Questions 64

Questions 64

Would the business world or academia accept without criticism or anxiety the type of behavior demonstrated by the current President of the U.S.? He wanders around the public forum like a broken toy. Why doesn't anyone say anything?

An overall twin correlation across thirty-eight measures was r = 0.95, p < .001. In contrast with previous research, the twins’ general intelligence and non-verbal reasoning scores showed some marked differences. A remarkable study of female co-twins, raised separately by an adoptive family in the United States and the biological family in South Korea.

Obstacle-course racing is close to being named the new fifth sport in modern pentathlon, replacing equestrianism, in a highly contentious move that opponents warn will plunge the sport deeper into civil war.

George Gilder on information, not materials, driving growth: "Wealth is most essentially knowledge... the caveman had access to all the materials we have today. Therefore, economic growth is learning, manifested in ‘learning curves’ of collapsing costs driven by markets...Crash a car and all its value disappears, though every molecule remains...Capitalism is not chiefly an incentive system, where entrepreneurs act in rote response to rewards and punishments like in a Skinner Box. It’s an information system governed by the unveiling of surprising truths, innovation. If the creativity of entrepreneurs wasn’t a surprise, socialist planning would work.”

M]eritocracy is a revolutionary idea, the intellectual dynamite which has blown up old worlds – and created the materials for the construction of new ones. For millennia, most societies have been organized according to the very opposite principles to meritocracy. People inherited their positions in fixed social orders. The world was ruled by royal dynasties. Plum jobs were bought and sold like furniture. Nepotism was a way of life. Upward mobility was discouraged and sometimes outlawed.--woodward

Questions 63

 

Questions 63

The British Retail Consortium (BRC) has calculated that one in seven shopfronts across Britain is empty.

A new map of the night sky has just been made public for the first time. The photo, which was published by scientists at Durham University, shows an incredibly detailed picture of millions of galaxies and space objects.
Many of the 4.4 million galaxies captured in the photo hold massive black holes, or are generating new stars at high speeds. Most of the specks of light visible in the image are billions of light-years away from Earth, according to the scientists. Some of the rarer objects captured in the image include colliding galaxies and flaring stars in the Milky Way.
4.4 billion galaxies.
The difference between "real income" and "real disposable income" is the latter is after taxes. Inflation-adjusted, real disposable income declined for the 9th time in 10 months.

Hoover Institution’s John Cochrane noted recently, big borrowing has to be followed by big consequences like big spending cuts, big tax increases, big inflation, or worse, a big debt crisis. It will also be followed by greater difficulty in responding to emergencies like the one in Ukraine.

NEWS

 NEWS

Good news. The Biden administration's disinformation czar claimed in a book she authored this year she will not be "silenced" on social media as she pushed back against what she considered to be "harassment" from men whenever she shared opinions online.
She claims the "infrastructure of the internet is built for men."

A lot of people feel she's unfit for the post but perhaps the whole idea is so goofy, she's perfect.

The State Department said it is "closely monitoring" the investigation into what left three Americans dead at a Bahamas Sandals resort, and a fourth hospitalized.

Salvation Army of Sarasota County: Starting in May, the agency was forced to cut its free dinner and shower services for members of the public who are not enrolled in its programs. 

An officer said. “In the last three to six months, we probably lost I would say 20% to 30% of our staff due to the fact that they can’t afford to live in the area and they need to move.”

Sinn Féin will be the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly for the first time, pushing the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) into second place.

“The War on the West” claims that perhaps as many as 12 million Africans were trafficked across the Atlantic in the Transatlantic slave trade. At the same time, as many as 18 million were sold to the East from Africa in the Arab slave trade. The author asks why are there no descendants of slaves in the Arab lands as there are in this country? Because, he says, the Arabs castrated all the male Africans they bought so that there would be no next generation.

Wrong More Often Than Dictated by the Laws of Chance

Wrong More Often Than Dictated by the Laws of Chance

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, when asked if government spending is fueling the rise in government indebtedness as well as inflation, answered “No, it isn’t. The government spending is doing the exact reverse, reducing the national debt. It is not inflationary.”

This is quite a statement--maybe not the idiocy of the 'tilting Guam' worry, but close. There is nobody--or at least not many--who would say that increased deficit spending does not increase the national debt. And, unless you are a fan of MMT, deficit spending is inflationary. Adding dollars to the exchange market cheapens them. What one of the most important people in the world is saying is just gibberish.

An element of American politics is that a politician--with the exception of Trump--can say anything, regardless of how stupid, without the risk of correction or criticism. This says as much about the observers as the politicians themselves. Frighteningly, there is no reason for us poor working slugs to assume that these stupid statements do not correlate directly with stupid government. 

The inescapable camera and microphone may require the quality of these people to rise. Now that would be change.

Question 62

 

Question 62

Members of the U.S. Senate often have conflicts of interest, both business and personal. But never before has our country experienced a senator who has dual citizenship, served in a foreign military and maintains deep ties to the other nation where he holds citizenship — one where the leader is notorious for punishing those who cross him. Mehmet Oz — more commonly known by his television name of “Dr. Oz” — has myriad connections to Turkey and the world of its autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that are causing concern in Washington and beyond.--WashPo
I saw an ad by a Dr. Oz opponent touting that he was an American.

According to California Assembly Bill 2098, physicians who deviate from an authorized set of beliefs would do so at risk to their medical license. The bill, written by Assemblyman Evan Low, a Democrat in Silicon Valley, and currently making its way through the California Legislature, is motivated by the idea that practicing doctors are spreading “misinformation” about the risks of COVID, its treatment, and the COVID vaccine.

An interesting observation from Durant, channeling Hayek: Law tends to lag behind moral development, not because law cannot learn, but because experience has shown the wisdom of testing new ways in practice before congealing them into law.

In reality, Europe is a fragmented continent increasingly distrustful of the reliability and sanity of the United States, unhappily but helplessly dependent on German economic interests, destabilized by serial crises, eager to diversify away from fossil fuels, and terrified by the return of Russian imperial power and the prospect of a nuclear exchange. Far from being strategically autonomous, Europe needs a partner and protector. And if the answer isn’t Washington, then Beijing is the only other game in town.--stern

Questions 61

Questions 61

Chappell attacked with a knife on stage. Are glass screens next for performers? They are very upset. Probably don't remember Monica Seles.

The Roe opinion leaks. Will it unify the Dems at mid-terms?

"Extremist MAGA Agenda" emerges as a Dem talking point. Can the party of The Ministry of Truth call anyone 'extremist?' 

Unbelievable Pens game. Brutal hit on Rakel.

Vance wins in Ohio.

Modeling cannot “accurately predict the numbers”, the chairman of the Government’s modeling task force admitted as he was questioned by MPs on why experts had got omicron projections so wrong. Speaking to the Commons science and health select committee, which is scrutinizing the pandemic response, Prof Medley said: “The modeling is there to understand the process and what’s going on. We know we can’t accurately predict the numbers, but we can give insight into the processes that determine the outcomes.”
Scenarios released in models before Christmas estimated that up to 6,000 people a day could die at the peak of the omicron wave, with tens of thousands of daily hospitalizations, leading to calls for a national lockdown. However, deaths peaked at 306 on Jan 21, while daily admissions never rose beyond 2,615.

zero carbon and zero covid are the same grift
it's the same state-sponsored crony corporatism to establish control and enrich allies--el malo gato

In 1959 the editor in chief of JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, wrote, “Neither the proponents nor the opponents of the smoking theory have sufficient evidence to warrant the assumption of an all-or-none authoritative position.” In 1958 the leading expert on statistical analysis, R.A Fisher, wrote in Nature, “Unfortunately, considerable propaganda is now being developed to convince the public that cigarette smoking is dangerous.” Imagine if doctors would have lost their medical licenses for disagreeing with the expert opinion.--wsj

The Bureau of Truth

The Bureau of Truth

The Bureau of Truth and Jankowicz are testing whether idiocy can be a threat to basic virtues.
This is from an article in the National Review.

"Jankowicz’s social-media history suggests that, while she is certainly interested in disinformation, her passion is dressing up as Liza Minnelli. In one video, Jankowicz adapts the tune of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” to convey that “Information laundering is really quite ferocious / It’s when a huckster takes some lies and makes them sound precocious.” In another, she offers up that pornographic twist on the Harry Potter books for which we’ve all been clamoring. “I helped him solve the mystery of the egg,” she warbles. “But I’d like to solve the mystery between his legs.” Her canon is limited in scope, but what I’ve seen of it is enough to test even the most committed civil libertarian in his opposition to casual waterboarding.

...

All told, it will be tough to find a more perfect example of Modern American Progressivism than this for a good while. It exhibits an entirely undeserved epistemological self-confidence. It is driven by a niche moral panic that begins and ends online. It is unabashedly authoritarian in concept and in tone. It involves the addition to the public payroll of one of the silliest people in all the land. And, like so much that the contemporary Left ends up doing, it has pushed the vast majority of psychologically normal voters into paroxysms of derisive laughter. One of the most remarkable features of our age is that the more het up about an issue the American Left seems to be, the less serious its saviors seem to become. David Harsanyi is correct to argue that the very idea of “the state putting an imprimatur on ‘truth’” is both “dangerous to freedom” and “laughable,” but I wonder if he is perhaps overestimating the extent to which the Democratic Party and its chums will ever be able to control America’s national conversation. We are told that we are in the midst of a chronic “information crisis,” and yet the best progressives can do to fight it is promote Brian Stelter, Taylor Lorenz, Jen Psaki, and Nina Jankowicz."