Gender Disparities

                    Gender Disparities



(From Perry)

Power and its Enemies

                  

                     Power and its Enemies




One of the difficulties in reflection on any problem is that we all bring our own colored glasses to the viewing room. So those with a special knowledge or dislike of religious persecution see religion as a special victim or persecutor. The aristocracy is an obvious target; few persecutions are from small groups so obviously unqualified to appoint themselves to lead. The Marxists target the historical backward waiting for displacement, i.e. most people. But this all omits the crucial element: Oppression. What we should always be concerned about is the arbitrary assumption of power. And we should particularly raise our concerns when groups try to undermine institutions and political infrastructure as policy; they can only want one thing.

This is from the witheringly brilliant Lord Acton and his February 26th, 1877, address to the Bridgnorth Institute, “The History of Freedom in Antiquity“:​

In the zeal for the popular interest, however, there was no provision for the unpopular, and the minority soon found itself at the mercy of the majority. The people, now sovereign, felt themselves bound by no rules of right or wrong, no criteria except expediency, no force outside of themselves. They conducted wars in the marketplace and lost them, exploited their dependencies, plundered the rich, and crowned their guilt with the martyrdom of Socrates. The experiment of Athens taught that democracy, the rule of the most numerous and most powerful class, was an evil of the same nature as monarchial absolutism and required restraints of the same sort: institutions to protect it against itself and a permanent source of law to prevent arbitrary revolutions of opinion. Men learned for the first time what later history was to confirm again and again: ‘It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.’

polyamory

                                     Polyamory

Words and efforts at expression always change. Politicians always try to redefine themselves in the best of modern connotation. So one does not hear "liberal" much anymore, but rather "progressive." And "strip club" has morphed into "gentleman's club." What used to be infidelity is now new and all shined up, called "Polyamory."
Polyamorous or open relationships are usually based on “consensual non-monogamy“—the idea that relationships can be loving, committed, and serious, without being sexually exclusive. It’s a more libertarian--as opposed to libertine--approach to sexuality, in which people can negotiate custom relationships, like contracts between firms or treaties between countries, while still retaining some sexual sovereignty and freedom of mate choice. Polyamory takes freedom of association seriously—not just in social and political life, but in the sexual realm. If you can choose to have more than one child, more than one friend, and more than one work colleague, you should be free to choose more than one sexual partner. Or so it is said. But it must also be said that sometimes the heart rises above theory.

None the less, surveys show openness to polyamory is already common among younger American adults:
   About 4 percent to 5 percent of all adults are currently in open or poly relationships;
   About 20 percent have tried some kind of open or poly relationship at some point;
   Among adults aged 18-44, 17 percent have had sex with someone else with the consent of their partner, up from 9 percent among adults aged 45-54;
   About 28 percent of adults say it is not natural for human beings to be faithful to only one person;
   About 29 percent of adults under 30 consider open relationships to be morally acceptable—compared to only 6 percent of adults over 65.

Arguing With Zombies

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future
by Paul Krugman  

Every so often in this mendacious world, someone will reveal what they really think. What really instigates tariffs?  Is the democracy we so widely praise really nothing more than anarchy?  Why do people really spend hundreds of millions of dollars to be elected to run a country? Those questions are less likely to be answered but when a political commentator comes clean, it is worth the read. For example, Paul Krugman's new book. It was reviewed recently in The Atlantic by Kelsey Dake and it is hard to believe his family let him publish it.

"What drives a dazzling academic—the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics, no less—to turn his New York Times column into an undiscriminating guillotine for conservative foes?" Dake asks. Understand, Dake substantively agrees with Krugman; what he questions is his style, his sounding like "a bloodthirsty Robespierre." 
Dake argues that Krugman was an evenhanded commentator until he joined the NYT in 1998 when he began to realize 'Republicans lost respect for facts and data, turning politically neutral technocrats into involuntary foes. “In 21st-century America,” Krugman writes, “accepting what the evidence says about an economic question will be seen as a partisan act.” '

'Commentators in this post-evidence, post-truth environment find themselves “arguing with zombies,” to cite Krugman’s book title. They confront “ideas that should have been killed by contrary evidence, but instead keep shambling along, eating people’s brains.”

Faced with these alarming undead adversaries, Krugman has concluded that politically neutral truth-telling is not merely impossible. It is morally inadequate. He duly sets out four rules for engaged public intellectuals. First, they should “stay with the easy stuff,” meaning subjects on which experts have achieved consensus: This is where an authoritative commentator can improve public understanding by delivering a clear message. Second, they should communicate in plain English—no controversy there. Third, and a bit more edgily, Krugman insists that commentators should “be honest about dishonesty.” If politicians deny clear evidence, they should be called out for arguing in bad faith. Finally, Krugman proclaims a rule that flies in the face of traditional journalistic tradecraft: “Don’t be afraid to talk about motives.”'

Krugman offers, as an example, climate change. 'Republican leaders have repeatedly ignored the solid expert consensus on climate change. Given that this consensus has been clear for more than a decade, it is fair to conclude that Republican leaders are consciously making false statements—in other words, that they are liars. Guessing at their motives seems risky but not totally unreasonable. Conceivably, they might be lying because they don’t want to irk voters with the news that hamburgers and pickup trucks are cooking the planet. But Krugman is basically right that “almost all prominent climate deniers are on the fossil-fuel take.” To state the matter plainly, conservatives lie about this issue because they are paid to lie. Or, in Krugman’s broad and snarling formulation: “Republicans don’t just have bad ideas; at this point, they are, necessarily, bad people.”'

Note that Dake's criticism is not that Krugman is being simplistic, or bigoted, or inaccurate or demagogic. He is not saying that honest disagreement can be overwhelming when presented in the public field, and so good, honest, dissenting positions might be lost. Nor is he saying that the extreme responses that are offered might be equally dangerous to the species as a whole, too dangerous to be applied without absolute certainty in a very uncertain science. No. Dake's complaint is that Krugman's position is impractical: 'By branding Republicans as “bad people,” he reduces the chances of swaying them.'

But, presumably, this sacrifice is necessary as the dishonest are not open to argument. Thus the ferocity of Krugman's style. Krugman does not see himself as a commentator, he has become Jeremiah. He is not hoping to persuade; he is simply screaming. The discussion is over, the results handed down from on high. Krugman is as certain--and as liberated--as Torquemada. The opposition is no longer a dissenter or opponent, he is the enemy. And, the greatest wound of all, he deserves no say, no consideration, no hearing. He is not just wrong, he is tainted. Spoiled. Dissent is a pathology.

"Resistance is futile," as the Borg say.

Well, at least the democracy knows where it stands.

1619 Is a Prime Number

                                              1619 Is a Prime Number

One of the appalling creations of the current race/propaganda/marketing gene splicing to crawl out of the Left's thought problem laboratory is the mind-numbing 1619 proposition recently floated by the formerly august NYT. 

Here is a portion of a take on it from the New Criterion:

It was to console its core readership that The New York Times undertook The 1619 Project in a special flood-the-zone issue of its Sunday magazine in August and then in a snazzy, graphics-heavy series of features on its website. For two years, the Times had invested heavily in the vaudeville entertainment called “Trump–Russia.” The spectacular failure of its leading man, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, to deliver a happy ending to that fiasco underscored the essential futility of the entire enterprise.

This was something that Dean Baquet, Executive Editor of the Times, grasped instantly. Last summer, he huddled with his staff in a town-hall-style meeting—the proceedings of which were promptly leaked—and acknowledged a sad truth: “We built our newsroom to cover one story” (the now-debunked story that Donald Trump had “colluded” with Russia to steal the 2016 election). The story didn’t pan out. “Now we have to regroup,” Baquet told the assembled troops, “and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story.” What story? Henceforth, or at least “for the next two years”—the remainder of Trump’s first term—the Times was going all in on “race, and other divisions.” Robert Mueller couldn’t get Trump. Maybe the Times could by writing about race in a “thoughtful,” i.e., obsessive and one-sided, way—“something,” Baquet added “we haven’t done in a large way in a long time.”

So there you have it. “That, to me,” Baquet concluded, “is the vision for coverage. You all are going to have to help us shape that vision. But I think that’s what we’re going to have to do for the rest of the next two years.” Et voilà, The 1619 Project, which the paper described in a preface as

a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

What followed was a stupefying race-based fantasy about the origins of the United States. The lead essay, by the black journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the “architect” of The 1619 Project, set the tone. “[O]ne of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain,” she wrote, “was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” So, everything you learned about the American Revolution is wrong, or at least wrongheaded. Forget about the Stamp Act, the, Boston Tea Party, the Intolerable Acts, “No taxation without representation,” etc. All that, utterly unmentioned by Ms. Hannah-Jones, was mere window dressing. The American colonists might talk about liberty. What they really cared about, according to this malignant fairy tale, was preserving and extending the institution of slavery. “[S]ome might argue,” as Hannah-Jones coyly puts it, “that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.” Gosh. Of course, “some might argue” any number of incredible things: that the earth is flat, that the moon is made of green cheese, that The New York Times is still a responsible source of news and even-handed commentary. The fact that “some might argue” X does not mean that X is credible.

So it is with the preposterous idea that America was founded as a “slavocracy.” Hannah-Jones asserts that “anti-black racism runs in the very dna of this country.” The claim is obviously metaphorical; countries do not possess dna. But if one were to take the metaphor seriously, as tantamount to asserting that anti-black racism is an essential and therefore unalterable characteristic of America, then the whole 1619 Project would be pointless from the get-go. It would be like complaining about the roundness of a circle or the wetness of water.

Presumably, however, neither Hannah-Jones nor the Times intends for us to take the metaphor quite so seriously. For Hannah-Jones, what is wanted is an expression that simultaneously justifies the endless whining of black radicals about how victimized they are because of things that happened a few centuries ago while also stressing the perpetually renewable guilt (like the liver of Prometheus) of whites, all whites, those living today even more than those actually involved in the African slave trade in the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries. For the Times, it fits in with what Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff called its “irresistible urge to delegitimize America.” That is the ultimate aim of The 1619 Project: to deliver another blow in the campaign to besmirch and diminish the political and moral achievement that is the United States of America. It is as despicable as it is mendacious.

You might say, Who cares about insane rantings in The New York Times? It is increasingly a niche publication for the credentialed, politically correct nomenklatura, totally out of touch with the main current of America and held afloat only by its unremitting attacks on anything to do with Donald Trump.

This is true. Nevertheless, the paper is not entirely without influence, even today. Indeed, various public school districts, including some in Chicago, have announced that they will supplement their curricula by distributing copies of The 1619 Project to students, thereby promulgating the racialist worldview expounded by that “major” “reframing” of our history. And though the copies will be paid for by the Times and donors, taxpayers will still be indirectly funding a version of history that is politically tendentious and wildly at odds with the facts. The Pulitzer Center (not affiliated with the famed prizes) has announced that it “is proud to be the education partner for The 1619 Project.” As we write, the Center’s website is full of little valentines to Hannah-Jones and her racialist, ahistorical fantasy about the founding of the United States.

We said that The 1619 Project was stupefying. What we meant was that the claims it makes are so outlandish, at once so ostentatiously at odds with historical reality while also being carefully framed in a corset of politically correct verbiage, that any critical response is at first stunned. Someone tells you that the Apollo 11 moon landing was a carefully staged hoax perpetrated by nasa or the Trilateral Commission or whatever. Your first response is a spluttering incredulity.

It is the same with the contention that 1619, the year that the first African slaves were brought to America, marked “the beginning of the system of slavery on which the country was built.” But there were already slaves and various other forms of indentured labor in the Americas as there were all over the world. To say that there were slaves in America is not to say that “the country was built” on slavery. Moreover, the African slaves were not “kidnapped” by American or British slavers, as Hannah-Jones asserts, but were sold by other black Africans who were happy to profit by selling people they had enslaved to the colonists.

Fortunately, a rational, historically informed response to The 1619 Project has been building. The National Association of Scholars has inaugurated the “1620 Project,” not just to commemorate the signing of the Mayflower Compact—a much more significant event in the history of the United States—but also to provide an occasion for thoughtful responses to some of the more outlandish claims made by Hannah-Jones and the other writers involved in the Times’s latest campaign of disinformation. (Among our favorites, the contention that double-entry bookkeeping was an innovation “whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps.”)

The distinguished historian Allen C. Guelzo, writing in City Journal, notes that “The 1619 Project is not history: it is polemic, born in the imaginations of those whose primary target is capitalism itself and who hope to tarnish capitalism by associating it with slavery.” The great irony, Guelzo writes, is that “The 1619 Project dispenses this malediction from the chair of ultimate cultural privilege in America,” The New York Times, “because in no human society has an enslaved people suddenly found itself vaulted into positions of such privilege, and with the consent—even the approbation—of those who were once the enslavers.”

(A prime number is one whose only function is 1 and itself, that is it is not the product of any two numbers other than one and itself. It is isolated, autogenerated and alone.) 

Trade and Jobs

                            Trade and Jobs
The current administration has linked the loss of manufacturing jobs with the trade deficit. This is extremely difficult because the world economy is not a level playing field and one circumstance in one area can not necessarily be applied elsewhere. Textile jobs in Vermont will not compare easily to sweat shops in Asia. 
Manufacturing jobs in the U.S. have fallen since the mid-70s and, during the same period, the trade deficit has risen. But, contrary to superficial thinking and politicians--not always the same because the politicians always have an extra mendacity card to play--, the two are not necessarily related. There may be a cause and effect relationship or it may be entirely coincidental. Or, like cats and the Plague, it may be a very complex relationship. 
While the percentage of Americans today employed in manufacturing occupations is indeed about half of what it was in the mid-1970s (14 percent today compared with about 28 percent back then), the decline in manufacturing jobs as a percentage of all American jobs started way back in 1945 (when it was about 44 percent of all jobs). Because for most of the period between the end of World War II and 1977 America ran annual trade surpluses, it is illegitimate to read the data as simply that trade deficits reduce manufacturing employment.

Energy Numbers

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 

On our way back today.

The Kenyon quote is really important and rarely heard. How many arrogant warlords, naive optimists, dreamy democratic visionaries, and simple murderous psychopaths have combined to pile the bodies of average, struggling, working people up as bulwarks and breastworks in their endless battles for self-gratification. (See Middle East)


Eutrapely : noun: Liveliness and ease of conversation. ETYMOLOGY: From Greek (pleasantness in conversation), from eu- (well) + trapely (to turn). Earliest documented use: 1596. It was one of Aristotle’s dozen virtues.

              Energy Numbers

From the June 2018 BP Statistical Review of Global Energy (67th edition) here are some details on C02 emissions in 2017:

1. Global CO₂ emissions from energy in 2017 grew by 1.6% (and 426.4 million tons), rebounding from the stagnant volumes during 2014-2016, and faster than the 10-year average of 1.3%.

2. Declines in CO2 emissions in 2017 were led by the US (-0.5% and 42 million tons). This is the ninth time in this century that the US has had the largest decline in emissions in the world. This also was the third consecutive year that emissions in the US declined, though the fall was the smallest over the last three years. Must be The Paris Accords.

3. Carbon emissions from energy use from the US are the lowest since 1992, the year that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) came into existence. The next largest decline was in Ukraine (-10.1% and 28.1 tons).

4. The largest increase in carbon emissions in 2017 came from China (1.6% and 119 tons), a reversal from the past three years when the largest increases in emissions came from India. China’s emissions in 2017 were 0.3% higher than the previous peak in 2014. China has had the world’s largest increments in carbon emission every year this century except in four years – 2000 and between 2014-16. The next highest increment came from India where emissions rose by 4.4% (93.2 million tons), though lower than its 10-year average (6% p.a.).

5. Together, China and India accounted for nearly half (212.2 million tons) of the increase in global carbon emissions (426.4 million tons). EU emissions were also up (1.5% and 42.4 million tons) with just Spain accounting for 44% of the increase in EU emissions. Among other EU members, UK and Denmark reported the lowest carbon emissions in their history.

Perry: For that impressive “greening” of America, we can thank the underground oceans of America’s natural gas that are now accessible because of the revolutionary, advanced drilling and extraction technologies of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal/directional drilling, and are increasingly displacing coal for the nation’s electricity generation.