Lincoln

                                    Lincoln


We Americans stupidly recognize this day as the day before taxes are due. So we emphasize money and materialism over greatness of mind and soul, greatness that was both a product of and an influence upon the nation. Taxes are trivial compared to what happened on this day in 1865. President Lincoln was shot by Booth on Good Friday, April 14, 1865 and died the next morning. Secretary of State Seward was brutally assaulted as was his son. There is good evidence that General Grant was stalked to his train the same night by the conspirators. This occurred 5 days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox and doomed the South to a reconciliation with the North shepherded by the usual political wolves. More importantly it deprived the nation and politics of the high standard of mind and spirit Lincoln embodied.

Tolstoy on Lincoln:
“.... how largely the name of Lincoln is worshiped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become. Now why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes? He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skillful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.

“Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country — bigger than all the Presidents together.

“We are still too near to his greatness,” Tolstoy concluded, “but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do.

“His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.”

I don’t want people to die, but....

                     I don’t want people to die, but....

"I don’t want people to die. But liberals are not helping by pressuring young people to give up jobs, savings and hope of a brighter future as if it’s a sacrifice they should make without complaint or any expectation of repayment, just because it’s the right thing to do.

The conversation should solely be framed as this, “We are asking young people to give up a lot, and to save mostly older people. So how are we going to pay them back? What sacrifice will be demanded to make them whole?”

I appreciate how people want to seem moral and righteous. But I want to underline the “contract” part of “social contract.” It is not justice to make young people give up their futures. We need to repay them, with interest.

People’s fears about losing jobs, losing houses, and watching retirement savings disappear are not minor. And if we fail to take them seriously, they will start to listen to Trump and others who say we have to re-open the economy."

"Just because it is the right thing to do?" "Want to seem moral and righteous?"

This was written by one Amanda Marcotte who has a job. She works as a political writer for the left-leaning website, Salon. I suppose all this implies that the idealistic, self-sacrificing optimism of the young, embodied by Sanders, has moved on to easier, lower ground. She seems to think that political triage is a new idea but it is the basis of old people on ice floes, death camps, euthanasia and eugenics. It is actually not a partisan question, it is a question of whatever the future is substituting for religion. It is a problem only when the political influence extends over controlling life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Which is too far.

Intensity is not a substitute for insight, nor is force for thought. Control over things should be carefully considered. Let's start here: Let's not read the works of people who write books titled, Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself. And, when they write articles, let's not take them seriously.

Sunday/Easter

                                   Easter

Easter is the essential Christian event. Every aspect of the Christian church hinges on Christ's resurrection.

The gospel is filled with little particulars (the woman hesitant to enter the tomb, Peter being outrun to the tomb, the meticulous arrangement of the burial cloths, the assumption that the body was stolen--after the assumption by the Pharisees that the apostles would steal it)--all giving misdirection and specificity to what becomes the philosophical earthquake of all time. And, of course, another biblical irony: The first to arrive, the women, could not be legal witnesses.

Yet how does this all hinge? Hearsay? The interpretation of a sacred book? Amulets and magic rites? No. Amazingly it hinges on us.

By the time Christ rises, we know all the players. We even have some insights about them. They are not revolutionaries, not mystics and, while seemingly sincere, they are not special. They are relatively normal working folks with responsibilities and, probably, annoyed families. As seen by their behavior during the Passion, they are not fully aware of what is happening. Nor are they particularly brave. Yet, after this crisis where their leader is tortured and killed, they somehow emerge as philosophers and martyrs. They all, to a man, experience a mind-changing, life-changing event. Scattered and leaderless they raise a religious movement that challenges everything in its time and, eventually, forces mighty Rome to adapt.

Christ performed the great, unarguable miracle. It was the behavior of men, people, who confirmed and developed it. No leap of faith was necessary. They were convinced and changed. Then they convinced and changed the world.

 

Graphs

                                     Wide-ranging Graphs

American CO2 production:
 


The dreaded inequality:



Some pent-up car demand:


And a curve that for some reason does not alarm people:

Good Friday

                             Good Friday

How the norms slide and slip, how the bell-shaped curve moves. Two poems about Good Friday that were outliers, now the norm.

Christina Rossetti's Good Friday

Am I a stone, and not a sheep,
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,
To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?

Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter, weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;

Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon –
I, only I.

Yet give not o’er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.


And the atheist Housmann' Easter Sunday, taking the position of the thief:


If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,
You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,
Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright
Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night
The hate you died to quench and could but fan,
Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.

But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,
At the right hand of majesty on high
You sit, and sitting so remember yet
Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,
Your cross and passion and the life you gave,
Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.

Goebbels and The Left

                      Goebbels and The Left

There has been a sudden outpouring of scholarship from left-leaning "scholars" on the history of post-World War II free market and libertarian thought. Much of it lacks academic rigor and has something of a conspiratorial tone as if no reasonable person could believe such ideas, and therefore they must be the product of corporate influence, a cover for racism and white supremacy, and so on. This kind of propagandist rewriting of history works; Goebbels was a genius at it.

Scholarship in drag, like the 1619 Project.

Attacking origins of thought through speculation is a standard. A great one is the attack on Christianity through its original documents. The Jesus Project, disguised as a Christian research project, was really made up of very aggressive, dare I say "evangelical," atheists who tried to cobble together a narrative that challenged the traditional Christian scripture with gnostic writings written three hundred years later. Some fun fiction is out there built around the Council of Nicea and the choice of preferred writings that emerged. (Khoury's Templar series is a good one.)

Berstein has an article on the topic in Reason. He analyzes Robert Van Horn who writes "from 1946 throughout the 1950s, corporations made possible and crucially supported the rise of Chicago law and economics through funding and advice…" He implies that corporate involvement influenced the normative positions of Chicago School economics, in particular skepticism of antitrust laws. there is nothing in Van Horn's post documenting that corporations funded the relevant scholars at Chicago. The only funding discussed in the article is from the Volker Fund. As Wikipedia explains: "The William Volker Fund was a charitable foundation established in 1932 by Kansas City, Missouri, businessman and home-furnishings mogul William Volker. Volker founded the fund with the purposes of aiding the needy, reforming Kansas City's health care and educational systems, and combating the influence of machine politics in municipal governance. Following Volker's death in 1947, Volker's nephew, Harold W. Luhnow continued the fund's previous mission, but also used the fund to promote and disseminate ideas on free-market economics."

"In sum, "corporate funding" amounted to a handful of three-year fellowships for independent scholarly research, and a two-week seminar. To extrapolate from that corporate funding was "crucial" to the rise of law and economics (the start of which the author himself dates to several years earlier), much less that it affected the substantive views of those involved, is quite a stretch."

But this is, and will be, the way of our new world. We will be overwhelmed by the audacity and the volume of fraud. Ideologues, tabla rasa politicians, and wide-eyed fools will adopt the style of sincere mystics and itinerate patent medicine hucksters. The new politician and his Press supporters will parse 2+2 and often will be overlooked because nobody will believe, like Goebbels, that anyone could lie so easily, so massively or be so egocentrically cruel.

All our Drugs Come from China

                              All our Drugs Come from China

"80 percent of America's pharmaceutical drug supply comes from China." This has been presented recently as part of a rather astonishing anxiety over America's dependence upon foreign manufacturers. We do this on purpose; it's cheaper. But the numbers are, in the words of the Secretary of Defense in "Independence Day," not entirely accurate.

What is underlying this problem is how the inaccuracy occurs. Are these people this dumb? Or are they insincere?

This is from Reason:

'Tracing this “80 percent of American drugs come from China” claim back to its source reveals a game of “whisper down the lane,” in which a rather innocuous piece of data about the global manufacturing base for pharmaceutical drugs has been inaccurately summarized and stripped of important context.

In December, when the U.S. and China signed the “phase one” trade deal—and when the coronavirus outbreak was still very much in the background—Politico published a story (with some reporting from the South China Morning Post) framed around the idea that “U.S. policymakers” were worried that China could “weaponize” its drug exports to gain leverage in a trade dispute.

The piece was designed to scare. “The U.S. relies on imported medicines from China in a big way,” authors Doug Palmer and Finbarr Bermingham wrote right at the top. “Antibiotics, over-the-counter pain meds and the stuff that stops itching and swelling—a lot of it is imported from China.”

How much is a lot? “In all, 80 percent of the U.S. supply of antibiotics are made in China,” they wrote, linking back to a press release from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa). (Remember, this piece was in Politico.)

But that’s not what the press release says.

Grassley’s statement was publicizing a letter Grassley sent on August 9 to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the FDA, asking them to conduct more inspections of foreign drug manufacturing facilities to make sure they meet American standards.

“Unbeknownst to many consumers … 80 percent of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients are produced abroad, the majority in China and India,” Grassley wrote.

There’s the first bit of context collapse: the authors of the Politico piece merged Grassley’s “80 percent … are produced abroad” into “80 percent…are made in China.”

All of this also raises another question: Where is Grassley getting that information? His letter sources that claim to a 2016 Government Accountability Office report which itself cited FDA data on pharmaceutical manufacturers around the world. And that report makes it clear that the U.S. has a diverse supply chain for drugs that goes well beyond India and China.

“Nearly 40 percent of finished drugs and approximately 80 percent of active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) are manufactured in registered establishments in more than 150 countries,” is how the GAO summed up America’s pharmaceutical supply chain.

In two jumps, we’ve gone from “80 percent of American drugs are manufactured in more than 150 countries around the world” to “80 percent of drugs come from two countries” to “80 percent of drugs come from China.”'

There are simply too many sources of information, misinformation, and disinformation out in the world for the individual to monitor. So the individual expects the trusted sites, who analyze information for a living, to do it. But they may be unable--or unwilling--to do so.