night 1, while the second totaled 18.1 million viewers.

Astros trade for Zack Greinke.

NASA is serious about creating faster than light travel, and have released a new batch of concept images showing exactly what a spacecraft equipped with a star-hopping warp drive might look like. Created in collaboration between Dutch artist Mark Rademaker and Nasa physicist Dr Harold White, the illustrations show a craft powered by an Alcubierre Drive – a hypothetical engine that was first suggested in 1994 as a way of achieving faster than light speeds. Alcubierre’s device worked by distorting space-time, expanding the space behind a ship and contracting the space in front of it to create a ‘warp bubble’ that essentially moves space and time around the object, rather than actually accelerating the craft to impossible speeds. For all its craziness, physicists conceded that such a warp drive might be theoretically possible but that it would require staggering amounts of power – something equivalent to the mass-energy of Jupiter, a planet 317 times the mass of the Earth. However, in 2012, Dr White announced that he had managed to finesse Alcubierre’s original plans to reduce the amount of mass-energy needed from that of a gas giant to a spacecraft the size of the Voyager 1 – and, even more surprisingly, that he was working with a team from Nasa to further develop his ideas.

Industrial progress, mechanical improvement, all of the great wonders of the modern era have meant relatively little to the wealthy. The rich in Ancient Greece would have benefited hardly at all from modern plumbing: running servants replaced running water. Television and radio? The patricians of Rome could enjoy the leading musicians and actors in their home, could have the leading actors as domestic retainers. Ready-to-wear clothing, supermarkets — all these and many other modern developments would have added little to their life. The great achievements of Western capitalism have redounded primarily to the benefit of the ordinary person. These achievements have made available to the masses conveniences and amenities that were previously the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful.--Freidman

In Chicago, one person is shot every four hours and murdered every 18 hours.

From 1990 to 2019, right-to-work states represented the top four US states for employment growth (Nevada +134%, Utah +118%, Idaho +100% and Arizona +98.7%), seven of the top eight states (the four states above plus Texas +82%, Florida +68% and North Dakota +66%), and 14 of the top 20 states. In contrast, all ten of the US states with the weakest employment gains since 1990 were forced unionism states (over most of the period): Connecticut (weakest job growth at only 2.5%), Rhode Island +9%, New Jersey +14%, Michigan* +14%, Ohio +15.5%, Maine +16%, Pennsylvania 16.5%, Illinois +17.5%, New York +18%, and Massachusetts +21%. Of the 20 US states with the weakest job growth since 1990, 15 of those 20 were forced unionism states (the exceptions were West Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Iowa).

From an interesting article on the politics of science by Brown:
There are several aspects of the contemporary global warming narrative that align well with an anti-hierarchy, collectivist worldview. This makes the issue gratifying to the sensibilities of the Left and offensive to the sensibilities of the Right.
Global warming is a tragedy of the commons, in which logical agents act in ways that run counter to the longterm interests of the group. These types of “collective-action problems” usually call for top-down government intervention at the expense of individual action and responsibility. Furthermore, the longterm nature of global warming demands acquiescence to collective action across generations. This natural alignment of the global warming problem with collectivist themes makes the issue much more palatable to the Left than the Right.

On this day in 1914, four days after Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Germany and Russia declared war against each other, France ordered a general mobilization, and the first German army units crossed into Luxembourg in preparation for the German invasion of France. During the next three days, Russia, France, Belgium, and Great Britain all lined up against Austria-Hungary and Germany, and the German army invaded Belgium. The “Great War” that ensued was one of unprecedented destruction and loss of life, resulting in the deaths of some 20 million soldiers and civilians.

                               Russians

We have come a long way from laughing at Romney's concern about the Russians.

There is a theme in the election of 2016 that has lasted over two years. It was floated by the Clinton campaign after the Clinton loss, it has been worried to death since in the strange Mueller investigation triggered by a Clinton opposition research paper and continued on in the Mueller redux when the poor man was dragged back to the Congress to testify with the hope of innuendo. The theme is this: The Russians influenced the 2016 election.

Now we all know the Russians try to influence what they can. The have a large disinformation program and have had so for years. They bribe and compromise and they deceive where they can. It seems they had a $100,000 budget to tamper in Facebook postings. But did they do anything substantive? With all the accusations against Trump, did the Russians influence anything?

In 2016, Obama said they didn't. “We were frankly more concerned in the run up to the election to the possibilities of vote tampering, which we did not see evidence of,” he said. “And we’re confident that we can guard against.”
During an interview with the Daily Show’s Trevor Noah, Obama downplayed the hack of a private email account of Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, defending his administration for revealing in October that the Russian government was connected. “None of this should be a big surprise,” Obama said, “Russia trying to influence our elections dates back to the Soviet Union.....What’s happened to our political system where some emails that were hacked and released ended up being the overwhelming story, and the constant source of coverage – breathless coverage – that was depicted as somehow damning in all sorts of ways when the truth of the matter was it was fairly routine stuff?” he said.

When Rothstein indicted the 13 Russians for interference with the electoral process he gave an interview and prefaced it with this:
"Now, there is no allegation in this indictment that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity. There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election."

So, we should be annoyed and indignant. Vigilant. Angry, maybe. But what is the source of the hysteria?

The Night King

I'm sometimes asked "Why do you spend so much of your time and money talking about kindness to animals when there is so much cruelty to men?" I answer: "I am working at the roots." -George T. Angell, reformer (5 Jun 1823-1909)


Chris found an unconscious bleeding man in the street outside of work yesterday and ran to the Dunkin' for a cop. ("I'm ill. Run to the golf course and get me a physician!"--W.C. Fields)
Yesterday it took me 70 minutes, with the assistance of two computer techs, for me to sign on the computer at the VA.

Good news. The government is getting efficient. LED lampposts are being installed in cities and public places across the world, only partly because of their economical, energy-saving properties. With the new installations comes a wide range of sensors designed to capture data on public activity. As Chuck Campagna, CEO of lighting company Amerlux, told The New York Times, “We are opening up an entirely new area in lighting applications and services, including video-based security and public safety, parking management, predictive maintenance and more.”
“We see outdoor lighting as the perfect infrastructure to build a brand new network,” added Hugh Martin, chief executive of the company Sensity, which installed smart lighting at Newark airport. “We felt what you’d want to use this network for is to gather information about people and the planet.”

Long-time democratic politician and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel will join investment bank Centerview Partners, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC Wednesday.

Just a month after leaving the mayor’s office of Chicago, Emanuel will be advising clients on mergers for Centerview, co-founders of the firm told the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news.

Curious that a guy would leave a city in bad economic shape and go manage  money.


And, from Boston:
June is Pride Month, historically a time to celebrate lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer history.

A group in Boston has announced plans to host a “Straight Pride" Parade this summer, although it's unclear whether the city will allow the event.

Mark Sahady, vice president of Super Happy Fun America, a group organized by three men who claim to advocate “on behalf of the straight community,” announced that the parade is tentatively scheduled for Aug. 31. Sahady included a proposed parade route that mirrors the path of the LGBT Pride Parade that takes place on Saturday.

On this day in 1944, Operation Overlord, code named D-Day, occurred--the Allied invasion of northern France. The business of fighting a war is probably not best done as an individual effort. Nor as a startup. Indeed, the very notion of democracy is probably antithetical to war; war demands structure, forced sacrifice of individuals, obedience and the centralization of decision-making. The success of power in war, the success of the militarized state, gives the state undue credit. The decision-making has been handed off in a democratic manner and it's time for the state to get on with it. But the process of democracy has nothing magic about it; it is a defensive system aiming at minimizing the damage to the voter. And in every war, one militarized system loses.

                                      The Night King

Communism was doomed from its inception. Adherents who sneered at the "invisible hand" saw a mysterious invisible force in history that picked its fights toward a idyllic endpoint of incentive-less, motiveless production of peace and wealth, leaving behind a path littered with the bodies of those poor souls only placed on this earth to facilitate as antagonists to communism's great march. This strange murderous idealism violated all the laws of human reality yet staggered on, storming trenches, deracinating appropriate families and slashing and burning the present to plant the seeds of the future. It is said that it attracted the idealist--but who could say its mayhem and murderous creed was, in any way, idealistic? No, it attracted the foolish, the embittered, the cynically ambitious, the irrational and the overtly psychopathic, who unsurprisingly rose in its hierarchy. But eventually, after years of misery and death, the cause flagged, failed and died.

The death of communism was perfectly predictable and those critics who predicted it can be rightfully proud. But they must be surprised by its stubborn death throes. How many people were drafted into its horrible morbid experiment? How many had to die to prove this was a stupid, unworkable and unnatural pipe-dream? And what are the responsibilities of those clear thinking observers who coolly watched this nightmare without interfering? After all, it took the Russian communist state three generations to die.

And how should those people react when confronted with communism's new iterations like socialism and Nazism?

Open Minded to Death

The essence of socialism is government allocation of capital.--many


Went to the ballgame last night with Chris. Lovely night and setting. Everything but baseball. We had a great time. No one enjoys a baseball game as much as Chris. I Ubered for the first time. Expensive. Bell hit a monster homerun.

“The glass and steel skyscrapers that have contributed so much to global warming” have “no place in our city or on our Earth anymore.” This is DeBlasio at his announcing his presidential candidacy. The mayor of New York wants to outlaw New York.
Is there no satirist out there, no clear thinking observer to chronicle these ridiculous times?

The WashPo has a list of the things Trump doesn't want to do. They call this "obstruction." It is all pretty weak stuff. They must know that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-guide-to-20-inquiries-trump-and-his-allies-are-working-to-impede/2019/05/11/83114574-733a-11e9-9eb4-0828f5389013_story.html?noredirect&utm_term=.ee5f69b703f0


Asylum-seeking is not a classification of immigrant, it is a defense against deportation.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he didn’t intend to soon implement a planned move to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, saying a decision would be pushed off several years.

Since 1976 there has been the Presidential Election Campaign Fund. Every year, taxpayers can, by checking a box on their tax return, contribute ($1 until 1993, $3 since then) to the fund -- without increasing their tax liability. Participation peaked in 1980, when 28.7% of taxpayers checked the box.
By 2018, participation had withered to 3.9% (i.e., 96.1% "voting" against it with their pencils). John McCain in 2008 was the last major party candidate to accept taxpayer funding (and consequent spending limits).

Consequently, justice is secured by suitably punishing acts of injustice, not by rewarding justice, which is your duty. Justice is the residual (a negative virtue) that consists in what remains, or is left over, after the civil order has instituted proportional punishments for unjust actions.--Nobel laureate Verrnon Smith. Is that true?

 A new study finds that overconfident people from upper-class backgrounds succeed, even if they’re not that clever. This is a difficult problem for the "Adversity Scale." Perhaps the upgrade of disadvantaged people will not be enough; perhaps we should downgrade the advantaged. Make the physically gifted wear extra weight (a Vonnegut story), make the others eat leaded paint.
  
U.S. industrial capacity has never been larger -- it is 66% above what it was when NAFTA was ratified in 1994 and 15% above what it was when China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 -- and real U.S. manufacturing is almost back to where it was in 2007, the year the recession began.
Manufacturers' output is 11% above what it was in 2001 and 45% above 1994. (These statistics are from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.) U.S. exports are 85% higher than in 2001 and 200% higher than in 1994, and about 800% higher than in 1975, the last year of a U.S. trade surplus.


On this day in 2015, Ireland became the first country to legalize same-sex marriage through referendum. The referendum passed with 62% of voters (1.2 million people) voting yes. The vote attracted a large turnout, with 60.5% of eligible voters.
  
                                                  Open Minded to Death

We are a trusting people. We are willing to give strange and unreasonable ideas a chance. So we consider that we might be born with an incestuous lust for some family members and murderous hate toward others. Such an idea may be called many things but scientific is not one. So, too, behaviorism which postulates we are born as tiny, pink giggling tabla razas whose personalities are imprinted after birth by experience. This notion is not devoid of science--it is contrary to science. There are countless experiments that show it simply is not true. But we were willing to give it a chance.
These errors are not just of academic interest.  People were treated as if these ideas were reasonable. So, too, people were lobotomized. And their stomachs removed for ulcers. All these errors were made with good intent, if inaccurate science.

Our open-mindedness extends beyond bad science; the so called social sciences are rife with it. Communism saw inherent social conflict resolving inevitably to a promised land of happy workers --after the prerequisite wholesale murders--with no proof at all. Nazism claimed a racial superiority of a self-interested subset contrary to all evidence. Socialism periodically rises from the dead--after horrible periods of homicide and degradation--with claims that are only hopes, hopes that defy what we know about people and behavior.

The recent plans of  'adjusting' SAT scores on the basis of mitigating factors that might influence performance is similarly starry-eyed. This, too, has been disproved. But the idea is Behaviorism II, the silly old Skinner-ism notion that we are all born the same, literally the same, and that differentiation is provided by life experience. A negative experience will impact our performance.

Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.


But people are complex. The only way our managers can manage us is if the fault is in our environment, something they can manipulate. But throwing our support behind erroneous thinking never ends well.

Stalin

Stalin and Shakespeare

An article by Gary Saul Morson explores the savagery and its possible explanations of the Communist Revolutions in the last century. One recurring theme is why the Western intellectuals seem to be so tolerant of the brutality. His article includes discussions of the book Scorched Earth: Stalin’s Reign of Terror, by Jörg Baberowski (whose analytic abilities Morson disdains), and Stéphane Courtois' The Black Book of Communism, which documents the specific mortality numbers of those unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of such a revolution. The article, which appeared in "The New Criterion," is worth the read. I have summarized some of the interesting parts here. I know little of Morson other than he was a professor at Penn before moving the Northwestern and writes for "Commentary" but it's hard not to like a guy who wrote When Pushkin Comes to Shove.

Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, and, after a few months of weak parliamentary rule, the Bolsheviks seized power. We call that seizure the Russian (or October) Revolution, but it might better be designated the Bolshevik coup d’état. A party of 10,000 people gained control of an empire occupying one-sixth of the earth’s land area.

Between 1825 and 1905, the tsars executed 191 people for political reasons—not for mere “suspicion” as under the Soviets but for actual assassinations, including that of Tsar Alexander II. In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn remarked that between 1905 and 1908 the regime executed as many as 2,200 people—forty-five a month!—“calling forth tears from Tolstoy and indignation from Korolenko and many, many others.” By comparison, conservative estimates of executions under Lenin and Stalin—say, twenty million from 1917 to 1953—yield an average of over ten thousand per week. That’s a tsarist century every few days.

...university classes typically blame the Cold War on American “paranoia” about communism and still picture Bolsheviks as idealists in too great a hurry. Being leftwing means never having to say you’re sorry.

In 1997 Stéphane Courtois published (in French) The Black Book of Communism, an anthology in which experts document, country by country, how many people Marxist–Leninists killed. With suitable academic equanimity, contributors ask whether the deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians, or the deportation of all Chechens to central Asia that took the lives of one person in three, qualifies as “genocide.” The only sign of real emotional urgency occurs in Courtois’s introduction, which breaks intellectual taboos by drawing parallels with Nazism, questioning Socialists’ frequent alliances with Communists, and, above all, wondering why intellectuals continue to apologize for Communist murders.
The volume’s scholars estimate twenty million deaths in the USSR, sixty-five million in China, two million each in Cambodia and North Korea, 1.7 million in Mengistu’s Ethiopia and other African countries, and so on, to a total of about one hundred million. (Eerily, the chief revolutionary in Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed predicts that the cost of perfect equality will be “a hundred million heads.”) So far as I can tell, these estimates are understatements. For example, the most authoritative study of Stalin’s war against the peasantry in the early 1930s, Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow, arrives at a figure twice the one in this volume. The difference between the two estimates—the margin of error—equals the number of Jews killed by the Nazis.
By contrast, Nazi deaths are estimated at twenty-five million. Of course numbers aren’t everything.......

Delivering a toast on the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power, Stalin declared: “We will destroy each and every enemy, even if he was an old Bolshevik; we will destroy all his kin, his family. We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts—yes, his thoughts!—threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin!” Even when the tsars imprisoned or executed revolutionaries, they never thought of arresting their spouses, children, grandparents, and cousins as well. And note Stalin’s insistence that not just wrong actions but improper thoughts merit “destruction.”

The goal was to change both nature and human nature. The Marxist “leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom” meant that everything would be subject to human redesign. At the end of Literature and Revolution, Trotsky asserted that “the present distribution of mountains and rivers, of fields, of meadows, of steppes, of forests, and of seashores cannot be considered final.” .......The “new man” will also redesign himself. He will “master his own feelings,” rendering them perfectly “transparent,” and at last create “a higher biologic type . . . a superman.” Trotsky’s book concludes with a promise that “the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.”

Apologists for the USSR have often claimed that, however regrettable the cost, the Bolsheviks had no choice if they were going to industrialize rapidly and defeat the Nazis. This excuse is nonsense. To begin with, the bloodiest event of all, the artificially induced famine during the war against the peasants, took place before Hitler came to power, and mass killings of whole groups dated to the regime’s first months. It is also hard to see how industrialization was helped by the massive arrest of the “bourgeois specialists,” which included just about everyone who understood how specific industries worked. And how was the war effort to be aided by targeting the army officer corps during the great purges of 1936–38? As Baberowski notes, “almost nothing remained” after more than ten thousand Red Army officers were arrested. In April 1938 the head of the “special department” of the Fifth Mechanized Corps dutifully reported that “100 percent of the command personnel in the corps and all its brigades” had been arrested. This was the one sort of production quota that was actually met. Is it any wonder that the Soviet army collapsed when the Germans invaded?

Apologists also suggest that there really were a lot of enemies of socialism. But people were arrested not just for conspiring against (or thinking negatively about) the regime. Quotas were issued for each region—Baberowski concludes that more than a million people were killed by quota—and local officials often filled them either arbitrarily or with the homeless, the blind, and amputees. In March 1938 the NKVD (the secret police) executed 1,160 people in Moscow with physical disabilities. Kliment Voroshilov, who occupied many top positions, argued for arresting abandoned children. “Why don’t we have these rascals shot?” he asked. “Should we wait for them to become grown-up criminals?” What’s more, two dozen whole ethnic groups were forcibly deported to Central Asia. After Stalin ordered the arrest of all Poles, the Polish section of the Comintern and the Polish Communist party had to be disbanded since they had no members.

If there is a core argument to this book, it is that none of this can be blamed on Marxism-Leninism. Believe it or not, such assertions are not a strained attempt to apologize for Marxism. Baberowski believes that no ideas ever motivate violence. “To men of violence . . . ideas are only a means of legitimizing their lust for murder to those for whom violence is not a natural course of action. Neither Stalin nor Yezhov were guided by Marxism or its promises when they had people arrested, tortured, and killed. . . . It had absolutely nothing to do with the writings of European Marxism.” For Baberowski, ideas are not just a relatively minor factor, they have “absolutely nothing” to do with what happens. “Reasons and legitimizations play absolutely no role,” he insists elsewhere; they are just means of coping with meaningless violence.
  

Solzhenitsyn takes the exact opposite position. Ideology makes all the difference. Why was it, he asks, that Macbeth and other Shakespearean villains killed only a few people, while Lenin and Stalin murdered millions? The answer is that Shakespeare’s villains “had no ideology”:

Ideology—that is what gives . . . the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses and will receive praises and honors.

Soviet Marxism rejected the very concept of human rights. Leninist ideology instructed one to think of classes, not humanity. What race was to Nazis, class was to Bolsheviks, and class origin, like race, was not something one chose. People born into bourgeois, noble, or kulak families had no more right to life than Jews or Gypsies did to Nazis.

Contrary to what liberals might presume, Soviet ethics taught one to overcome, not foster, natural sympathy for the suffering of others, which might make one hesitate to kill a class enemy. In November 1918, Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, published an article in the journal Red Terror in which he instructed:

"We are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against Soviet power. The first questions that you ought to put are: To what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education or profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused."

It was no big step to extend the notion of enemy classes to enemy peoples, like the Cossacks, Chechens, or Crimean Tatars.

Since the Party was the agent of History itself, it could not be mistaken, and so anything the party did was morally right by definition. “Morality is entirely subordinated to the class struggle of the proletariat,” Lenin declared. At the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924, Trotsky explained:

"Comrades, none of us wishes or is able to be right against his Party. The Party in the last analysis is always right, because the Party is the sole historical instrument given the proletariat for the solution of its basic problems."

The idea that truth and morality have no objective basis but are simply what power says they are, is, of course, also a key tenet of many current postmodernists.