Charts and Things

“He hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly."--Iago


The guys next door started on the tree stump at 7:30.
Good meal at Zinho.
Mom's project has a lot of moving pieces.

The unemployment rate for African-Americans fell to the lowest level ever recorded in August, dropping from 6 percent to 5.5 percent. The persistent gap between white and black unemployment also narrowed to its smallest on record.

In 2008, there were only 1,574 breweries across the United States. However, the total amount of craft breweries, microbreweries, and brewpubs has climbed to 7,346 in just a decade. Of the three categories of craft beer, microbreweries have contributed the most to recent production growth. Last year, they accounted for 80% of this growth, up from 60% in 2017. The term microbrewery refers to the maximum amount of beer the brewery can produce. For microbreweries, that number is 15,000 barrels (460,000 U.S. gallons) of beer per year. They also have to sell 25% or more of their beer on site, which is why we are witnessing a surge in breweries that double up as a restaurant or bar. Comparing this data to figures on larger breweries available from the Breweries Association, it is clear that it is the larger, more established breweries that are feeling the heat. While their growth slows, more small breweries open, and sales are further cannibalized.

As the world’s leading automakers are gearing up to later this month show off their motors at giant industry fair in Frankfurt, just 16% of drivers in Germany (Europe’s biggest economy) considering a new car are thinking electric, according to a poll published by utility EON SE. Only the Czechs were less interested in buying an electric car.

According to a press release, Grubhub has partnered with leading fast-food chain McDonald’s. Grubhub will be McDonald’s delivery partner. Delivery!

Republicans support the government preventing gays from marrying and Americans from using drugs, and the building of a border wall. Democrats want the government to prevent Americans from drinking sugary soda, from eating fatty foods, and from bargaining freely in competitive labor markets. Both parties support cronyism. The Democrats are especially eager to subsidize Tesla and solar panels. Republicans love to subsidize Boeing and farmers. Both sides are A-OK subsidizing the U.S. automobile industry and protecting “essential” industries from foreign competition. And both sides believe that it is the role of government to create or protect jobs through protectionism, or other government-granted privileges.--deRugy, on the idiosyncratic use of government power

India's space agency on Saturday lost communication with its spacecraft just before it was due to land near the South Pole of the Moon, in a blow to the nation's lunar ambitions.

Demand for organic food is up, with sales reaching $35.9 billion in 2014. "I think people believe these foods are better for them, but we really don't know that they are," says registered dietitian Kathy McManus, director of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital. "There've been a number of studies examining the macro- and micronutrient content, but whether organically or conventionally grown, the foods are really similar for vitamins, minerals, and carbohydrates," says McManus.

On September 7, 1940, 300 German bombers raided London, in the first of 57 consecutive nights of bombing. This bombing “blitzkrieg” (lightning war) would continue until May 1941. After the successful occupation of France, it was only a matter of time before the Germans turned their sights across the Channel to England. Hitler wanted a submissive, neutralized Britain so that he could concentrate on his plans for the East, namely the land invasion of the Soviet Union, without interference.

                 Charts and Things                 

Valentina Sampaio, Victoria  Secret's new transgender model:

Plausibility

It is their [“an elitist class of progressives”] divisive message that marks the black race as forever broken, as a people whose healing comes only through the guilt, pity, profits and benevolence of the white race. This perception is playing out on our nation’s college campuses, where young white Americans claim privilege due to their skin color and young black Americans, with no apparent shame, accept this demeaning of their own color as truth.--Burgess Owens

Mom is in West Virginia again for another round of meetings.
I've been busy, in my own smaller way.

Imagine what people who suggest spending 10 trillion dollars on a project of any sort must think of money and our economy.

Google makes you wonder if we have gone from an enterprise culture with a philanthropic arm to a philanthropyc culture with an enterprise arm.
 
Wind turbines only last for around 20 years, so many of them are now wearing out. That raises serious questions about disposal of defunct wind turbine parts. The turbines’ giant blades are not recyclable, so they must be dumped in landfills.
If a wind farm includes 100 turbines, that means that 500 million pounds of concrete (which off-gases CO2, by the way) have been poured into what previously was likely farm land. When the turbines are defunct after a mere 20 years, what will be done with hundreds of millions of pounds of concrete? Maybe walls on the edges of the oceans?

Gnosticism (with links to classical Hinduism) forms the foundation for feminism and transgenderism. Why? Because radical feminism and transgenderism reject the ontological and biological basis of womanhood and gender. “One is not born, but becomes a woman” (Simone de Beauvoir).--Gomes
Plausible.

On this day in 1522, one of Ferdinand Magellan’s five ships—the Victoria—arrived at Sanlúcar de Barrameda in Spain, thus completing the first circumnavigation of the world. The Vittoria was commanded by Basque navigator Juan Sebastian de Elcano, who took charge of the vessel after the murder of Magellan in the Philippines in April 1521.

                                               Plausibility

Time Magazine columnist Ian Bremmer tweeted a quote from President Donald Trump about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un that quickly went viral — but it wasn’t real.

“President Trump in Tokyo: ‘Kim Jong Un is smarter and would make a better President than Sleepy Joe Biden.'” Bremmer wrote on Twitter. Bremmer left the false post up for several hours before conceding he made up the quote and deleting the tweet, which he defended as “plausible.”

"The Plausible" is a short step from "If you can conceive of it, it could happen" to "If you can conceive of it it did, or will, happen." This used to be the province of people who were called "airheads." It has become, in some circles, political and economic philosophy.

Wehner on Will #2

The rightness of a thing isn't determined by the amount of courage it takes. -Mary Renault, novelist 


Some interesting problems are coming in the academic world. Many teaching physicians have no benchmarks that determine salary. That is changing and there will be screaming.

A Swedish behavioral scientist has suggested that it may be necessary to turn to cannibalism and start eating humans in order to save the planet. Settled science?

Most are expecting a net 22.5 million more immigrants to come to the U.S. over the next 20 years. By 2049, they’re expecting immigration to account for a stunning 87% of annual population growth. We’re going to have a lot more illegal immigrants. Despite the current bluster and the scandals at the border, the CBO expects we’ll have 2.4 million more illegal immigrants in 20 years’ time than we have today.

Federal Reserve officials are gearing up to reduce interest rates at their next policy meeting in two weeks, most likely by a quarter-percentage point, as the U.S.-China trade war darkens the global economic outlook. (wsj)

The price of copper often gives us a clear indication of where the economy is heading, and it is now down 13 percent over the last six months.

A transgender philosophy professor defended herself last week following a tweet in which she lauded the death of David Koch: “It’s okay to be happy, even celebrate, when bad people die.”

The Energy Information Administration reports that the subsides per unit of power generation for wind and solar electricity are many times greater than those for conventional electricity. 

In the spring of 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder revealed an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador on U.S. soil. Mattis urged the White House to make the public case for reprisals against Tehran. He was rebuffed. “We treated an act of war as a law enforcement violation, jailing the low level courier.” 
Mattis did mot like Obama.


By 2049 the annual interest on the debt will be about 5% of gross domestic product — roughly the share that we spend today on Social Security. And that’s even if interest rates stay low. Despite rising debt and federal spending, the government is expecting — or hoping — the average rate on federal debt will rise only from today’s lowly 2.4% to 4.2%, still modest by historic standards, by 2049.

On this day in 1877, Oglala Sioux chief Crazy Horse was fatally bayoneted by a U.S. soldier after resisting confinement in a guardhouse at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. 

                  Wehner on Will #2

In The Atlantic, Jul 28, 2019  Peter Wehner interviewed George Will about his new book on Conservativism. It raised several important points and these are several more:


All of us, including Will, have to deal with the fact that we are now confronted with a head of government who is systematically assaulting our ideals and virtues. Those who may have forgotten are now being reminded that government has a vital role in the cultivation and sustenance—or in the degradation and destruction—of political cultures.
 “To revitalize politics and strengthen government, we need to talk about talk. We need a new, respectful rhetoric—respectful, that is, of the better angels of mankind’s nature.” The reason, he said, is that “mankind is not just matter, not just a machine with an appetitive ghost in it. We are not what we eat. We are, to some extent, what we and our leaders—the emblematic figures of our polity—say we are.”

Will’s broader project over the course of his career is the restoration of norms, the bolstering of public confidence in government, and the recovery of the nation’s founding virtues. “What I’d like progressives to take away from the book is a reconsideration of their dilemma,” he recently told me. “And their dilemma is this: In 1964, when I cast my first presidential vote for Barry Goldwater, to whose memory the book is dedicated, 77 percent of the American people said they trusted the government to do the right thing all the time or almost all the time. Today, it’s 17 percent—and that 60-point evaporation of government prestige has accompanied a 60-fold increase in government pretensions. I would think my progressive friends would be alarmed by this, because their entire agenda depends on strong government, and strong government depends on public confidence in the government.”

“What I’d like conservatives to take away from this book,” Will added, “is the sense of the enormous intellectual pedigree behind conservatism from Madison to Lincoln to [the economist Friedrich] Hayek and the rest.” Will said conservatives need to answer the question, What does conservatism want to conserve?

The most important of all revolutions, Edmund Burke said, is a “revolution in sentiment, manners and moral opinion.” What conservatives like Will and me believe, and what we think Trump supporters either don’t understand or deny, is the destructive revolution in manners and mores that Donald Trump is ushering in, the enormous cultural and social blast radius of his presidency. 

Bubble, Bubble

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.--Chesterton

Alyssa got in last night and Chris picked her up.
My weight is up 4 pounds.
Federer lost and Mom stayed up to watch.

I spoke to a geologist about the Marcellus and the Utica formations. he says there is 250 years of energy in the Marcellus and 350 years in the Utica. He says that Putin will be destroyed.

Darrell Silver is the cofounder and CEO of Thinkful, a coding academy that currently has about 1,600 students. Online. No real estate. Part-time teachers.
Lean.
Thinkful trains mostly young adults (the average student is about 30) in computer programming and related skills needed by American business. The cost is somewhere between $10,000 and $14,000. But if you are struggling financially and if Thinkful believes you have the desire and the ability to succeed (and only 10 to 20% of interested students do), they will make you a deal: pay nothing, but sign a contract giving them somewhere between 10 and 14% of your post-training income for two or three years. It is the ultimate “skin in the game” model—both the student and Thinkful have enormous incentives for the student to successfully complete the program and get a job utilizing newly acquired skills. Unlike in traditional higher education, the student’s interests are very closely aligned with that of the school. Mr. Silver says about 85% of participants get a full-time job within six months of completing the academy’s program. 
He thinks a five to ten fold growth in scale over the next few years is highly reasonable and, indeed, expected. Now expansion will eventually outstrip demand but would the coding academy model work in other occupations as well, for example learning skills like welding or becoming experts in hospital patient information system management?


After months of stonewalling, Amazon's smart doorbell company, Ring, revealed last week that it's working with over 400 law enforcement agencies across the United States. Facial recognition?


The U.S. is projected to experience a shortage of between 46,900 and 121,900 physicians in both primary care and specialty care by the year 2032, according to a report published in April by the Association of American Medical Colleges.

The maniac who shot the people in El Paso was not the guy describes initially. He wrote--like the Unabomber--a crazy philosophy. There are two main themes. First, he hates non-whites and wants them exterminated. Second, he despises commercial capitalism. This is a crazy portion of it:
"Consumer culture is creating thousands of tons of unnecessary plastic waste and electronic waste, and recycling to help slow this down is almost non-existent. Urban sprawl creates inefficient cities which unnecessarily destroys millions of acres of land. We even use god knows how many trees worth of paper towels just [to] wipe water off our hands. Everything I have seen and heard in my short life has led me to believe that the average American isn't willing to change their lifestyle, even if the changes only cause a slight inconvenience."
His positions, such as they are, have been cherry-picked to fit an anti-Trump narrative.


Hundreds of women have joined Birthstrike, a group for those who have decided "not to bear children due to the severity of the ecological crisis." But isn't the advance of the world the result of human intelligence and creativity? How could anyone deny the contribution of the human species? There is some serious pessimism out there. And self-hatred.
The Talmud records that when the enslavement of the Hebrews in ancient Egypt grew unbearable, their leaders advised couples to stop having babies — why raise more children to face a life of slavery? Eventually one of those leaders was persuaded he was wrong, and that child-rearing should go on even in the teeth of murderous oppression. So he and his wife had another baby. That baby, named Moses, became the liberator who led his people to freedom.
So there!


                          Bubble, Bubble

Tired of worrying about the American culture? Or warfare in the Middle East. Try Kashmir.

Kashmir was once the most dangerous place in the world. Disputed between India and Pakistan—two nuclear weapons states—the stunning Himalayan redoubt is India’s only Muslim majority state. Until the arrival of India’s Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, tensions in Kashmir were on the wane. Terrorist incidents and deaths were down, tourism was up and the erstwhile nuclear flashpoint was as close to peaceful as it had been in decades. That peace is now over.

Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government took the drastic step of abolishing the constitutional provision that guaranteed Kashmir’s autonomy. The government also announced a plan to partition Kashmir and downgrade it from a full-fledged state to a federally administered “Union Territory.” It deployed over ten thousand soldiers, blocked internet access, and placed leading Kashmiri politicians under house arrest. The separatist insurgency, which has accelerated under the BJP government after a period of relative calm, is now poised to explode.

The roots of Kashmir’s conflict are deep, embedded in the acrimonious partition of the South Asian subcontinent and mired in on again off again India-Pakistan military tensions. Pakistan does its part to stoke flames, funding Kashmiri separatists while its intelligence services train them. Terrorists who enjoy safe haven in Pakistan cross the border to conduct attacks in India while religious groups in Pakistan recruit young men to join the jihad. Groups involved in the conflict have hijacked airliners, attacked India’s parliament, and kidnapped and killed American and European tourists. In short, Pakistan’s hands are far from clean.

Prior to 2014, Pakistan’s Islamist insurgency consumed the Army’s attention at home while India’s government continually engaged with Pakistan and the Kashmiris. The result was a relative quiet on the subcontinent. Yet as Pakistan’s insurgency died down and the army reasserted itself over the country’s politics, increasing numbers of Pakistan-based militants crossed into India. Relations between the countries again started to deteriorate. (Frost)

Kashmir is a convenient cauldron for a couple of malignant witches

One Child Nation

No matter how cynical you get, it's impossible to keep up.--Lily Tomlin


Pretty quiet weekend.

Well, here's a terrible view from Kunstler: "In a nation afflicted by fads, crazes, manias, and rages, mass murder is the jackpot for nihilists - begging the question: why does this country produce so many of them? Answer: this is exactly what you get in a culture where anything goes and nothing matters. Extract all the meaning and purpose from being here on earth, and erase as many boundaries as you can from custom and behavior, and watch what happens, especially among young men trained on video slaughter games." He also said these two things: "I sense another change in the air: the retreat of Wokesterism to the intellectual carnival tent it crawled out of." And, "Odious as he (Trump) is to many, history will record one salutary effect of his term in office: the RussiaGate ploy alerted Americans that there truly is a Deep State with its own self-winding agenda."

There has been a spike in interest in Irish passports since the U.K. voted to exit the European Union three years ago. In 2015, there were approximately 46,000 applications from the U.K. There were more than twice as many (98,500) Irish passports applications from U.K. residents in 2018, two years after the country voted to exit the European Union. Holders of an Irish passport would have the freedom to work anywhere within the EU and have the right to “visa-free or visa-on-arrival” travel to 172 countries around the world.

Shrumpter wrote, “the economic life of a non-socialist society consists of millions of relations or flows between individual firms and households. We can establish certain theorems about them, but we can never observe all of them.” To this Hayek added,  "most of the phenomena in which we [as economists] are interested, such as competition, could not occur at all unless the number of distinct elements involved were fairly large, and that the overall pattern that will form itself is determined by the significantly different behaviour of the different individuals so that the obstacle of obtaining the relevant data cannot be overcome by treating them as members of a statistical collective.

For this reason economic theory is confined to describing kinds of patterns which will appear if certain general conditions are satisfied, but can rarely if ever derive from this knowledge any predictions of specific phenomena."

American colleges and universities are underwriting "girls only" college and pre-college programs in clear violation of Title IX. Perry asks, "Aside from the fact that it’s clearly illegal, under what moral code, and under what set of ethical principles of fairness, social justice, and equity, has it become so acceptable to promote, fund and sanction so much gender favoritism, gender bias, gender preferences, gender prejudice, gender apartheid and gender discrimination in higher education, most notably in the area of STEM-based programs? Especially when according to the most recent data available  from the National Science Foundation, women actually earned slightly more bachelor’s degrees in “Science and Engineering” (3,111,529) between 2006 and 2016 than men (3,091,614)."

According to WorldAtlas, the murder capital of the globe is Honduras — where there are 90.4 homicides per 100,000 people. Baltimore, with 56 homicides per 100,000 people, edges out the number two spot ahead of Venezuela, where there are 53.7 homicides per 100,000 people.

Pesticides are used to preserve foods but are also used for aesthetics. We consumers place an incredible burden on farmers as to how a product looks; so in many cases farmers will treat crops solely to preserve their appearance.


Coolest January-August in U.S.:

On the morning of September 1, 2004 a group of Chechan terrorists surrounded students, teachers and parents on the playground of School No. 1 in Beslan as they held a celebration in honor of the first day of the school year.  Over 300 people died, many of them children, while hundreds more were injured. Hard bitten, experienced men shooting terrified children.

                   One Child Nation

One Child Nation was the winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and premiering in select theaters on August 9 courtesy of Amazon, directors Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang’s heartrending documentary examines their native China’s one-child policy.

From 1979 to 2015, China’s policy placed strict guidelines on reproduction in order to curb population growth, which Wang’s mother proclaims (parroting the Communist Party line) might otherwise have led to famine and potential cannibalism. Urban citizens were limited to a single child, while rural inhabitants were, in the mid-1980s, granted the opportunity to have a second

The law outlined strict punishment for non-compliance: the destruction of homes, forfeiture of property and valuables, and steep fines. Those who suffered those penalties, however, got off easy, since local Family Planning Officials—empowered by the Nationalist Party—also had the authority to abduct women, tie them up, and force them to undergo sterilizations and abortions as late as 8-9 months into their pregnancies.

In the early 1990s, the country began allowing foreigners to adopt “orphans,” thereby creating a booming market for Chinese girls. What Wang and Zhang reveal is that overseas adoption quickly became a despicable trafficking racket in which Family Planning officials tore second children away from their homes and gave them to orphanages (for a fee), which then sold them to American and European families who ostensibly had no clue that they were perpetuating a kidnapping-for-profit paradigm.


This, above, is from a review in The Daily Beast which opened with this astonishing line: "One Child Nation is a stark reminder that America isn’t the only country where a woman’s right to control her body has been under siege." Think about that a second.
These people are comparing the organized Chinese homicidal and child selling social program with the United States!

Shlae and Gilder

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.--Arthur Schopenhauer


 Nice weekend. We went to "Angel has Fallen" last night with the McGraws. Totally predictable story where hundreds die from gunfire, explosions and implausibility. Really fun.

There has been no warming in the United States since at least 2005, according to updated data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). What these new data show is that in the contiguous 48 states there has been a statistically insignificant amount of warming over the past 14.5 years. The trend line shows that US temperatures have increased by about 0.6º F per decade, or roughly 0.06º per year. It’s worth noting as well that US temperatures have been below average for most of the past year. 

 
CNN reports that the Trump White House has drafted an executive order that “could put the Federal Communications Commission in charge of shaping how Facebook, Twitter, and other large tech companies curate what appears on their websites,” according to sources. Specifically, the draft order attempts to limit Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, that gives internet companies broad immunity from lawsuits over third-party content. Do we really want a group of political appointees getting more involved in regulating internet speech?

On this day in 1666, the Great Fire of London broke out in the house of King Charles II’s baker on Pudding Lane near London Bridge. It soon spread to Thames Street, where warehouses filled with combustibles and a strong easterly wind transformed the blaze into an inferno. When the Great Fire finally was extinguished on September 6, more than four-fifths of London was destroyed. Only 16 people were known to have died.
                                         Shlae and Gilder

Shlae has a generally accepted--if not popularized--thesis that the New Deal did nothing to help the economy and plenty to stifle it. But there is an argument that war--particularly WWII--is a stimulus for economies and specifically rescued the U.S. economy in the 1940s. It is the classic Keynesian approach: Increase government spending at times of decline. The counter argument is that spending on war is "The Broken Window Fallacy," you are wasting money and effort to no purpose, building things designed to blow up, and removing productive members of society to the battlefield or the grave. In my lifetime, war has always been associated with a downturn as money and debt is diverted to the production of materials of war at the expense of those products that improve lives. More, the reputation of war's success, like Rome's, is really the result of looting, not production. The Russians stole most of eastern Germany at the end of the war, an advantage, certainly, but nothing more than the success of the pirate. A classic example of this is the Eastern European invasion by Rome where they stole enough silver to finance their domestic and foreign adventures for twenty-five years.

This is from Gilder, an avowed (and arrogant) free marketer with his prospective on the war's end:

“After World War II, when ten million demobilized servicemen returned to an economy that had to be converted from a garrison state to civilian needs, economists steeled themselves for a renewed depression.  A sweeping Republican victory in the Congressional election of 1946, however, brought an end to the wartime government-planning regime [overregulation].  Dropping from 42 percent of GDP to 14 percent, government spending plummeted by a total of 61 percent between 1945 and 1947.  One hundred fifty thousand government regulators were laid off, along with perhaps a million other civilian employees of government.  The War Production Board, the War Labor Board, and the Office of Price Administration were dismantled [deregulation].”

“Every Keynesian economist confidently predicted doom.  Sounding exactly like his future student Paul Krugman, who would beg Obama for trillions in additional ‘stimulus’ spending, Paul Samuelson in 1945 prophesied ‘the greatest period of unemployment and dislocation any economy has ever faced.’  Arnold Kling of the Cato Institute has observed that ‘as a percentage of GDP the decrease in government purchases was larger than would result from the total elimination of government today.’  As Paul Krugman points out, nominal GDP, as measured by economists, did drop a record 20.6 percent in 1946 when government spending plummeted."

“But a drop in government spending after a war does not depress creativity; it unleashes it.  Judging the public sector contribution by its cost is the great error of Keynesian economics….the Great Depression, which had continued through the war disguised by price controls and necessary defense spending, at last came to an end.  Economic growth surged by 10 percent over two years and the civilian labor force expanded by seven million workers….[T]he private sector…launch[ed] a ten-year boom despite self-defeating tax rates on investors as high as 91 percent.  The Republican Congress compensated for the high rates by introducing joint returns, effectively cutting taxes in half for intact families.  Corporate taxes dropped drastically, and the tax burden, measured by government spending, fell more dramatically than at any other time in American history.  Low inflation and privatization led to a resurgence of large manufacturing corporations...

Sunday/Basics at Banquets

The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong...the truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I'm not too sure."--Mencken


Picnic at Amy and Jeff's. I ate my first ribs ever. Messy but really good. Nice, relaxing time.
Ned has moved into his new place above ground.


Sirhan Sirhan, imprisoned for more than 50 years for the 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, was hospitalized Friday after being stabbed by a fellow inmate at a San Diego prison.

There is a collection of essays by writers on "Peanuts" coming out. This is part of one, by Hardy: "I may have found something confirming in Schulz’s nihilism—I don’t think that’s too strong a word. I understand he took his Christian faith seriously, and I know people have argued that the suffering in Peanuts is somehow redemptive, but I’m not sure I buy it. What I took away from Schulz is that life is hard. People are difficult at best, unfathomable at worst. Justice is a foreign tongue. Happiness can vaporize in the thin gap between a third and fourth panel, and the best response to all that is to laugh and keep moving, always ready to duck."

HBO host Bill Maher said that he is “glad” billionaire  David Koch, a conservative activist, is dead and added that he hoped “the end was painful.” These people are simply too awful to be of any influence.

On September 1, 1972, American chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer defeated Russian Boris Spassky during the World Chess Championship in Reykjavik, Iceland.


                                Basics at Banquets

The gospel is set at another banquet, a recurring metaphor as heaven as a banquet. It is another "first will be last" gospel with the idea of the basics versus the superfluous in life. Humility is a basic and, if present, colors all of life's achievements and failures. The rush for advancement and recognition is benighted. It has interesting political and economic implications as the primacy of economics and/or position is a distortion of the real nature of man. 
The lowest common denominator is the real common denominator.

TWO SPARROWS

Two sparrows, feeding,

Heard a thrush

Sing to the dawn, 

The first said, “Tush!

In all my life

I never heard

A more affected

Singing bird.”

The second said,

“It’s you and me

Who slave to keep

The likes of he.”

“And if we cared,”

Both sparrows said,

“We’d do that singing

On our head.”

The thrush pecked sideways

And was dumb.

“And now,” they screamed,

“He’s pinched our crumb!”

(Humbert Wolfe)