Reverie

Before liberalism, almost all governments were thieves.  The news to my gentle social-democratic friends is that most of them still are.--McCloskey

In 1928 Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, regarded by most as the first lesbian novel, was judged by the British courts to be obscene. Johnathan Cape had published the book at the end of July. Three weeks later, the editor of the Sunday Express wrote that he "would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel" of "unutterable putrefaction" and "contagion." This, of course, caused a rush of sales. 
Without being asked, or telling Radclyffe Hall, her nervous publisher sent the book to the Home Office for examination; the authorities then began a series of raids and seizures, resulting in a call to trial. Hall responded by renewing her vows to smash "the conspiracy of silence" on the lesbian issue, and to defeat censorship "on behalf of English literature."

She had a terrible time of it, not because of the subject matter but because the artistic community hated the quality of the writing. Even Sackville-West demurred. So no one defended it in court. (The best refusal came from Shaw who said he was too immoral to be a witness. He did initiate an attempt to refine the definition of obscenity.)

A group of Chinese scientists injected a human being with cells genetically edited using CRISPR-Cas9 technology. This is the first time CRISPR has been used on a fully formed adult human and it’s encouraged a biomedical battle between China and the United States. The scientists from China are hoping the genetically edited cells will help their patient fend off a virulent type of lung cancer in hopes it might work on other cancer patients who have not responded to chemotherapy, radiation and other treatments.
This is really dangerous stuff.

There is an article written by Peter Boettke that notes the election was misjudged by experts. What if experts are wrong in areas we think them experts in? Ever since the Wilsonian period, the progressive agenda has come with trained experts who by design are immune from direct democratic pressures.  This is most evident in the Independent Regulatory Agencies -- CPSC, EPA, FTC, FAA, FCC, FERC, Fed Reserve System, FDA, ICC, NLRB, NRC, OSHA, SEC -- but it is an embedded attitude in our universities, our legal system, our politics, our media.  Experts are expected to lead the way based on their expertise in the policy sciences.

The structure of the American government was an  analytical move to build institutions that would ensure that "bad men would do least harm".  This means  "good men" will not be granted the power to pursue actions unchecked even if that good man was about to do the objectively "right thing". So we might be deprived of "the good man's" "good acts." But that trade-off was understood by Madison when he wrote that if men were angels there would be no need for government, and if government were to be run by angels there would be no need for restraints, but precisely because men are going to rule over other men, we must first empower, and then constrain that power.
These institutions--and our faith in experts--run counter to this basic principle.

In 1851, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick was published. The British edition, entitled The Whale, had appeared the previous month but, through a number of mistakes, it had a rearranged and incomplete ending. The critics looked upon the botched ending as the last straw in a book already too unusual and obscure. The upshot was that Melville's masterpiece, the book he was counting on to rescue his reputation and his finances, was so belittled and slandered in the crucial first weeks following publication in America that it never had a chance. The American critics accepted the European reviews and the book--and Melville--never recovered.

Who is....James Clapper?

In 1777, after 16 months of debate, the Continental Congress, sitting in its temporary capital of York, Pennsylvania, agreed to adopt the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. Not until March 1, 1781, would the last of the 13 states, Maryland, ratify the agreement. This was a loose federation, really too loose to govern, and  in the following decade would be peacefully replaced--the government was peacefully replaced--by the Constitution.

An interesting take on the election: "But those of you who are shaking in your Birkenstocks over the election of Donald Trump should consider the possibility that if the office of the presidency is that important to you, then perhaps the most intelligent course of action is not to pin your hopes on controlling it always and forever (something unlikely to happen under truly democratic processes) but to work toward making it less important – to you, and to everybody else, too."--Williamson

The spinning jenny, the use of coke in iron smelting, and the steam engine did not need Newton’s calculus, Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood, the heliocentric approach to astronomy or other scientific advances of the day. Deirdre McCloskey’s great “Bourgeois Equality” (2016) suggests it was ultimately liberty that made England’s leap forward so unique. --Vedder's review of Mokyr.


Obamacare has some peculiar aspects. Two key provisions of health-insurance regulation essentially destroy health insurance as health insurance: the combination of guarantee issue and community rating. Guarantee issue demands coverage be provided regardless of risk, community rating demands that people be charged the same regardless of risk. Either one, taken separately, allow insurance to exist, but combined makes insurance impossible. It just isn't what insurance is.

Three million votes in the U.S. presidential election were cast by illegal aliens, according to Greg Phillips of the VoteFraud.org organization. I have no idea who he is or who his group is. But his statement is reported and now part of the culture.

Lindsey Vonn crashed and broke her arm. She tweeted this: "..at least my knees are ok and I will return to the slopes as soon as possible." Secretary of Defense.

In an interview with the BBC’s ‘Panorama’ which aired in Britain recently, Edward Snowden spoke in detail about the spying capabilities of the UK intelligence agency GCHQ. He disclosed that government spies can legally hack into any citizen’s phone to listen in to what’s happening in the room, view files, messages and photos, pinpoint exactly where a person is (to a much more sophisticated level than a normal GPS system), and monitor a person’s every move and every conversation, even when the phone is turned off. These technologies are named after Smurfs. Cute.

Pleonasm: noun:1. the use of more words than are necessary to express an idea; redundancy. 2. an instance of this, as free gift or true fact. usage:
As the standard of mentality has risen, just so has the dictum of man gone forth that he must and will do his own thinking. He no longer wishes to have the thought iterated and reiterated and hammered in upon him again and again. Pleonasm is repellent to him. -- Jack London, "Phenomena of Literary Evolution," The Bookman, Volume XII, September 1900–February 1901

Golden oldie:


http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/04/economy-and-well-poisoners.html

The Economy and the Well Poisoners steeleydock.blogspot.com Employment rates for the over 55 year old cohort are rising. Rising. As the older generation continues to find they can not afford to retire...

In competitive market economies the only people who profit are those who serve other people well. In international markets that is also true. So inhibiting free trade will serve the customer less well. Wealth and growth are not aided by making products and services less abundant. Yet the anti-free trade movement was supported by both major candidates this year.

Bill and Hillary had a vicious fight over her blaming FBI Director Comey for reopening the investigation into her emails for her slump in the polls, reveals a source close to the ex-president. Bill faulted Robby Mook, John Podesta and Hillary herself as he claimed they were  tone-deaf about the feeble economy and its impact on millions and millions of working-class voters. (my main news source, the Daily Mail)

“Do you think he would have married me if I wasn’t beautiful?" Melania's Quora-quoted answer to Barbara Walter's question, "Would you have married Mr. Trump if he were not wealthy?"

Leon Wieseltier is the Isaiah Berlin senior fellow in culture and policy at the Brookings Institution. In June he wrote an article in the WashPo trying to understand the attitude of the American voter as he approached the election. He thought he had insight after watching "The Deer Hunter," seeing an isolated, involuting and declining white community. (He saw the emergence of personal suffering over reason.) But the movie was not about that. The middle class suffered at the hands of its own leadership mindlessly, (in that particular instance by the Vietnam War--a shameful event where the government victimized the American citizen and his family-- ) and every single social structure failed them. They were on their own.
Wieseltier's point is that damaged people and communities hit back when they are hurt, collapse on themselves and turn against everyone who is not them. Perhaps that is true, but that did not happen in either the movie or this election. Racism, bigotry and xenophobia might have been a factor in this election but I doubt it was a large one. The middle class saw a government that made less and less sense to them, spoke of them only with hostility, had vital concerns they never dreamed of, had spokesmen who thought Beverly Hills was Olympus, and demeaned them whenever they said they did not get it--all this when they had some serious problems of their own to address. I doubt Trump is an answer, but these people do not seem to even know the questions. One starting place might be to give the backbone of the nation a little respect.
 
Obama made a plea for the end of divisiveness, just as if the DNC were not paying agitators to fight at the Trump rallies.

U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) will introduce legislation when the Senate comes into session that would eliminate the Electoral College. The Electoral College is sort of an un-agreed upon test of whether or not you understand the country's founding principles.

US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is resigning. Clapper condemned Snowden for damaging the US ability to collect intelligence and for giving away US secrets to enemies.

"What Snowden has stolen and exposed has gone way, way beyond his professed concerns with so-called domestic surveillance programs," Clapper said to a hearing in January 2014.

"As a result, we've lost critical foreign intelligence collection sources, including some shared with us by valued partners."

But he also said separately that the revelations sparked a debate over balancing government spying powers and privacy rights that "actually probably needed to happen."

AAAAaaaaaaannnnnndddddd.....a chart:

Herzen

There is a lovely review in the NYT by Michael Ignatieff  of the book The Discovery of Chance The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen by Aileen M. Kelly. Tolstoy thought Herzen (1812-70) was one of the finest prose writers of his time, and so did Turgenev and Dostoyevsky. He was also an editor, a political activist and a scathing and ironical polemicist, castigating equally the Russian despots in Petersburg and his fellow socialists in exile in London, Geneva and Paris. After Herzen’s death, he had the misfortune to be praised by Vladimir Ilych Lenin for his “selfless devotion” in exile to the cause of revolution. Praise from that tyrannous quarter has damaged Herzen’s reputation ever since. It was also untrue. Herzen loathed revolutionary violence, and he rejected the argument, first articulated by Karl Marx, that Communism was “the solution of the riddle of history.” Isaiah Berlin had regard for Herzen and  his friend and mentor, Aileen M. Kelly, has devoted her life to the resurrection of Herzen’s reputation.

Ignatieff writes: As someone who lived through the intoxication of the 1848 revolution, only to see his hopes crushed, and who supported the cause of Polish freedom in the uprising of 1863, only to be execrated by Russian friends who turned into anti-Polish xenophobes, he wrote with poignant insight about a perennial theme in politics: how to sustain political hope when your dreams are repeatedly shattered.

While Turgenev sank into misanthropic pessimism when his liberal dreams came to nothing and Dostoyevsky transited from revolutionary agitation to deep-dyed conservatism, Herzen remained true to the revolutionary dreams of his youth, without ever losing what Isaiah Berlin was to call his unsparing sense of reality.

 

Herzen matters today because he thought about the cruel dialectic between hope and history in politics and because he struggled to find Russia its own way into the 20th century. Should Russia rejoin the river of European liberty or to follow a separate, Asiatic destiny? Kelly argues he was the 19th-century thinker who thought most deeply about the implications of Darwinism for the theories of history that the European intelligentsia inherited from the Enlightenment.  Thanks to his exposure to Darwin’s predecessors, Kelly argues, Herzen was the only Russian socialist who immediately grasped the implications of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” when it appeared in 1859. He realized that evolution overturned the idea of history as a purposive story of progress guided by human intention.

 

Herzen also saw, as none of his socialist contemporaries did, that Darwin had overturned socialist politics, particularly its assumption that revolutionaries — or a leading class like the proletariat — could guide history toward revolutionary triumph. Kelly’s book is called “The Discovery of Chance” because she believes that Herzen, more than any other 19th-century political philosopher, understood how devastating it was to political hope to discover that evolution worked through chance, through the random emergence of evolutionary variations that turned out to have adaptive survival value. Remarkably, this insight did not lead Herzen to pessimism, despite the blighting of so many of his political hopes. In one of his characteristically vivid metaphors, he wrote: “We must be proud of not being needles and threads in the hands of fate as it sews the motley cloth of history. . . . We know that this cloth is not sewn without us. . . . And that is not all; we can change the pattern of the carpet.” Even as man develops “according to the laws of the most fatal necessity,” he wrote, “he constantly posits himself as free. This is a necessary condition for his activity, this is a psychological fact, a social fact.” The logic of history may escape us, he wrote, but “man can do his duty.”

(from Michael Ignatieff)

Sowell

Thomas Sowell is retiring. He has one of those direct minds that allow complex problems to be seen simply. I think that is an art. His critics say it is simplistic. Here are some of his quotes:

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today. 

It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.   

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. 
 

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long. 

 

Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good. 

Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated. 

Immigration laws are the only laws that are discussed in terms of how to help people who break them.

Perhaps his best:

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

And my personal favorite,

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

Cab Thoughts 1/4/17

The promise of benefits to a group of people funded by future taxes on  people as yet too young to vote is taxation without representation.--Alaric Phlogiston




To say that we “need to bring back the high-paying jobs this country lost” is to say that we need to bring back the high levels of scarcity this country has since overcome.  It is to say that we need to be made poorer. --Bordeaux

In 1602 the refurbished Bodleian Library at Oxford University was officially opened to the public. In 1610, Sir Thomas Bodley, a wealthy retired diplomat, made an agreement with the Stationers' Company to obtain a free copy of each book printed -- the Bodleian is a reference library, the second largest in England after the British Museum Library -- but made it clear that there would be no shelf space for plays or similar works on "very unworthy matters." This policy changed in time, and of the Bodleian's 50,000 manuscripts today there are many theatrical treasures, including some First Folios of Shakespeare, but all purchased long after the free copies had been rejected.

 Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry were shot in the oldest section of the Bodleian, the Duke Humphrey Library. The Duke was one of the first to help finance and stock the Bodleian in its earlier incarnation, in the first half of the 15th century -- this was decades before the library was allowed or forced into ruin and needed Bodley's rescue. He was the youngest son of Henry IV.  The "good Duke Humphrey" was lauded for his patronage to learning, he was a little ambitious on the political side. He and his second wife, Eleanor of Cobham, were caught (or at least accused of) practicing Macbeth -- style witchcraft in order to take over the throne. The Duke hanged for it and Eleanor was banished to the Isle of Man, after first being humiliated by a parade of penance, as she describes here in Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 2:

Methinks I should not thus be led along,
Mail'd up in shame, with papers on my back,
And followed with a rabble that rejoice
To see my tears and hear my deep-fet groans.
The ruthless flint doth cut my tender feet,
And when I start, the envious people laugh
And bid me be advised how I tread.
Ah, Humphrey, can I bear this shameful yoke?....(from Steve King)

In 1895, physicist Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen (1845-1923) became the first person to observe X-rays. X-rays are electromagnetic energy waves that act similarly to light rays, but at wavelengths approximately 1,000 times shorter than those of light.

What is....Pied Piper Strategy?

Conan Doyle had experience as a ship's doctor, the second time on a voyage to Portugal and West Africa in 1881. Aboard with him was Henry Garnet, U.S. consul to Liberia, a learned man, a former slave and a leading abolitionist. Garnet apparently triggered a turnaround in Conan Doyle's estimation of "the latent virtues of the swarthy races." His early opinion "that you abhor them on first meeting them, and gradually learn to dislike them a very great deal more" had, by 1909, evolved to writing The Crime of the Congo, a 45,000 word treatise on the horrors of exploitation and imperialism.

The Dallas Police and Fire Pension Fund is failing. The Dallas pension board wants the city to contribute $1.1. billion in 2018. To do that, they would have to increase the property tax rate by 130%.



Samuelson and his successors taught that the economic machine had a gas pedal that could be used to avoid economic slowdowns.  That device was “aggregate demand,” which could be increased by the government’s printing money, running a budget deficit, or both. In this economic subfield, known as macroeconomics, the concept of specialization is forgotten entirely.  Instead, economists employ an interpretive framework in which every worker performs the same job, toiling in one big factory that produces a homogeneous output.  Macroeconomics replaces specialization with that GDP factory.--Arnold Kling

One of the inherent checks in power is that of off-setting responsibility. But Julian Assange has become one of the most powerful political actors in the world, without any responsibilities.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/08/class.html

Class steeleydock.blogspot.com Recent conversation with some British about Kate Middleton revealed some interesting observations. She was universally admired as an able ...

Comedian Bill Maher has an interesting take on the election that I think has some merit. On Friday night he said it was wrong for Democrats to have portrayed former Republicans as villains, explaining that they “cried wolf” when it wasn’t necessary.
The “Real Time” host contended Donald Trump, the current Republican presidential nominee, was truly dangerous for America, on the other hand, and the injudicious attacks of other candidates in the past have weakened the impact of attacks now.

“I know liberals made a big mistake because we attacked your boy [President George W. Bush] like he was the end of the world,” Maher told panelist David Frum, a former speechwriter for Bush. “He wasn’t.”

Maher continued: “And Mitt Romney, we attacked that way. I gave Obama a million dollars, I was so afraid of Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney wouldn’t have changed my life that much, or yours. Or John McCain.”

“They were honorable men who we disagreed with. And we should have kept it that way. So we cried wolf. And that was wrong,” Maher said.

But it is hard for the righteous to hold their fire.

After more than 20 years of construction, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is complete and, following in-depth testing, the largest-ever space telescope is expected to launch within two years, NASA officials announced.

I think that elections should be held at one time--a couple of days in a row if necessary--on the same day that taxes are due.


The things you learn from financial sites. Victoria's Secret is having some financial problems. Why? There are some considerable changes going on. One analyst pointed to a decline in breast augmentations as one example of consumers' changing tastes. Roughly 279,000 American women had the surgery in 2015, down from nearly 331,000 three years earlier. It was the third consecutive year that number had fallen.

NYT reporter Patrick Healy, in an e-mail dated Feb. 29, 2016 and released on Nov. 9 by WikiLeaks, asked the Clinton campaign: "We're told that President Clinton (like Mrs. Clinton and some other Dems) thinks that Trump would be a formidable opponent in the general election, and that Dems are in a form of denial if they dismiss Trump as a joke who would be easily defeated in November. President Clinton, like others, thinks that Trump has his finger on the pulse of the electorate's mood and that only a well-financed, concerted campaign portray(ing) him as dangerous and bigoted will win what both Clintons believe will be a close November election."
See: "Pied Piper" below.

The reason rich people are now able to live alongside wildlife in a way that poor people do not is partly because, once liberated from mere subsistence, they can afford to care. It is also because wealth partly decouples the life of human beings from dependence on wild ecosystems. By eating farmed food, moving to cities, using minerals instead of organic materials, we reduce the need to exploit, or compete with, wildlife.--Ridley

One significant result of Clinton's defeat: She promised Supreme Court justices who would reverse Citizens United, compromising the First Amendment by empowering the political class to regulate the quantity, content and timing of campaign speech about itself. Now this will never happen.



Banks are lending about 74% of their deposits vs. their historic 96% rate. Much of this is regulation driven. (The velocity of money is at the lowest rate in 100 years.)


The FBI reportedly operated almost two dozen child pornography websites hidden on the dark web to lure and catch predators.

For more than 30 years, sharia courts enforcing Islamic law have been operating quietly across Britain. But two official inquiries have put them in the spotlight amid accusations that they discriminate against women.

Very little is known about them, even their number, which one study by the University of Reading puts at 30, while the British think tank Civitas estimates there are 85.

Sharia courts or councils, as they prefer to be called, mainly pronounce on Islamic divorces, which today constitute 90 percent of the cases they handle.

Religious courts have existed for hundreds of years in Britain, whether in the Catholic Church or in the Jewish community -- the Beth Din -- notes Amin Al-Astewani, lecturer in law at Lancaster University.

As with sharia councils, the decisions of those bodies are not legally binding, but they represent a strong moral and social constraint for those who use them, he wrote in a submission to the parliamentary inquiry. (Yahoo!)

Salon has an astonishing article on Hillary's "Pied Piper Strategy." This is a sliver but it is worth googling: "In its self-described “pied piper” strategy, the Clinton campaign proposed intentionally cultivating extreme right-wing presidential candidates, hoping to turn them into the new “mainstream of the Republican Party” in order to try to increase Clinton’s chances of winning. The Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee called for using far-right candidates “as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right.” Clinton’s camp insisted that Trump and other extremists should be “elevated” to “leaders of the pack” and media outlets should be told to “take them seriously.”"Sounds like the Russians.

AAAAAnnnnndddddd......a libertarian poster:

 

Kosinski

So, if the novelist is a tale-spinner, a fabricator, (a liar?), what limits should we place on him? What is "the integrity of the artist?"

When six-year-old Jerzy Kosinski became separated from his parents he was given up for dead; he spent the next three years roaming the Polish countryside, witnessing and suffering such atrocities that he was struck dumb, recovering his speech only years later when, now reclaimed by his parents from an orphanage and enrolled in a school for the handicapped, he was jolted back to speech by a skiing accident.

Or so the story went, until a 1982 Village Voice article challenged it and just about everything else about Kosinski. A 1996 biography by James Park Sloan maintains that the main accusations are indeed true. These include the revelation that The Painted Bird, which Kosinski either promoted as an autobiographical novel or allowed to be so interpreted, was the furthest thing from personal experience: the Kosinskis remained together throughout the war, safe and even comfortable.

Noting Kosinski's inability to express himself clearly in written English, Sloan says that he hired teams of editors to virtually ghostwrite his books, and that Being There, his 1971 hit, was not only polished by hirelings but Polish in origin, the plot stolen from a book published in the 30s back home.

Some Jewish critics say that, whether true of Kosinski's youth or not, The Painted Bird is still a powerful and representative book; some Polish critics say that Polish peasants could not have committed such atrocities upon him or anyone. Some praise the book as a simply-told parable.
In Being There, much of the above seems to reappear as theme -- the almost-mute Chauncey Gardiner, the parable truths concocted from nothing much, the rise to fame in a world of spin and re-spin.

Kosinski's literary reputation certainly went into a tailspin; when he committed suicide in 1991, some cited the allegations as cause.
(from Steve King)

GMO

A GMO is a plant or animal that has been genetically modified through the addition of a small amount of genetic material from other organisms through molecular techniques. Currently, the GMOs on the market today have been given genetic traits to provide protection from pests, tolerance to pesticides, or improve its quality. Examples of GMO field crops include Bt-potatoes, Bt-corn, Bt-sweet corn, Roundup Ready soybeans, Roundup Ready Corn, and Liberty Link corn.

There has been a profound increase in genetic modification since the dawn of settled agriculture until now. Just as we breed dogs and horses and cattle, we breed plants. Genetic engineering is a new and different way to do that. Genetic engineering means modifying the DNA of a crop such as corn, soy, or cotton or moving genes between organisms that do not usually breed.
Scientists now go beyond the traditional method of cross breeding, and that is where genetic modification comes in. They move genes between plants that would not normally do that.

The estimate in the U.S. is that 60-70 percent of our supermarket foods contain ingredients that came from a genetically engineered variety,” Dr. Margeret Smith, a professor at Cornell University’s Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics, said, referring to highly processed foods made with corn, soy, or cottonseed. She said 90 percent of the soy and corn fields in the U.S. are devoted to genetically engineered varieties of those crops.
“Fresh produce, it’s very, very limited. About the only thing we’d find perhaps in a grocery store, or on a farm stand around here, would be insect-resistant sweet corn. But once you start moving to refined ingredients, like syrups, flours, oils, these are highly refined. They don’t carry genetic material, and they don’t carry protein. Corn syrup is sugar and water. That’s all that’s in there. There’s no protein, there’s no DNA. So you can measure the chemistry of corn syrup from a genetically engineered variety, and the corn syrup from a non-genetically engineered variety, and they will be identical.”

Smith described how some of the safety testing works. She said, “What they actually do, is take the new protein, and test it in a petri dish with human digestive enzymes. And measure how long it takes to break down. And if it takes any longer than standard proteins would take, that raises a red flag. So these proteins and this DNA — it’s not like it’s building up somehow. Your digestive system is meant to break those things down. You then absorb them as small molecules, and your body builds the things you need out of it.”

"... has that genetically engineered corn been tested for food safety?’ Well, no. We tested the protein the BT gene makes. We tested the protein that the herbicide tolerance gene makes.” (In Bt corn, the donor organism is a naturally occurring soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, and the gene of interest produces a protein that kills Lepidoptera larvae, in particular, European corn borer. This protein is called the Bt delta endotoxin.)

 

Which is to say, if you can digest it, it probably is ok?

Sunday New Year

One of the curiosities of New Years Resolutions is the unspoken belief that new and better ideas are coming to the fore. I hope that is true but my advice is a hash of old suggestions:

Seek fulfillment. Emphasize safety.

Do not go out of the house in your pajamas.

Spend less than you earn.

Learn a good quote once a week.

There are better ways to do military-type lifts that pressure bones and joints but no good reason to do them at all.

Keep boundaries. Always reassess them.

One thing at a time. Multitasking has been shown to be terribly inefficient.

Do not be on time, be early.

Never use the phone at social events, dinner or in the car.

Keep up-to-date phone numbers and addresses of friends. Use them. Keep up with old friends with a line or e-mail; do not allow them to slip away.

Get seven hours of sleep a day.

The time before and after exercise  is very important. Warm up and cool down.

People will not remember presents but they will remember how you made them feel.

Ours is a period of downgrading. Start a mild upgrade with more effort on appearance. Maybe it will catch on.

Do not phone from the bathroom.

First dates should always be coffee or lunch.

Do not read anything while eating a meal with others.

Sign all petitions and always vote "no."

Build a good wardrobe one good piece at a time.

Do not put ice in wine. If the wine is not cool enough, go to a better place.

Angry people are usually entertaining but avoid them after 6 o'clock.

Read a formal literary effort, a book or essay or play, a little bit every day.

Wake up. Early. The day will be nice and long and full of opportunities.

Go to bed at a reasonable time. Anything that happens late at night is because the perpetrators think no one is watching.

Do not name your children after large cities in Texas. Or European cheeses.

If you are going to drink alcohol, drink only good alcohol. Never drink something because it is there.

Never drink alcohol because you "don't want to waste it."

Memorize one insightful quote or poetry line every week.

Have your teeth cleaned every six months.

Make a budget. The discipline alone is helpful.

Set aside a percentage for two groups of savings. Use one account to go to when necessary for a big purchase or a surprise problem. Use the other one for retirement. Never touch the second one.

People tend to like what they do when they are good at it. So, be good at your job and your diversions.

Always get the cost of goods or services up front. This is especially true of lawyers.

When traveling:

Never travel without a phone that works

Never travel alone to an area where you do not know the language or the alphabet.

Always travel with enough money.

Avoid areas where you might depend upon the good-will of people with old political grudges towards some group you remotely resemble.

Always, always get the harbor-master's number when you leave a ship.

Buy one tailor-made piece of clothing so you can see the difference from retail.

Floss.

"To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying, and gives moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown - the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none." (Friedrich Nietzsche) 

Remember this when attacking another's beliefs. You are attacking more than his intellectual position, you are attacking his area of comfort and command.

Save 10% of your income for retirement.

And some book suggestions.
Dog Star, Between Two Rivers (a good intro to Turtledove), and Snow Crush are all nice, entertaining books, Snow Crush a bit complex.
Up in the Old Hotel was very good, if long.
Hiroshima by Hersey is surprising.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity  written by the Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo is quite different and very good. It is non-fiction. Nothing quite like it.
Alistair MacLeod's No Great Mischief is a remarkable book that elevates tribe above the individual. About the Scots in Canada. Really good.
Seven Eves is easy reading sci-fi with an emphasis on epigenetics. Very interesting and fun.
And on the heavier side, Santayana's only novel, The Last Puritan.

Paul's Letter to the Galatians says that Christ on earth means that all men are adopted sons of God, heirs to His infinite creation.
So every man, regardless of station or circumstance, wealth or heritage, birthright or appearance, sickness or health is equal in the eyes of God. There have been a lot of notions--from nihilism to castes, from divine right to class conflict, from Freud to Malthus--that have come down the pike since the beginning of recorded time but has there ever been a more radical, more hopeful, more optimistic idea than that? And could there be a better thought to start the new year?

Happy New Year.