Reverie

 

The socialists of today aren’t experienced logisticians who fail to see the disanalogies between running an organization and running a whole society.  They’re dreamers who want to lead before they learn to follow.  So while I’d gladly give a socialist general a lecture on the economics of socialism, today’s typical socialist needs to hear a simpler message: They should learn to make solid mundane plans for their own lives before they think about imposing grandiose plans on the rest of the world.--Caplan

Once any thought at all is given to the actual processes of collective decision-making, the claims for efficiency-generating properties of the socialist alternative collapse of their own weight.--Buchanan

Food and Drug Administration approved Dsuvia (sufentanil tablet) “to manage acute pain in adults, weeks after the chairman of the advisory committee that reviewed it asked the agency to reject it on grounds that it would likely be abused.” Dsuvia is “a new form of an extremely potent opioid...that has been used intravenously and in epidurals since the 1980s.” FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said in a statement that Dsuvia is delivered in a “pre-filled, single-dose applicator” and that it will only be used in medically supervised settings like hospitals and surgical centers or on the battlefield to treat wounded soldiers. A spokesperson for the FDA said that “there were drug safety and risk experts on the committee whose expert input was taken very seriously throughout this process.”

Stormy petrel (with apologies to Stormy Daniels): noun:
1. One who brings trouble or whose appearance is a sign of coming trouble.
2. Any of various small sea birds of the family Hydrobatidae having dark feathers and lighter underparts, also known as Mother Carey’s Chicken.

ETYMOLOGY:

The birds got the name storm petrel or stormy petrel because old-time sailors believed their appearance foreshadowed a storm. It’s not certain why the bird is named petrel. One unsubstantiated theory is that it is named after St. Peter who walked on water in the Gospel of Matthew. The petrel’s habit of flying low over water with legs extended gives the appearance that it’s walking on the water. Earliest documented use: 1776.

I believe that Aristotle’s and Washington’s, Jefferson’s, and Madison’s complicity in supporting slavery renders none of these men unsuitable sources today of knowledge, wisdom, or inspiration. One reason for my belief is practical: If we were to take knowledge, wisdom, and inspiration only from saints, we would dramatically reduce our access to the colossal supply of knowledge, wisdom, and inspiration offered to us by history. And rejecting in the name of purity nearly all of this knowledge, wisdom, and inspiration, our society would quickly become polluted by ignorance and evil that would otherwise have been kept at bay.--Bordeaux

The U.N. says that the entire world would have to impose carbon taxes of up to $5,500 per ton to avoid a supposed climate-change catastrophe.

The opening of "Beirut" likens Beirut to a boardinghouse that has no owner and whose tenants are joined only by insincerity, treachery and two thousand years of vendetta. One day strangers come begging entrance and, after violent debate, they are allowed in. They turn out to be the Palestinians and the only thing they want to do is burn down the Israeli house next door.  

Trump is freezing CAFE mileage standards and the earth--and the global warming activists--have trembled in revulsion. But CAFE mileage standards were not created to fight global warming. They were enacted after the 1973-74 oil shock. CAFE was a political solution to a political problem: soaring oil prices

What was....Nephite-Lamanite Wars?

I saw a transgender woman in the office recently with a prostate abscess. Ruby Rose is off Twitter because she has been accused of not being gay enough to be Batwoman.  A guide to some of the topics and terms discussed in “Gender: The Space Between,” as defined by the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, The Trevor Project, and the National Center for Transgender Equality includes 22 terms. UK Facebook users can now choose from one of 71 gender options. Fortunately, despite the confusion over what was formerly thought to be straight-forward, the culture is able to assess really complex stuff like global warming clearly and accurately.

Tesla and....the Saudis?

The New York Times reported Trump Administration officials say they have found a way around a ruling by US District Court Judge James E. Boasberg halting a Kentucky plan to introduce Medicaid work requirements.

Is the recording of conversations in the White House a good idea, even if it makes you feel good?

If civic virtue is taught, how much diversity of opinion can be tolerated? If, as the population increases, the number of outliers under the bell curve grows, does freedom become intolerable?

Buffalo Wild Wings is exploring the business of gambling on sports.

An oblique take on property by Bernstein: The right to property is the right that guarantees all other rights. Individuals without property are susceptible to starvation, and it is much easier to bend the fearful and hungry to the will of the state. If a person’s property can be arbitrarily threatened by the state, that power will inevitably be employed to intimidate those with divergent political and religious opinions.

Britain is now being watched by an astonishing 4.2million CCTV cameras - one for every 14 people and a fifth of the cameras in the entire world.

Golden oldie:

Kissinger said that the appearance of a guy like Trump was necessary every so often to reset things. He was speaking specifically about trade. I did not know the European economic community was bigger than the U.S. and that the Americans were subsidizing it as much as they are. The "Free Trade" agreement that Trump is angry about is 22,000 pages long. That's a lot of parsing of free trade.

I am haunted by these statements and pronouncements that claim academic accuracy. I heard a man say that 200 million Native Americans died from disease after the first Europeans arrived. Then the pandemics expert said maybe 8 million. (Still the biggest epidemic ever proportionally. The Black Death killed 25 million.) But  a recent DNA study that traced back to common ancestors and estimated population disturbances that way reported two huge bottlenecks in North America, one in 1000, one around Christ--not the European invasion. Probably the Nephite-Lamanite Wars.

What this kind of hyperbole means about pharmaceuticals and global warming, I just don't knw. 

Anyone suspicious that the Russians do not and have not developed biologic weapons because they signed the U.N. agreement against them need only recall the Russians developed a manufacturing industry for bombs built in toys that they dropped on Afghanistan, knowing they would attract children.

The Kursk, a Russian nuclear submarine sank  to the bottom of the Barents Sea in 2000; all 118 crew members were later found dead. The exact cause of the disaster remains unknown. The Russian government, true to its paranoid and homicidal history, refused the help of British and Norwegian dive teams, recognized as the world's best.

China disputes allegations that it is holding as many as one million Muslim ethnic minorities in internment camps—instead calling them vocational schools—in rare comments before a U.N. panel.

Attitudes toward socialism among Democrats have not changed much since 2010, with 57 percent view it positively, according to the Gallup survey. Negative views of "capitalism" has increased considerably.

Last year, Canadians faced a median wait of more than 21 weeks to receive treatment from specialists after obtaining referrals from their general practitioners. That's double the median wait time of 25 years ago.

The consumer may no longer be able to fund his standard of living with savings and debt. The chart below is scary.

 

After weeks of preparation, angst and fear-mongering, the big white nationalist march came. And went. Reports are that about two dozen "white nationalists" showed up to be harassed by thousands of counter protesters. One protestor organizer, clearly a serious and full time job, said, "We know from experience that ignoring white nationalists doesn't work." How exactly does he know that? This was a non-event, magnified only by the over-response to it.

There are problems in this world but this does not look like one of them. But I'm sure we will continue to focus on this distraction and rub it raw. Like an outbreak of Ebola.

AAAAAAAaaaaaaadddddd........a graph:

Of Human Action but not Design

Munger has an article trying to explain the evolution of cultural but not legal norms and uses as his example the so-called Pittsburgh Left Turn (said to be responsible for Roethlisberger's motorcycle accident.)

In an article in the Pittsburgh City Paper in 2006, Chris Potter wrote:

As longtime residents know, the Pittsburgh Left takes place when two or more cars — one planning to go straight, and the other to turn left — face off at a red light without a "left-turn only" lane or signal. The Pittsburgh Left occurs when the light turns green, and the driver turning left takes the turn without yielding to the oncoming car.

Pittsburgh is an old city, many of whose streets were designed before automobiles held sway. [That means] that street grids are constricted, with little room for amenities like left-turn-only lanes. The absence of such lanes means drivers have to solve traffic problems on their own. Instead of letting one car at the head of an intersection bottle up traffic behind it, the Pittsburgh Left gives the turning driver a chance to get out of everyone else's way. In exchange for a few seconds of patience, the Pittsburgh Left allows traffic in both directions to move smoothly for the duration of the signal. Of course, the system only works if both drivers know about it. No doubt that's why newcomers find it so vexing.

The Pittsburgh Left is a very efficient convention. On two-lane streets, turning left can block traffic as the turning car waits for an opening. And left-turn arrows are expensive and add time to each traffic light cycle. Far better to let the left turners — if there are any — go first. If there are no left turners, traffic just proceeds normally, not waiting on a left arrow.

Actually, it’s worse than that. The Pittsburgh Left is technically illegal, according to the Pennsylvania Driver’s Handbook (p. 47): “Drivers turning left must yield to oncoming vehicles going straight ahead.” The written rules, the gamer rules, appear to endorse one pattern of action. But the actual rules, the ones you have to travel around to learn, may be quite different. Real rules are not written down, and the people living in that rule system may not understand either the nature or effects of the rules. It is very difficult to change conventions, because they represent the expectations people have developed in dealing with each other over years or decades.

As Hayek said in 1988, in The Fatal Conceit:

To understand our civilisation, one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection — the comparative increase of population and wealth — of those groups that happened to follow them.… This process is perhaps the least appreciated facet of human evolution.

The Origins of the Caravan

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

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

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

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

Numb-ers

 Elections should be sort of a dialectic moment where competing ideas and philosophies collide and a direction emerges. Our elections and the divisions underlying them are simply not capable of such decision. I expect the main result of the election will be investigations But, in the background where the grownups sit, they may be mulling these numbers, with an emphasis on "numb:"

The $1.271 trillion increase in federal debt over the last year was nearly $500 billion or 39% higher than the official annual deficit of only $779 billion, which means that politicians are keeping significant amounts of debt off-balance sheet.  

Over the past five years, the official deficit was reported as $2.977 trillion whereas the federal deficit grew by $4.777 trillion, meaning that 38% of the actual shortfall was hidden.

The CBO’s latest projection is the U.S. will add close to $1 trillion of debt in 2019 and over $1 trillion in 2020.

And this direction is with a Republican administration and Congress.

The off-budget deficits have averaged around $360 billion for the last five years, generally increasing over time. But if we take just that average and add them to the projected deficits, the US government deficit will be approximately $1.4 trillion per year for the next five years, which will mean $29 trillion total debt by 2024.

And that’s without a recession.

Intimations of China

A letter to a financial newsletter:

Jeffrey Ho writes:

I just completed a month-long, 2500-mile journey across western China. Signs of an economic boom are everywhere. While there are no Tier 1 or 2 cities in the west (only two western cities, Lanzhou and Urumqi, are considered Tier 3), even tiny cities of a million or less now sport brand new, modern train/bus stations and airports rivaling or surpassing America’s best.

A massive construction boom is evident all across the classic Silk Road. Small towns that have not seen a new building in 50 or 100 years are now being rebuilt with modern high-rise condominiums right alongside the old. What they do have in Gansu, Qinghai, and Xinjiang Provinces is space. Xinjiang, the westernmost province, is 3-times the size of France.

Gansu, once considered an impoverished backwater area that was largely desert is now a green hinterland as modern irrigation and farming techniques have tamed the waters of the Yellow River. To put it in perspective, Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province, is the geographic center of China. This means that as modern engineering and agricultural progress turn more of the desert into productive land, China is just beginning to realize their Manifest Destiny.

The ride on the high-speed train was almost boring. You couldn’t tell that you were barreling across the desert at 130mph except for the LED indicator inside the cabin. My fellow passengers were all seated in their assigned seats with no one laying in the aisles, no agricultural produce or live animals, and the only annoyance was perhaps the conductors incessantly making sure that overhead baggage were perfectly in place. If there is one sign that China has achieved their greatest aspiration to be a first world nation, this is it.

Freedom is virtually our only advantage.

Living Standards

Russ Roberts  frequently polls journalists about how much economic growth there has been since the year 1900. According to Roberts, the typical response is that the standard of living has gone up by around fifty percent. In reality, the U.S. standard of living has increased by a factor of five to seven, estimated conservatively, and probably much more, depending on how we measure prices and the values of outputs over time, a highly inexact science.

In 1900, for instance, almost half of all U.S. households (forty-nine percent) had more than one occupant per room and almost one quarter (twenty-three percent) had over 3.5 persons per sleeping room. Slightly less than one quarter (twenty-four percent) of all U.S. households had running water, eighteen percent had refrigerators, and twelve percent had gas or electric lighting. Today, the figures for all of these stand at ninety-nine percent or higher. Back then, only five percent of households had telephones, and none of them had radio or TV. The high school graduation rate was only about six percent, and most jobs were physically arduous and had high rates of disability or even death. In the mid-nineteenth century, a typical worker might have put in somewhere between 2,800 and 3,300 hours of work a year; the estimate is now closer to 1,400 to 2,000 a year.

(from Tyler Cowen’s new book, Stubborn Attachments) 

The really astonishing thing is how there could be much doubt about these achievements. One could argue about the cause and effect but the change, the material progress, is undeniable.
There might be a cost that is worth discussing but the material success--with two world wars and an economic crisis thrown in--is astonishing.
One would think that people would be very cautious about disrupting it.

Sunday/Sacks

Suzanne Koven, an internist, once interviewed Oliver Sacks.

Sacks' interview included some remarks about his surprising drug-taking history and one startling observation. Later in the interview Sacks says, "..[A]...  parfumier had made something unlike anything ever encountered on earth. And it had a very strong smell which aroused no associations and could not be compared to anything. One realized this was absolute novelty. And I quote Poe on this: absolute novelty can enter some hallucinations and maybe some psychosis. I don’t know if imagination is enough. I think hallucinations in various ways go beyond imagination. These are not necessarily creative ways, though maybe they could be put down to creativity."

Kovan asks, " Almost like a visitation? Or would you say hallucinations sometimes come from a part of the brain that isn’t part of the “self?”

Sacks answers, "Yes, well that’s what the muse is. Or the devil!"