Question 87

Question 87

In the Penguin Random House/S&S antitrust trial it was revealed that out of 58,000 trade titles published per year, half of those titles sell fewer than one dozen books. 

90 percent of titles sell fewer than 2,000 units. 

NYT: "about 98 percent of the books that publishers released in 2020 sold fewer than 5,000 copies."

On Sept. 13, 2001, the Met reopened two days after the attack on the World Trade Center. The next day the New York Times reported that by 4 p.m., 8,270 visitors had passed through its doors, “more than normal for this time of year.” 

At a time of fear and despair, people sought out art.

Trouble at NASA? Former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver writes in her new book, “Escaping Gravity,” that the agency is paying the manufacturing company Aerojet Rocketdyne $150 million apiece to refurbish the outdated RS-25 outdated engines—$600 million a flight. It is no wonder that taxpayers so far have put nearly $30 billion into the Artemis moon-launch program before its first launch: $12 billion for the first SLS, $14 billion for two Orion crew capsules and $3.6 billion for new SLS launch facilities at Cape Canaveral.

Is the current rewriting of history just another effort to deprive Black Americans of the revolutionary American experience?

Britain’s German mercenaries noted that “you do not see a regiment” in the Continental Army “in which there is not a large number of blacks”? Africans did not contradict American ideas of freedom; they embraced them and enlarged them alongside other Americans “by linking those ideas to a larger spirit of equality and humanity.”

So Batgirl has been canceled, post-production?

Energy: What the Government Says

 

Energy: What the Government Says

One of the significant changes in American politics is that some of our leaders have an apocalyptic vision of the world that requires them to put the world's interest paramount in their thinking. This hierarchy subordinates U.S. safety and independence as well.

Biden's opinion of oil producers and refiners is pretty public and available.

"Putin is causing the rise in the price of gas in America by invading Ukraine." This is a tough sell because the argument against cutting out Russian oil imports was that we imported so little. And the price of oil was up 48% since Biden's election before the Russians went into Ukraine.

This is like blaming the shutdown of the economy on Covid.

The only thing worse than a stupid lie by a politician is when he believes it. Then you have the worst of both worlds, the stupid and the mendacious.

Some numbers from somewhere:

The U.S. imports only 3% of its petroleum supply and less than 1% of coal from Russia.

There are 9,000 available unused drilling permits, Biden claimed, and only 10% of onshore oil production takes place on federal land. Talk about a misdirection play.

First, companies have to obtain additional permits for rights of way to access leases and build pipelines to transport fuel. This has become harder under the Biden Administration. Second, companies must build up a sufficient inventory of permits before they can contract rigs because of the regulatory difficulties of operating on federal land.

It takes 140 days or so for the feds to approve a drilling permit versus two for the state of Texas. The Administration has halted onshore lease sales. Producers are developing leases more slowly since they don’t know when more will be available. Offshore leases were snapped up at a November auction because companies expect it might be the last one.

Interior’s five-year leasing program for the Gulf of Mexico expires in June. Yet the Administration hasn’t promulgated a new plan. Nor did it appeal a liberal judge’s order in January revoking the November leases. But the Administration has appealed another judge’s order requiring that it hold lease sales.

Then there’s the not-small problem of financing. Companies can’t explore and drill, or build pipelines, without capital. Biden financial regulators allied with progressive investors are working to cut it off. The Labor Department has proposed a rule that would require 401(k) managers to consider the climate impact of their investment holdings.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is expected to issue a rule requiring companies and their financiers to disclose greenhouse gas emissions. Mr. Biden has nominated Sarah Bloom Raskin, of all people, to be the Federal Reserve’s top bank supervisor. Her top priority is using bank regulation to redirect capital from fossil fuels to green energy.

Large energy producers are buying back stock and redirecting capital to renewables because they see the Administration’s writing on the wall. Small independent producers are eager to take advantage of higher prices but can’t get loans. Many relied on private equity during the last shale boom, but now these firms are cutting them off.

Progressive outfit Global Energy Monitor gleefully proclaimed Tuesday that $244 billion in U.S. liquefied natural gas projects are stalled because they “are struggling to find financiers and buyers” amid “pressure from cheap renewables"—i.e., rich green energy subsidies that Democrats want to make richer—and “tightening climate commitments.”

***

It’s almost a miracle that any oil and gas production is occurring in America amid this political hostility. The Ukraine crisis ought to be an inflection point that causes the Biden Administration to do an energy reset. Instead, the President says it “should motivate us to accelerate the transition to clean energy” and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

Replacing Russia’s five million barrels of global crude exports with U.S. and Canadian oil and building pipelines to transport it would take time. But the transition to a fossil-free world will take decades and technological breakthroughs—and will leave the U.S. dependent on China, Russia and other countries for minerals like lithium and nickel.

Mr. Biden bemoans today’s skyrocketing gas prices, yet he remains hostage to the green-energy donors whose policies guarantee higher prices. The President is enabling Vladimir Putin’s energy leverage even as he claims the opposite.

When Do Voters Get Reflective?

                   When Do Voters Get Reflective?
 
I came across this from the fierce Lionel Shriver:

 
Last week’s Spectator interview with Rishi Sunak conveyed the anti-science ‘science’, the paucity of even fag-packet cost-benefit analysis and the ideological lockdown of Boris Johnson’s cabinet that brought forth calamitously extensive lockdowns of everyone else. Ever since, numerous politicians and institutions implicated in this rash experiment have had a vested interest in maintaining the myth that putting whole societies into standby mode, as if countries are mere flatscreens that can be benignly switched on and off by governmental remote, saved many millions of lives.

As it will take years for culpable parties to retire, I once feared that a full generation would need to elapse before we recognised lockdowns for what they were: the biggest public health debacle in history. Yet everywhere I turn lately, still another journalist is decrying the avoidable social, medical and economic costs of this hysterical over-reaction to a virus, while deriding lockdown zealots for having vilified sceptics of a policy that may well end up killing more people than it protected. The Covid revisionism is welcome – though it’s a good deal easier to publish these opinion pieces now than it was two years ago, and I speak from experience.

I’m all for holding officialdom accountable for mistakes from on high that continue to generate dire consequences, not least today’s soaring inflation. Yet it’s worth pressing more uncomfortably: should the public not also be held accountable? After all, the professional naysayer Neil Ferguson notoriously assumed that democracies would never ‘get away with’ lockdowns in Europe – ‘and then Italy did it. And we realised that we could.’ What facilitated sending entire populations to their room like naughty children? Not merely draconian laws, but widespread public eagerness to obey them. Johnson’s heavy hand was forced in part by British opinion polls.
With nary a whimper, the public abdicated every civil right they’d imagined to be inalienable

What was wrong with people – individual people, and in many instances this means you, reader – yes, you – who’d never even heard of a ‘lockdown’ outside a prison or an American school-shooting drill, yet who overnight embraced as inevitable a method of suppressing communicable disease never before tried at scale, never recommended in public health literature and first used to ‘successfully’ quell Covid by lying, authoritarian China? Why didn’t more independent thinkers say: ‘Hold on a minute. Have you thought this through? Might nationwide house arrest be just a tad over the top? And have you pols never heard of unintended consequences?’ Why didn’t more enterprising citizens hit the internet and note: ‘Wow! We’ve had pandemics before’ – and some older folks would have lived through the contagions of 1957 and 1968 themselves – ‘and we didn’t close so much as a betting shop. Why can’t we be trusted to act like grown-ups and behave in our own self-interest?’ Why didn’t more members of the public get angry?

In the UK, a resistance did emerge, but we were few and roundly traduced. Chillingly uniform journalistic cheerleaders for government restrictions on all the major networks might at least claim to have been intimidated by coercive Ofcom ‘guidelines’. But under no such regulatory pressure, most regular shmoes in whose faces interviewers poked microphones still obligingly spouted: ‘No ruination of our lives is too extreme!’ With nary a whimper, the British public abdicated every civil right they’d imagined the very week before to be inalienable: the right to assembly; to free association; to family life; to travel, even the right to leave the country; effectively, too, the right to free speech. Worse, a substantial volunteer army became the state’s enforcers, ringing the police when neighbours dared to go running twice in a day.

If we step back to gain a modicum of perspective, what’s most disturbing about the past ten years is a different kind of climate change: a sequence of social manias that have swept the world like back-to-back sandstorms.

In 2012, a rare mental illness entailing estrangement from the sexual signifiers of one’s own body suddenly snowballed into an international obsession, until now we have thousands of women lopping off their healthy breasts with the blessing of both the medical establishment and the state.

In 2017, a movement energised by legitimate consternation over a sexually predatory Hollywood producer’s abuse of power exploded into a worldwide female grudge-fest, until no woman could hold her head high in public without a personal story of sexual victimisation, which ambitious females carried with them everywhere like bespoke handbags. Some of the men destroyed by this frenzy surely deserved their fate, but others didn’t. In the process of conflating rape and a disappointing date while demonising commonplace flirtation and courtship, we must have lowered the birth rate in multiple countries by several babies per thousand.

In 2020, we all moaned cosily, ‘Here we go, another lockdown,’ as if the state barricading us in our homes for months on end were a time-honoured tradition like Christmas. With the populace primed for hysteria, that summer massive marches all over the world poured into the streets after a single unjustified murder of a black suspect by a white policeman in Minneapolis, issuing in an era consumed by race that is, alas, still with us. It never appeared to enter the heads of indignant protestors in Seoul that, gee, they didn’t really have any black people in South Korea.

Swept up in this succession of manic social waves, everyone gets exercised about the same thing, mindlessly repeats the same empty phrases and eagerly adopts the same branding (with its implied chiming in, the coinage ‘MeToo’ was pitch-perfect). Trans women are women! Believe women! Protect the NHS! Black lives matter! Yet once a mania begins to subside, we never hear any sheepish self-examination. Say, something like: ‘Hmm. I do feel badly about that Floyd chap, but why did I find myself shouting on a London street “Hands up, don’t shoot!” when our constabulary is unarmed?’ Members of the throng never seem to notice that none of these passing intoxications was their idea, or to wonder what this blowing-in-the-wind suggestibility says about their vulnerability to, er, you know, fascism. So you’ve really got to worry what comes next.

Sunday/Philemon

 Sunday/Philemon

The epistle today is from Paul's to Philemon, Paul's shortest. In it Paul, old now and in prison. recommends his 'child,' Onesimus, to his old friend, Philemon

The second reading from the letter of St. Paul to Philemon
9-10, 12-17

I, Paul, an old man,
and now also a prisoner for Christ Jesus,
urge you on behalf of my child Onesimus,
whose father I have become in my imprisonment;
I am sending him, that is, my own heart, back to you.
I should have liked to retain him for myself,
so that he might serve me on your behalf
in my imprisonment for the gospel,
but I did not want to do anything without your consent,
so that the good you do might not be forced but voluntary.
Perhaps this is why he was away from you for a while,
that you might have him back forever,
no longer as a slave
but more than a slave, a brother,
beloved especially to me, but even more so to you,
as a man and in the Lord.
So if you regard me as a partner, welcome him as you would me.

The backstory is important. Onesimus is an actual slave. More importantly, he's Philemon's slave. And he was not just 'away from you for a while,' he stole from Philemon, then ran off, both maiming offenses. He is in prison with Paul for a third, unrelated crime. He is being returned to his master--who can by rights chop off his hand and foot--not for justice but for Christian charity. His life is not to be viewed by birth or circumstance, it is to be cherished equally as a child of God. As Paul himself.

At this time in history, nobody was thinking and talking like this. This was a cataclysmic revolution in thought.

Question 86

Question 86

This looks fun. Poland’s top politician said Thursday that the government will seek the equivalent of some $1.3 trillion in reparations from Germany for the Nazis’ World War II invasion and occupation of his country…
“We will turn to Germany to open negotiations on the reparations,” Kaczynski said, adding it will be a “long and not an easy path” but “one day will bring success.”
He insisted the move would serve “true Polish-German reconciliation” that would be based on “truth.”

Days after releasing a plan to phase out new gas-powered cars, Ben Zeisloft of the Daily Wire reports that California officials are “asking residents to avoid charging their electric vehicles in the interest of not overwhelming the power grid.”

In the starkest way possible, it is important to remember that while [Adam] Smith identified the human propensity to truck, barter and exchange, Hobbes and others had also identified the human propensity to rape, pillage and plunder unless constrained. Whether men are Smithian or Hobbesian in their behavioral propensities is a function of the rules of the game under which they operate. If the costs of raping, pillaging and plundering are less than the benefits, then the ‘society’ under examination will indeed resemble the Hobbesian jungle. If the costs of predation are raised, and the benefits of cooperation are greater, then Smithian wealth creation through realizing the mutual gains from trade will be the foundation of the social order.--a scary idea by Boettke.
Is it true?

China’s carbon emissions fell almost 8 percent in the April-to-June quarter compared with the same period last year, the sharpest decline in the past decade, according to climate research service Carbon Brief.
The fall in emissions reflects a dramatic slowing in Chinese economic growth caused by large-scale coronavirus lockdowns and a crisis in the heavily indebted property sector. It was the fourth consecutive quarter in which emissions have fallen in China, the world’s biggest emitter.
Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst at the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, which compiled the data for Carbon Brief, said there had been a drop of 44 percent in the number of construction projects started and a 33 percent fall in those completed during the second quarter.

There is an explosion of referrals for gender-dysphoria services for children and young people in the U.K., which have gone from 50 in 2009 to 2,500 annually by 2020. The spike first started in 2014-2015, according to an interim report National Health Service gender services made public in March; the backlog now totals 4,600 people, who can expect about two years on the waitlist.

Question 85

Question 85

President Joe Biden charged in a prime-time address Thursday that the “extreme ideology” of Donald Trump and his adherents “threatens the very foundation of our republic,” as he summoned Americans of all stripes to help counter what he sketched as dark forces within the Republican Party trying to subvert democracy.
Wait. Trump has an ideology?

[I]t is not right to talk, as often happens, about the tyranny of capital, since even in the most extreme an cases its presence can never be more damaging than its absence to the situation of the worker.--Bastiat

Transgender women report bottom surgery at rates between 5–13%
Chest surgery is generally reported at about twice the rate of genital GCS. In studies that assessed transgender men and women as an aggregate, chest surgery has been reported at rates between 8–25%, and genital surgery at 4–13%

Is the problem on the border serious enough to use land mines?
Why not?

30% of people think that Biden has done a good job. How is that possible? Does one standard deviation being 68.27% help?

A study of Russian publications in the 1990s found that some 39 percent of all nonfiction published in Russia in that decade had something to do with the occult.

One of the most consequential statistics passed by without much noise. India's total fertility rate fell below the population replacement rate to 2.0, with many states far below that level, thanks to effective campaigns around family planning & contraception.

Question 84

Question 84

This “novel theory” (novel with Adam Smith) is, of course, that the allocation of resources should be determined by the forces of the market rather than as a result of government decisions. Quite apart from the malallocations which are the result of political pressures, an administrative agency which attempts to perform the function normally carried out by the pricing mechanism operates under two handicaps. First of all, it lacks the precise monetary measure of benefit and cost provided by the market. Second, it cannot, by the nature of things, be in possession of all the relevant information possessed by the managers of every business … to say nothing of the preferences of consumers for the various goods and services…--coase.

[It is] the first quality of a Liberal to claim the same thing for others and for oneself, to dislike exception and prerogative, to think of all men and all countries, to acknowledge the rights of the individual, derived from nature and universal, in preference to the primitive rights of a country or of a clan, obtained by force and not from heaven.--Lord Acton

immigration reduced union density by 5.7 percentage points between 1980 and 2020, which accounted for 29.7 percent of the overall decline in union density during that period.

A government thus limited [as proposed in the American Declaration of Independence] is not in the business of imposing its opinions about what happiness the citizens should choose to pursue. Having such opinions is the business of other institutions – private and voluntary ones, including religious ones, that nourish the conditions for liberty. The Founders did not consider natural rights reasonable because religion affirmed them; rather, the Founders considered religion reasonable because it secured those rights.--Will

Alex Washburne, a Montana-based mathematical biologist and statistician who has published in ecology, evolution, epidemiology and finance, tried to sound the alarm bell on the massive collateral damage of lockdowns very early on. His background in finance and economics led him to believe that “the COVID response was greatly imbalanced and risked causing harm in the service of public health.”
“Covid showed me ways in which socioscientific inefficiencies…can lead to an insular expert class that mismanages critical risks our society faces and, without checks and balances, they can weaponize their myopic expertise (e.g. epidemiology) to mislead society and cause harm…”
As a result of the backlash he faced, Washburne eventually left academia and founded Agora, a new scientific startup and incubator ‘safe space’ for scientists of different backgrounds and divergent political views to collaborate. (from cohen)

From a recent study: "Our findings contribute to a growing body of literature which suggests school-based mask mandates have limited to no impact on the case rates of COVID-19 among K-12 students."

In Soundview Bronx, only 7% of students who enter ninth grade are ready for college four years later. For black students, the figure is 4%.

A libertarian – which mean a true “liberal” in the original sense of the word – wants a society with no human-made, involuntary ups and downs, no masters and slaves. That’s all there is to it.-McCloskey

Will on Bauerline: "...he anticipated that millennials were going to become “unsatisfied and confused” adults, bereft of the consolations of a cultural inheritance, which is unavailable to nonreaders. They would be gripped by the furies of brittle people bewildered by encounters with disagreement, which they find inexplicable. And by the apocalyptic terrors that afflict frustrated utopians, the only kind there is."

Sally Hemmings, Native American lands, and slavery have become very prominent in the tour of Monticello, along with diminishing Jefferson himself.
Monticello’s push to “finish the restoration of the landscape of slavery” on the estate has largely been funded by left-leaning philanthropist David M. Rubenstein, who donated $20 million toward that effort in 2015. Rubenstein, a private-equity billionaire and former Carter Administration official — recently pledged to continue his extensive investments in China — and is on the boards of the globalist World Economic Forum, China’s Tsinghua University, and the Council on Foreign Relations, among others.