Vacuum

“Democratic societies are necessarily placed at risk when people conceive of their relationships as being grounded on principles of command and control rather than on principles of self-responsibility in self-governing communities”--Ostrom

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To give presidential candidates, who don’t even know who we are, power over our most intimate relationships is to bestow them with one more power of which they are not worthy.--Miltimore

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From a paper:
“These results strongly suggest Neanderthal-derived DNA is playing a significant role in autism susceptibility across major populations in the United States.”

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Vacuum

Harris entered the 'debate' with some templates to fill. As the event progressed, a pattern emerged that was at least unsettling. Part of Harris' template was to repeat known falsehoods. The 2025 project. The Charlottesville lie. January 6th. The 'bloodbath' calumny. An IVF falsehood, a new one. These were typical of the distortions and deceptions Harris worked into her presentation.

While these lies had long been exposed, Harris blithely rolled them out.  And it gave the observer an unsettling feeling. Harris' confidence in her insincerity was astonishing. Certainly, some devotees have cult-like acceptance of these lies but there can't be so many as to justify them. And she would be preaching to the choir.

In some ways this has the feel of 'creative non-fiction' but it may be something more basic. We may have a culture that no longer distinguishes between truth and falsehood. Or no longer thinks it matters.

And it seems that anything will fill Kamala's mental vacuum.

Pole-Sitting and Luddites

Haitian illegal immigrants have an incarceration rate 38 percent below native-born Americans and legal Haitian immigrants have an incarceration rate about 81 percent below native-born Americans

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Inflation-adjusted median household income was $80,610 in 2023, up 4% from the 2022 estimate of $77,540, the bureau said in its annual report card on households’ financial well-being. This move returned incomes to about where they were in 2019, the peak that was hit just before the pandemic.

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Pole-Sitting and Luddites

“When it gets too hot, we lightly spray water on our arms, legs, and faces; the water helps dissipate a lot of heat,” a New York Times essay by Stan Cox, the author of an anti-air-conditioning book titled “I Swore Off Air-Conditioning, and You Can Too” suggests as an alternative to modern air-conditioning technology. Cox also advocates restricting dishwashers and refrigeration.

If this sounds like the statement of a wide-eyed, religious devotee sitting on a pole in the Byzantine desert...it should. That is not to dismiss the notion but rather to dignify it at least with a history and a seemingly hard-wired human tendency to challenge change, materialism, innovation, and comfort. And human success.

Rousseau was maybe not as innovative as once thought.

Capitalism

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure." -H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic

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The empirical literature from dozens of countries over many decades again confirms the theory: In case after case after case—and regardless of the model used—economists have found that tariffs reduce national economic output and make a nation worse off on net, while tariff liberalization generally does the opposite.

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Is a reaction developing against the management of the debate in sympathy for Trump?

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Capitalism

The incredible success of the last two hundred years has been defined by its enemies. 'Capitalism' is a strange term encompassing freedom, markets, social attitude, enlightenment principles, and competitive risk with success and failure. It is inadequate but McClosky has a reasonable correction of its nature:

'“Capitalism” is a misleadingly loaded and scientifically foolish word, imposed over a century ago by followers of Marx. A scientifically more accurate word for what happened after 1800 is “innovism.” Explosive innovation in the past two centuries has made the poor rich, now even in China, and coming along in India. The Swiss, for example, have escaped from the grim business plan of exporting young men into the wars of Europe, and have become instead one the richest of nations, festooned with BMWs and central heating and educations in three or four languages. The Great Enrichment of the Swiss, rising from $3 a day in 1800 to well over $150 a day now, happened because its bourgeoisie in the past two centuries steadily, gently set aside the aristocratic and priestly passions that had troubled Europe for so long. Not that such passions entirely disappeared. They pop up in Putin’s Orthodox nationalism and Maduro’s holy socialism, in both cases to justify tyranny.'

Debate

 

“Storming a breech, conducting an embassy, ruling a nation are glittering deeds. Rebuking, laughing, buying, selling, loving, hating, and living together gently and justly with your household and with yourself is something more difficult.” --Montaigne

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Last year the United States became the world’s largest LNG exporter, surpassing Qatar and Australia. U.S. exports rose 14.7 percent to a record 88.9 million metric tons (MT), or 8.6 billion cubic feet per day.
U.S. supplied almost a fifth of all gas to the EU and the U.K., up from 5 percent in 2021. 

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Debate

One of America's mysteries is its reverence for debates and their peculiar skill sets.

This debate was certainly a mess. The Trump camp will talk about ABC bias and slanted questions and analysis with ridiculously selective fact-checking. They will be right but they did agree to the circumstances and certainly knew what was coming. What is astounding is they seem surprised, as if they thought the left-leaning press was going to rise to the occasion and become even-handed. But there is no denying the impression: Trump was as expected and Harris, while mediocre and unabashedly untruthful and calculating, was better than expected.

Harris was brilliantly, sympathetically bland, repeating each question in a way that gave her the option to take her answer in any direction. And she often ended her comments with some statement that would stimulate the direction of Trump's response.

The moderators vigilantly guarded the DNC's interests.

No questions on the debt, none on Americans being killed in the Middle East by Iranian proxies, no question on the American killed by the Israelis, no question on America's military readiness, no question on Harris' childish economic suggestions like national rent control and taxation of unrealized capital gains, no question on Iran, no question about the execution of an American by Hamas.

And no question about China.

It was a display of two mediocre candidates for the most important position in the free world being interviewed by two shallow partisans disguised as the Free Press.

Engines and Cabooses

‘Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.’ – Joseph Stalin

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Engines and Cabooses

The train cars get to the same place, all at the same time--some with less work. So why does the caboose envy the engine? 

Technology and the individual make a powerful partnership and certainly are factors in the explosion of human economic development of the last 200 years. McClosky suggests that success is partly dependent upon the individual just being left alone to fulfill his vision.

The interference is usually assumed to be caused by religious or government entities. But it also seems to be true that success itself stimulates opposition. Royalty. Kulaks. The Rich. Somehow in us there arises a strange opposition to success. This has expanded from revolutionary minorities into democracies.

Perhaps this explains antisemitism. The proportion of people with an IQ of 140 or more is about six times higher among Jews than any other population. Jews, forming much less than a single percent of the world’s population, have won 32% of the Nobel Prizes awarded in the 21st century. They dominate classical music. Many Jews have been factors in the great economic revolution of the last 200 years.

The curiosity of this great growth over the last two centuries is that the expansion of the quality of life and wealth has been led by a very few. Their creations have expanded to fill the culture and enrich everyone. Those discoverers and developers have become more enriched than others, but the growth in wealth of the least in the culture has been extraordinary. A simple comparison of those cultures that have not participated shows the disparity.

So why would those in that successful culture, having benefitted so much from the creators in the culture, resent them?

Inquiring Minds

In early 2024, six out of 10 teachers nationwide said they were experiencing burnout, and one in five said they intended to leave their job at the end of the academic year, according to a study by Rand Corporation.
The most common reason for teacher stress? Student behavior.

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If Trump forces Affordable Care Act plans to cover IVF, he will encourage more Americans to move to taxpayer-subsidized plans from small business offerings that often can’t afford to cover IVF.

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Inquiring Minds

Although it has received little national attention, Linda Sun, a former top-level aide to New York governors Kathy Hochul and Andrew Cuomo, has been arrested as an alleged spy for Beijing. This has raised some anxiety about the impact of the CCP and its espionage influence in the U.S.

A big part of the CCP’s overseas influence operations is carried out by its “united front” network, a complex network of agencies and organizations that are coordinated by a party agency called the United Front Work Department.

Newsweek investigation in 2020 found 600 United Front organizations in the United States. Nicholas Eftimiades, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said that if each of the organizations had recruited several people, the CCP could have “at least 20,000 to 30,000 actively working—knowingly or not—on behalf of China.”

As for classic spies, the size of China’s top intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), has an estimated 100,000 employees, around five times the size of the CIA.

One/Two State

The rightness of a thing isn't determined by the amount of courage it takes. -Mary Renault, novelist

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One/Two State

David Friedman, Trump's ambassador to Israel, is making the rounds, talking about his book, One Jewish State.

He was one of the leading architects of the historic Abraham Accords,

He argues that while Israel doesn't want a Palestinian state, neither do the Palestinians who fear the incompetence and corruption of their leaders. He gives as an example a dispute that occurred during the Trump administration.

Several small Arab towns in the Israeli section close to the West Bank were complaining about how they were treated over something. The Israeli government sent representatives to speak to them and Friedman, as U.S. Ambassador, was included. Friedman offered that the lines drawing the territory were arbitrary and Trump and the Israelis had agreed they could redraw the boundaries so the unhappy Arab towns could be included in the Arab-administrated West Bank.

The Arabs were horrified by the suggestion. They would never want to live under such a corrupt government. They immediately withdrew all their complaints.