The Contract

The American Constitution is, as far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at any given time by the brain and purpose of man---Gladstone


Cloudy this morning but making a comeback.
Chris saw The Joker and it sounds grim.
Steelers really are hurting but won't get a good draft pick out of it. Don't understand the hit on Rudolph. And they may not have a number one receiver.
The baseball playoffs have been great with really important roles played by old Pirates. One strange thing is the prominence of rookies and guys newly called up.






                                    The Contract

"Furthermore, the citizen is no longer the judge of the dangers to which the law desires him to expose himself; and when the prince says to him: “It is expedient for the State that you should die,” he ought to die, because it is only on that condition that he has been living in security up to the present, and because his life is no longer a mere bounty of nature, but a gift made conditionally by the State."

This is from The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a guy most people think of as a free spirit, back to nature kind of guy. And he was. He just thought the nature of man we were getting back to emerge from the State and not him, not at all how many people think of Rousseau.
And a significant distinction from the American philosophy.

Faith and Wheelbarrows

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. ~mathematician Blaise Pascal, 1670

Easy ride to Bonita Springs on these great flat roads. We have a very luxurious condo with two porches. Mom has rented a cabana and is quite pleased with herself.
Hot as blazes.

To show their devotion to Murugan, the Hindu God of War, devotees in South India and Sri Lanka (all males) are pierced with large hooks and then hung on a festival float, as if they were toys on a nightmarish baby mobile. It’s an amazing and horrifying display not unlike Christian devotees in the Philippines who are nailed to crosses.

Primates given ecstasy twice a day for four days (eight total doses) show reduction in the number of serotonergic neurons seven years later.

                            Faith and Wheelbarrows

A recent gospel Christ recounts the story of a rich man sent to hell for being uncharitable. He tries to negotiate some relief, then, failing that, tries to send his brothers a warning to avoid his fate. He is told that the brothers would not heed his warnings; if they did not believe the prophets they would not believe a man who returned from the dead.
The wicked cynicism here is unmatched in the Gospel, I think. One hardly knows what to make of it.
A French acrobat named Jean François Gravelet, better known as Monsieur Charles Blondin because of his extravagant blond hair, came to the United States and decided to cross the Niagara Falls on a tightrope. His success made him a sensation and he returned to do it countless times, each time adding to the risk with some trick or another. Once he did it with his head covered in a sack so he could not see where he was going, once carrying a locomotive light. In his most famous exploit, he carried a stove and utensils on his back, walked to the center of the cable, started a fire and cooked an omelet. When it was ready, he lowered the breakfast to passengers on deck of the Maid of the Mist. 
Once he did it pushing a wheelbarrow. It is said that at the end of his walk the crowd acclaimed him, shouting he was the greatest ever. He asked them if he could safely carry one of them back in the wheelbarrow and the crowd cried "Yes!" But when he asked for a volunteer, no one accepted.
Such are the limits of faith. 
 

Liberty/Property/Trade

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. -William Pitt, British prime minister (28 May 1759-1806)


Saw Donny and Carol Capone last night and we had a great time. They are doing well. Donny made a very good dinner. A nice night compromised slightly by a scary ride home in a lunatic Uber. 
Another great performance by an ex-Pirate in the playoffs. They will probably never give up on a pitcher again, regardless of how terrible he is.
We head for Bonita Springs today.

Sanders has had myocardial damage. The impact on his physiology is a bell curve of possibilities. He might be physically able to continue but his V-P will be as important as he is, like an old Roman election. If he drops, who gets his funds? Whoever does must assume some of the socialist mantle which I think will make Trump stronger.

The word "sin" in Hebrew means "to miss the mark."

                                         Liberty/Property/Trade

Liberty is often described as an internal process where the mind surmounts some horrible material restraint. Not poverty, not the Gulag can enslave the heart of man. Liberty has some external examples like "Free speech," and "Free press" but these can be as abstract as internalized freedom. So what is Liberty's touchstone?       

There are some realities: Liberty is a recent concept, recent for a reason. One could argue that Liberty requires some unfettered sphere of influence; it is impossible without the ability to have something of one's own. Until recently, that personal influence was impossible. The Powers That Be allowed no individual sphere of influence. The rise of production beyond subsistence created value. That is, Liberty is a corollary of personal property. Put another way, is freedom meaningful without having something of one's own?

Then things get sticky. According to Ayau, "A person can exercise property rights in one of two ways: through personal use, the enjoyment or consumption of what he owns; or by trading it for something else, either directly through barter or indirectly through the use of money and the intermediation of third parties. Thus, trade is a fundamental manifestation of your property rights."

So Freedom, Property and  Free Trade are Siamese triplets, one impossible without the other. Indeed all three are a function of each other, which explains their concurrent development. And, if you will allow a wonderful reach, the triplets create The Three Body Problem.

So, of course, it gets more complex. As Frenchie Rourk says, "Property is without meaning unless you are allowed to defend it."

Chesterton and Caution

Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.--Edward Abbey


Easy trip on the always worrisome Allegiant. Lovely morning but the afternoons are withering, even for me. 
I am in the Library sitting beside a clearly crazy guy who has been helped by the staff to get on to some interactive site where he is screaming with despair and delight.
At the Arts hotel; quite nice. 
Had a good dinner at Libby's with the Clarksons. The restaurant is much improved in design; I had good food. A fun night with some interesting views on Trump, whose fierce opposition I still have trouble understanding.
A lot of ex-Pirates performing in the Playoffs.
Mom continues to be busy, even down here.

Interesting little summary of European politics from Davies: Currently in both Europe and the U.S. there are two coherent positions and voting blocs that are coming together in response to the decline of the old center right and center left and the emergence of the new national collectivist right.

One is what we may call radical left/green, a position that combines interventionist economics with environmentalism and a specific kind of radical identity politics. This last aspect alienates this new left from much of the older left’s working class constituency. The other is what we may call cosmopolitan liberals, a group that combines support for a broadly free market economy with personal liberty and cultural individualism, but also supports a more egalitarian public policy than most individualists would like. Both of these groups are cosmopolitan in their outlook and skeptical about nationalism, but they have different ideas about how the supranational order should be organized.

We’ve finally convinced a generation of Americans to be Malthusians. According to Scott Rasmussen’s polling, nearly 30 percent of voters now claim to believe that it’s “at least somewhat likely” that the earth will become uninhabitable and humanity will be wiped out over the next 10-15 years. Half of voters under 35 believe it is likely we are on the edge of extinction.

                            Chesterton and Caution

There is a uniform caution among many who argue that we do not understand enough about biology to tamper with it. So, in our ignorance, gene manipulation or species extinction carries a potential risk to the species or the world. Yet ancient institutions and customs do not get the same careful protection. This is from Chesterton:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion. (Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Ignatius Press, 1990, p. 157)

Asian Privileged

 "It is dismaying that most of the binding law in Britain comes from the European Commission in Brussels. But why, with its primacy at stake, did Parliament punt one of the most momentous decisions in British history to a referendum? The bedrock principle of representative government is that "the people" do not decide issues, they decide who shall decide. And once a legislature sloughs off responsibility and resorts to a referendum on the dubious premise that the simple way to find out what people want is to ask them, it is difficult to avoid recurring episodes of plebiscitary democracy." --Will 


This playoff baseball is so exciting. 19 Rays started the year with only two years Major League experience. Charlie Morton is the only $15 Million player they have ever had. Meadows is their best hitter. The lowest salaried team in the game. Against the "Moneyball" team, the fifth lowest payroll team.
We are off to Sarasota today, then to Bonita Springs Saturday.

A few sacred quotes from the untouchable Warmers:
“No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits… Climate change provides the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.” ~Christine Stewart, former Canadian Environment Minister
“A global warming treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the enhanced greenhouse effect.” ~Richard Benedick, deputy assistant secretary of state, USA
“We have to offer up scary scenarios about global warming … …each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” ~Stephen Schneider, Stanford University environmentalist
“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” ~Kevin Trenberth, National Center For Atmospheric Research, USA
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” ~Maurice Strong, Senior Advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan
“A global warming treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the greenhouse effect.” ~Richard Benedick, deputy assistant secretary of state, USA
 “I would freely admit that on global warming we have crossed the boundary from news reporting to advocacy.” ~Charles Alexander, Time magazine science editor
“We’ve got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” ~Timothy Wirth, Clinton Administration Under Secretary of State
These quotes in any other context would be devastating.

On this day in 1995, former football star O.J. Simpson was acquitted of the brutal 1994 double murder of his estranged wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. 



                   Asian Privileged


What gives white privilege a patina of empirical credibility is its statistical comparisons between blacks and whites. However, these statistics are often decontextualized, omitting base rates and key group comparators. As Thomas Sowell points out, “The mere omission of one crucial fact can turn accurate statistics into traps that lead to conclusions that would be demonstrably false if the full facts were known.” Take mortgage approval rates, for example.

In 2000, data from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights showed that 44.6 percent of black applicants were turned down for mortgage loans. In comparison, 22.3 percent of white applicants were turned down. In spite of data indicating that black-owned banks had turned down black applicants at rates higher than white-owned banks, accusations of discrimination within the banking sector were widespread. However, the same report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights revealed another interesting statistic: the mortgage rejection rate for Asian Americans was 12.4 percent. In other words, Asian Americans were approved at a higher rate than whites. This data point never saw the light of day in most newspapers or television news programs.

Seldom are Asian American data included in news stories or academic studies which conclude that racial discrimination explains much or most of the disparities between blacks and whites. Reporting this data would undermine, if not devastate, the conclusions made by the proponents of white privilege. This, according to journalist Wesley Yang, is why they are often excluded. Asians disrupt the narrative of white privilege. (somewhere)

Wrong Questions

To be able to recover his honor, a slave must necessarily adopt the rules and standards of the society that surrounds him, and this means that, in practice at least, he cannot absolutely reject the institutions that de­prived him of his honor in the first place."---Olaudah Equiano

Amazing game last night that somehow Washington won.


Relativity Space, a venture-backed rocket company, just raised $140 million to fund its plan to 3D print its rockets.

The problem with price controls is simple when we think in terms of opportunity cost. If prices are fixed by law, they cannot tell us anything about the true opportunity cost of goods and services. Nevertheless, the logic of opportunity costs still applies to producers, including landlords, and consumers, including tenants.--Quiggin

This weird thing that slavery is the child of Capitalism and that America hinged on slavery really surprised me --until I read this: "Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry…cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations." This is a quote from Marx. So the sacred prophet must be taken seriously, regardless of how unserious the observation.

The Vaping deaths are mostly in THC use. But.....

“Scientist predicts a new ice age by 21st century” (The Boston Globe, April 16, 1970). “U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming” (The Washington Post, July 9, 1971). “Space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast” (The Guardian, January 29, 1974). “The Cooling” (New York Times Book Review, July 18, 1976). “Acid Rain Kills Life in Lakes” (Noblesville Ledger, April 9, 1980). “Acid rain no environmental crisis, study concludes” (Associated Press, September 6, 1990). “Rising seas to obliterate nations by 2000” (Associated Press, June 30, 1989). “New York City’s West Side Highway under water by 2019” (Salon.com, October 23, 2001). “Gore: ‘Entire north polar ice cap will be gone in 5 years’” (WUWT, December 14, 2008). 
“Just 96 months to save world from catastrophe, says Prince Charles” (The Independent, July 9, 2009). “Gordon Brown: We have fewer than fifty days to save our planet from catastrophe” (The Independent, October 20, 2009). “French Foreign Minister: ‘500 Days to Avoid Climate Chaos’” (Washington Examiner, May 14, 2014). “Planet Still Standing 500 Days After French Foreign Minister Warned of ‘Climate Chaos’” (Washington Examiner, September 29, 2015).--from CEI

Controlling for academic traits and much else, being Asian American predicts a substantially lower probability of Harvard admission… And being female predicts a substantially higher probability of admission.--recent paper


Thirty-one-year-old British Major John Andre was hanged as a spy by U.S. military forces in Tappan, New York, on October 2, 1780



                              Wrong Questions


We have a history of asking the wrong questions. There is a clarity in the great teachers, an insightful way of thinking that explodes the prevailing error. Not only do they think deeper, they think more simply.

This is Sowell on poverty: "It’s not the origins of poverty that need to be explained. What requires explaining are the things that created and sustained higher standards of living. There’s no explanation needed for poverty. The species began in poverty. So what you really need to know is what are the things that enable some countries, and some groups within countries, to become prosperous.”
This is the question that Deidre McCloskey has asked in her trilogy.

This is Sowell on slavery: "Everyone hated the idea of being a slave but few had any qualms about enslaving others. Slavery was just not an issue, not even among intellectuals, much less among political leaders, until the 18th century – and then it was an issue only in Western civilization. Among those who turned against slavery in the 18th century were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and other American leaders. You could research all of the 18th century Africa or Asia or the Middle East without finding any comparable rejection of slavery there. But who is singled out for scathing criticism today? American leaders of the 18th century.

Deciding that slavery was wrong was much easier than deciding what to do with millions of people from another continent, of another race, and without any historical preparation for living as free citizens in a society like that of the United States, where they were 20 percent of the population.

It is clear from the private correspondence of Washington, Jefferson, and many others that their moral rejection of slavery was unambiguous, but the practical question of what to do now had them baffled. That would remain so for more than half a century."

A Population Collapse?

A study of National Merit Scholarships finalists found that among finalists from five-child families, the first-born was the finalist more often than the other four siblings combined. Firstborns were also a majority of the finalists in two-child, three-child and four-child families. If there is not equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected—or assumed—when conditions are not nearly so comparable?--Sowell    

It was strange, walking around the old McGill campus.Went to Stack'd on Ellsworth to see if it was still the good sandwich place from Copeland. It is actually the Tipsy Cow with a new name.
 
 Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters’ stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience.  

The average grave is visited for only about fifteen years.

"In order to impeach the president of the United States, you need to have an impeachable offense first, and even if everything that is being alleged is 100 percent true there is simply no impeachable offense in this case.  In recent days there has been a lot of talk about “the integrity of our elections” and Donald Trump has been accused of “betraying his oath of office”, but top Democrats never seem to publicly bring up any specific law that Trump has violated.  The U.S. Constitution sets a high standard for impeaching the president, and unless that standard is met, impeachment proceedings should not go forward.  Some progressive writers have attempted to suggest that Trump is guilty of bribery, extortion, obstruction of justice or a campaign finance violation, but none of those crimes comes anywhere close to fitting the facts of this case.  Democrats may have been offended by what Trump said during his call with the president of Ukraine, but being offended is not enough to impeach someone."  (I found this on a site that is not kind to Trump.)

Hillary thinks Trump is obsessed with her.

People who consider themselves optimists may be more than a third less likely to suffer from a heart attack or stroke, according to a new study published in the JAMA Network Open medical journal.

Excessive use of alcohol now results in about 3.3 million deaths around the world each year.  In Russia and its former satellite states, one in five male deaths is caused by drinking.  And in the United States during the period 2006 and 2010, excessive alcohol use was responsible for close to 90,000 deaths a year.
Last year there were 1,187 drug-related deaths in Scotland, a record, and a staggering increase of 27 percent from the year before. Overdoses are more common in Scotland, by some measures, than even in the United States.
Middle-age mortality increases among non-Hispanic whites are driven almost entirely by changes in the bottom 10% of the education distribution. Drivers of mortality change differ substantially across groups. Deaths of despair explain a large share of mortality change among young non-Hispanic whites, but a small share among older whites and almost none among non-Hispanic blacks.

Public health officials for years have urged Americans to limit consumption of red meat and processed meats because of concerns that these foods are linked to heart disease, cancer and other ills. But on Monday, in a remarkable turnabout, an international collaboration of researchers produced a series of analyses concluding that the advice, a bedrock of almost all dietary guidelines, is not backed by good scientific evidence.

On October 1, 1944, the first of two sets of medical experiments involving castration are performed on homosexuals at the Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar, Germany. Buchenwald was one of the first concentration camps established by the Nazi regime. Constructed in 1937, it was a complement to camps north (Sachsenhausen) and south (Dachau), and was built to hold slave laborers, who worked in local munitions factories 24 hours a day, in 12-hour shifts. Although not technically a death camp, in that it had no gas chambers, nevertheless hundreds of prisoners died monthly, from malnutrition, beatings, disease and executions. The camp boasted a sophisticated-sounding facility on its grounds called the Division for Typhus and Virus Research of the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen SS. In truth, it was a chamber of horrors where medical experiments of the cruelest kind were carried out on prisoners against their will. Victims were often intentionally infused with various infections to test out vaccines. Euthanasia was also performed regularly on Jews, Gypsies, and mentally ill prisoners.

                 A Population Collapse?

Elon Musk continues to suggest a population collapse is in store within a few decades time...and he is 110% correct if you make two caveats...

1) focus on the young and potential child bearing populations and

2) look at the world excluding a single continent...Africa.

Africa childbearing population (blue line) and young population (green line), below.

• Young projected to rise 400 million and peak around 2090!?!
• Childbearing population projected to grow nearly 1 billion through 2100.

Consider:

• Since 1980, Africa has grown from 11% to 17% of the worlds total population
• Since 1980, Africa has grown from 17% to 30% of annual global births
• In 1989, annual global births (excluding Africa) peaked and have declined 15% since (and still falling)
• The 3+ decade decline in global births (excluding Africa) has nearly (but not quite) been offset by increasing births in Africa
• By 2023, the worlds childbearing population (excluding Africa) will be in indefinite decline...and only Africa's childbearing population will continue growing
• A declining childbearing population (excluding Africa) with deeply negative fertility rates (excluding Africa) is highly likely to see births fall at an accelerating rate (far more than the gradual decline predicted by the UN)
• However, over the past five decades, African income per capita has risen just 240% compared to Upper Middle income nations (China, Brazil, Russia, etc.) rising 950% and high income nations 410%...Africa is clearly losing ground
• By the best proxy for true economic activity, energy consumption, suggests Africa has grown from just 2.4% to 3.6% of global energy consumption...and the future there is not brightening.
• Africa's economic growth is dependent on global growth (x-Africa)...but with declining global markets for exports and significant overcapacity, Africa's export driven growth potential is very low
• Lastly, Africa (particularly Sub-Saharan Africa where most of the population growth is occurring) has one of the lowest emigration rates of any poor region.
• By 2030, Africa will be 22% of the worlds population, be 200% of annual growth among the childbearing population, and be responsible for 38% of global births...but still just estimated to be 4.6% of global energy consumption.
• In short, when excluding Africa, births have already collapsed and due to the imminent decline in childbearing population, far larger declines (also known as collapse) are imminent

That is to say, Africa is all the growth in the childbearing population and births...but with minimal increase anticipated in energy consumption or global economic impact.  There is essentially no transfer mechanism from the first world wealth to the poor of the third world nor is there a strong avenue for emigration.  The global economy will impact Africa but Africa is very unlikely to impact the global economy.  And as the UN noted recently, the end of global population growth is now in sight and the global population is likely to peak around 2100, under 11 billion persons.  The collapse of populations in East Asia, Europe, and Eurasia is already a done deal. (from I can't remember where)

The overall world population: