On Carrying Half an Umbrella

Genuine law, like language, evolves; each is the result of human action but not human design.--Bruno Leoni


The Yankees are almost 2-0. They came back Sunday night and tied it up before losing in the 11th. The Nationals are just destroying the Cardinals.
Chris spent Indigenous Peoples Day at the zoo being scared witless by big cats. 

The administration has sent Pence to Turkey. Why am I not reassured?

Harley-Davidson Inc. has stopped production and deliveries of its first electric motorcycle after discovering a problem related to the vehicle's charging equipment, a major setback for a product the company is counting on to rejuvenate sales.

On this day in 1917, Mata Hari, the archetype of the seductive female spy, was executed for espionage by a French firing squad at Vincennes outside of Paris.

Mata Hari in 1906 (wiki)

             On Carrying Half an Umbrella

In 2000, Dr. David Viner, a senior research scientist at the University of East Anglia's climate research unit, predicted that in a few years winter snowfall would become "a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren't going to know what snow is." 

In 2004, the U.S. Pentagon warned President George W. Bush that major European cities would be beneath rising seas. Britain will be plunged into a Siberian climate by 2020. Why the Pentagon saw it necessary to branch into this field at least as unpredictable as warfare, they do not say.

In 2008, Al Gore predicted that the polar ice cap would be gone in a mere 10 years. 

A U.S. Department of Energy study led by the U.S. Navy predicted the Arctic Ocean would experience an ice-free summer by 2016.

This is why the weather forecasts give percentages of the chance of rain; this predicting the future thing is just too difficult and should be left to mystics. 

Why is that reasonable caution so outrageous to people?

Three Lepers Walk into a Bar

It is a cruel mortification, searching for what is instructive in the history of past times, to find that the exploits of conquerors who have desolated the earth, and the freaks of tyrants who have rendered nations unhappy, are recorded with minute and often disgusting accuracy, while the discovery of useful arts, and the progress of the most beneficial branches of commerce, are passed over in silence, and suffered to sink into oblivion.--John Kenyon

Happy Indigenous Persons Day.Easy trip back.
I noticed a curious thing about Sarasota. All Saturday I counted the African-Americans I saw working, walking, eating-- anywhere. During the whole day I got about; I walked 4.9 miles. I saw 3 black people before dinner at seven, then saw 18 more the rest of the night, most were in two party groups. 
Steelers played hard last night.

Hunter Biden, son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, said that he wouldn’t work for any foreign-owned companies or serve on their boards if his father is elected president. Maybe he could work for Hilary's charity.

A company known as Oxitec, based out of the United Kingdom,  announced plans to release genetically-engineered, or transgenic, mosquitoes into the wild. Oxitec’s stated goal was to eradicate native mosquito populations carrying potentially deadly diseases like Zika by infiltrating their ranks with transgenic impostors. These impostor mosquitoes presumably do not have the ability to reproduce, and thus pose no risk of causing long-term changes to the natural ecosystem, according to a report by Natural News. 

However, it appears that Oxitec was wrong about their GMO mosquitoes. As revealed in a new study, which was published in the journal Nature, Oxitec’s transgenic mosquitoes are not only able to reproduce, but their presence within native mosquito populations is actually causing super-mosquitoes to spawn. The world will have to face an onslaught of super-mosquitoes that are more resilient than the ones that previously existed in nature.  

The mosquitoes are still carrying infectious diseases at the same rate as before the GMO mosquitoes were released. The study states that this whole plan broke down because the natural female mosquitoes prefer to mate with male mosquitoes that were known to be fertile, and not the infertile GMO mosquitoes released by Oxitec.

Large swaths of the California—by itself the fifth-largest economy in the world, and home to the globe’s most technologically advanced companies—may be subject to the sort of abrupt blackouts normally associated with underdeveloped countries.

On this day in 1947, U.S. Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager became the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound. Also the Battle of Hastings was on this day.

                                Three Lepers Walk into a Bar

This weekend the gospel was the curing of the ten lepers. Not a flattering assessment of mankind where only one returns to thank Christ for curing him; maybe just a lot of respect for certification. 
But lepers are important in the Bible. True, they are outsiders and good targets for a non-establishment message. But there is something universal about the leper. Alone, hurt and declining in his fatal skin, his is a hopeless life where his companions are linked only by disease. The leper is mankind at the edge of the precipice.
Interestingly, part of his disease is the loss of sensation in the affected part which results in the unknowing injury, usually accidentally self-inflicted. The usual sensation of touch or pain or heat is lost so the tissue is hurt without being aware of it. So the carpenter gradually damages his tissues with his instruments, the cook with her fire.
In this gospel, nine of the lepers had the defect of all men: unfeeling hearts.

Chambersburg

We've got all the information in the world on everybody. The point is to go out there and execute.--Pirate rookie pitcher, Keller 

Heading back to Sarasota today.
Had dinner with Joanne Kane and her sister last night. Good meal at Bonefish.

An Aug. 8 nuclear accident near Nyonoksa, Russia, was caused by a nuclear reaction that occurred while Russians were attempting to recover a nuclear-powered cruise missile submerged in the White Sea after a failed test last year.

This is the fundamental fact on which the whole philosophy of individualism is based. It does not assume, as is often asserted, that man is egoistic or selfish or ought to be. It merely starts from the indisputable fact that the limits of our powers of imagination make it impossible to include in our scale of values more than a sector of the needs of the whole society, and that, since strictly speaking, scales of value can exist only in individuals minds, nothing but partial scales of values exist – scales which are inevitably different and often inconsistent with each other. From this the individualist concludes that the individuals should be allowed, within defined limits, to follow their own values and preferences rather than somebody else’s; that within these spheres the individual’s system of ends should be supreme and not subject to dictation by others. It is this recognition of the individual as the ultimate judge of his ends, the belief that as far as possible his own views ought to govern his actions, that forms the essence of the individualist position.--The Road to Serfdom

A lot of debate over the economic nature of the Scandinavian countries. Socialist? Just how socialist? Democratic socialist? Well, there is indeed debate. But, if anyone gets confused, these countries are absolutely socialist: North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba.


                         Chambersburg

The strange discussion over the wealth of the Confederacy--and its being the origin of capitalism(!)--continues. Makes you wonder how the North had the wherewithal to win. Here is Phelan's take:

"The Confederacy was reduced to shaking down frontier towns for cash, as when, in 1864, Chambersburg in Pennsylvania was burned after refusing to pay up on an extortion demand. Indeed, Harvard economist Nathan Nunn has found a strong negative relationship between the historical existence of slavery in a county or state and its level of income, lasting into the present day.

Debates between academics seldom go mainstream, but this one matters. On the back of a number produced by Baptist’s ignorance and peddled by Desmond in his New York Times article, Congress is being lobbied to take billions of dollars from one group of Americans and give them to another group.

This, like the burning of Chambersburg, is a political shakedown, pure and simple, and the likes of Desmond, Baptist, and others are simply cooking up dodgy numbers to try to justify it. It is a disgrace to the history profession."

Mortification

The rights of individuals to their Millian liberties [are] directly opposed to the basic commitment to a deliberately embraced collective moral goal...Under socialism, every dissenting voice raises a threat similar to that raised under a democracy by those who preach antidemocracy.--socialist economist Robert Heilbroner


Had dinner with the Stewarts and then went to "The Great Gatsby," a play that has been around in both N.Y. and London. It is a good story and provocative in our current American mea culpa phase. It was well done but had an interesting twist: Gatsby was played by a black man. This creates a number of plot problems but may have been worth it as it updated the conflict--but maybe unnecessarily. Interestingly, i bet about a third of the audience left at the break.
The Astros vs. the Yankees should be epic.
It was painful watching Cole vs. Glasnow in the playoffs. I have no argument with fine-tuning a small market team but some value must be returned. And the third guy they gave to the Rays, Baz, I think, is their number 6 prospect. That is just unforgivable.


                              Mortification
Diversity programs are increasingly not about getting past race; they are about insisting on its eternal centrality to everything in America. So we are not trying to solve whatever racial problems we have, we are trying to institutionalize them. We are beginning to look like a culture bringing back those public Middle Ages frenzies of mortification of the flesh. But this cultural guilt is quite selective.

In the last decade, the emphasis is on racial oppression as a permanent structural force built into America’s DNA. The NYT has developed an entire thesis on this idea in what looks like simple pamphleteering, not reporting or news in the slightest. So discrimination is not a the result of some tribalism or "other recognition," it is a distortion of our normally accepting nature. This good nature has been poisoned by America.

Affirmative action is not an adjustment to a distorted inequality, it is a form of open-ended resistance to a malignant “white supremacy” that has been aided and abetted by America's history--but also its very nature. So, we are not to overcome whatever errors have occurred, we must accept them as sort of a national illness. It has become the nation's Original Sin, a matter of faith and ceaseless contrition. And we insist upon publicly whipping ourselves.

In colleges, perhaps 'reverse" discrimination could still be justified by the legacy of an overwhelmingly white student body for a very long time, an attempt to level the playing field retroactively so that non-white minorities can do better. Still discrimination but....maybe charitably tolerable. But there is a problem, even in this re-balancing distortion. There is clear imbalance in racial selection in colleges and graduate schools to the detriment of Asian-Americans.

So why go after Asian-Americans — a non-white minority? Why punish one minority group in order to protect others? Many Asian-American students are children of immigrants, without inherited wealth or privilege, and, as an ethnic group, were subject to brutal discrimination in this country for centuries. Japanese-Americans were actually locked up in internment camps in living memory. And they’re the ones being discriminated against for the purpose of racial justice? This is possible only if bad thinking is actively encouraged in the community.

Forgetting History

But in the end what Obama did that is unforgivable is increasing centralization in a complex system.-- Taleb


Liz got some serious positive feedback at work this week.
I went to bed with the Dodgers up 3-1 and Kershaw pitching. Then all hell broke loose.
Will it be Cole vs. Glasnow and Charlie Morton? Discouraging.
Nice toime with Jaanne Kane at dinner last night.

So the Kurds did not help us at Normandy? That logic will appeal to the people who think a first generation Italian-American is responsible for the seventeenth British slavery tradition in the American colonies.


                                  Forgetting History

I spent a long time criticizing an article on forgetting history. The writer was comparing the cultural phenomenon of gradually having lessons of history drip away and used as his examples the avaunt guard vaccine refusals and the rise of right-wing sentiments. While we may not remember epidemics, we are not immune to reading about them. We don't have to have recent volcano experience to have some reasonable caution regarding their potential. And if such a forgetting is real, then we will forget war--that sounds fatal. But the idea that the right-wing threat is forgotten is curious. One would think that the danger of right-wing belief pales before the threat of the centralized state and the horrors it has created in the last century and has proud, numerous advocates now.
But somehow I lost the article so we are left with this remnant.

More Sowell

In Double A baseball, no one can hit the 97 mph fastball, in Triple A, some can't hit anything but. --Chris McCague

Good time at dinner with Joanne Kane last night at Tarpon Bay. Always good food and an exceptional, if pricey, wine list.
Still hot as blazes and I likely will get Zika, I am so bitten.
Despite my free time somehow I am two weeks behind in my emails.


Economics is not a catechism to be mastered in an afternoon. It is a way of arguing, a difficult though not unreasonable way, and foreign to most politicians and journalists. The public therefore gets no tuition in it from watching public life. --Deirdre nee Donald McCloskey 

Youthful climate activists claim they’ve been sold out by their elders. Greta Thunberg put it with her usual accusatory starkness at the U.N.: “You are failing us, but young people are starting to understand your betrayal.”

This is laughable. By no global measure of social and economic well-being have we failed kids. According to HumanProgress.org, the global poverty rate fell from 28 percent in 1999 to 11 percent in 2013. Life expectancy increased from 63.2 years to 71.9 years from 1981 to 2015. The completion rate for primary school increased from 80 percent in 1981 to 90 percent in 2015. The same benign trends hold for hunger, child labor, literacy, and so on.--NR

                                Sowell  

More from the inexhaustible Sowell collection: Predicting the Future. “Economists are often asked to predict what the economy is going to do. But economic predictions require predicting what politicians are going to do– and nothing is more unpredictable.”

Politicians as Santa Claus. “The big question that seldom— if ever— gets asked in the mainstream media is whether these are a net increase in jobs. Since the only resources that the government has are the resources it takes from the private sector, using those resources to create jobs means reducing the resources available to create jobs in the private sector.

So long as most people do not look beyond superficial appearances, politicians can get away with playing Santa Claus on all sorts of issues, while leaving havoc in their wake— such as growing unemployment, despite all the jobs being ‘created.'”

Health Insurance. “Whatever position people take on health care reform, there seems to be a bipartisan consensus— usually a sign of mushy thinking— that it is a good idea for the government to force insurance companies to insure people whom politicians want them to insure, and to insure them for things that politicians think should be insured. Contrary to what politicians expect us to do, let’s stop and think.

Why aren’t insurance companies already insuring the people and the conditions that they are now going to be forced to cover? Because that means additional costs— and because the insurance companies don’t think their customers are willing to pay those particular costs for those particular coverages.

It costs politicians nothing to mandate more insurance coverage for more people. But that doesn’t mean that the costs vanish into thin air. It simply means that both buyers and sellers of insurance are forced to pay costs that neither of them wants to pay. But, because political rhetoric leaves out such grubby things as costs, it sounds like a great deal.”

Khrushchev, MacLaine and Disneyland

The crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness , and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o'clock--Margaret Hasley

Torrential rain last evening followed, this morning, by frogs. Really loud frogs. Woke us up.


On Fuel Cell Vehicles from somewhere: Hydrogen’s proponents point to how clean it is as an energy source as water and heat are the only byproducts and how it can be made from a number of sources, including methane, coal, water, even garbage. Resource-poor Japan sees hydrogen as a way to greater energy security. They also argue that driving ranges and refueling times for FCVs are comparable to gasoline cars, whereas EVs require hours to recharge and provide only a few hundred kilometers of range. Many backers in China and Japan see FCVs as complementing EVs rather than replacing them. In general, hydrogen is seen as the more efficient choice for heavier vehicles that drive longer distances, hence the current emphasis on city buses.


               Khrushchev, MacLaine and Disneyland

If you look closely, silliness always shows. Here is an account of Krushchev's visit in 1959 as described in History.com.

Khrushchev arrived in the United States on September 15 for an extended visit and a summit meeting with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Soviet leader indicated a desire to see Hollywood and a visit was arranged. On September 19, Khrushchev and his wife arrived in Los Angeles. The day began pleasantly enough, with a tour of the Twentieth Century Fox Studios in Hollywood. The Soviet premier was taken on to the sound stage for the movie “Can-Can” and was immediately surrounded by the cast of the film, including Shirley MacLaine and Juliet Prowse. MacLaine greeted Khrushchev in broken Russian and then attempted to engage the premier in an impromptu dance. Khrushchev jovially begged off and then stood by while the cast members performed a number from the film. Frank Sinatra was brought in to serve as an unofficial master of ceremonies for the visit, and he later lunched with an obviously delighted Khrushchev.

Things began to unravel when Twentieth Century Fox President Spyros P. Skouras introduced Khrushchev at Los Angeles Town Hall. Almost immediately, Skouras, who was an ardent anticommunist, irritated Khrushchev by referring to the premier’s famous statement that Russia would “bury” capitalism. Skouras declared that Los Angeles was not particularly interested in “burying” anyone, but would meet the challenge if posed. Khrushchev’s famous temper quickly flared. He charged that Skouras’s remarks were part of a campaign to heckle him during his trip to America. The plan, Khrushchev suggested, was to needle him, “rub” America’s strength in his face, and make him “a little shaky in the knees.” Addressing Skouras directly, Khrushchev stated, “If you want to go on with the arms race, very well. We accept that challenge. As for the output of rockets–well, they are on the assembly line. This is a most serious question. It is one of life or death, ladies and gentlemen. One of war and peace.”

Khrushchev’s anger increased when he learned that he would not be allowed to visit Disneyland. Government authorities feared that the crowds would pose a safety hazard for the premier. Khrushchev, still fuming about the debate with Skouras, exploded. “And I say, I would very much like to go and see Disneyland. But then, we cannot guarantee your security, they say. Then what must I do? Commit suicide? What is it? Is there an epidemic of cholera there or something? Or have gangsters taken hold of the place that can destroy me?” Khrushchev left Los Angeles the next morning.