Quality vs Censorship

The Democrats spent 300 million dollars against Scott in Florida.

***

The Gaetz nomination was a revealing error.

***

I assess the climate impact of granting federal approval to all proposed U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG) export terminal projects, which would double U.S. export capacity by 2030. Results indicate a net decrease in global emissions through 2070, primarily due to higher local gas prices in the U.S., leading to lower domestic gas generation and accelerated renewable adoption.--That is from the job market paper of Constanza Abuin

Not what most LNG proponents would expect. Or believe. Certainly, the supply side in the improved distribution atmosphere would have a significant, if uncertain, impact. It does say a lot about world demand, though.

***


Quality vs Censorship

The premiere of a 19th-century play directed by John Malkovich was performed in an almost empty Sofia National Theatre after angry protesters irritated with how Bulgarians are portrayed prevented visitors from entering the building.

Reuters reports that one hour before the opening of George Bernard Shaw's Arms and The Man on Thursday evening, protesters started gathering in front of the theatre, Nova TV reported on its website.

They held a big banner reading: "Without anti-Bulgarian plays at the National Theatre." Protesters threw garbage bags, spat and physically attacked Oscar-nominated animator Theodore Ushev as he tried to enter the theatre, Nova TV reported.

To avoid further clashes, the theatre management allowed only a few journalists inside to watch the performance.

The play is a comedy featuring a love story during a conflict between Bulgaria and Serbia.

Critics in Bulgaria say Shaw presents the Bulgarian soldiers as cowardly and unworthy, and Bulgarians as people who bathe once in their lives and don't read, Nova TV reported.

Criticism of art is become intolerance of it. And that can become suffocating.

News

 

News

From the news last night:

The Houthis attacked several U.S. ships last night.

Melania has declined the 'transition tea' with Jill Biden because Jill insulted her family during the campaign. She's becoming one of my favorite Americans.

Chris recommends the podcast 'Sold a Story' on Spotify, on American education. It is very good, upsetting and surprising. Two amazing stats: 35% of 4th graders can not read. 85% of Black students in 4th grade can not read. And the reasons are infuriating.

Target has a Merry Christmas campaign for the first time in years.

Trump’s election drove the largest single-day increase in the U.S. dollar in more than two years, and the third largest in the last decade.

Kamala's campaign spent $1 billion. Billion. And they paid the entertainers who appeared for her. $1 million to Oprah.
 
Some remarkable Trump announcements last night.

---Huckabee to Israel; hopefully he will be busy and will do fewer ads. 

---Rubio to State; a turnaround from 'little Mario.'

---Homan, a real bull, is 'Border Czar; his boss at the Department of Homeland Security, will be Kristi Noem, the diminutive puppy assassin. It's hard to imagine that relationship. And DHS is a big job

---Pete Hegseth as Defense? He is a decorated veteran from several tours in the Middle East with a Princeton and Harvard background who has been a vocal critic of how the military has been organized and marketed. So this might be an innovative and revolutionary appointment. But he has run only a charity. And this is a really big job. On the other hand, has Lloyd Austin done a good job?

---Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to overhaul the federal government, leading what is called the Department of Government Efficiency. These are actually good, important ideas and I guess there's no reason they can't be entertaining.

Several of his foreign policy appointees are pro-Ukraine. Surprising.

The crucial positions of Education and Attorney General are pending. Both departments have been nightmares and need serious guidance.

Business and government are logical mergers. But are they? Herbert Hoover's election was powered by his engineering background, the success he had earlier in repatriating Americans caught in the first war, and his managing the Americans' effort to feed Europe after the war. His election was felt to be a victory for efficiency and objectivity in government with more than a dash of philanthropy. The depression and his position in it were complex but he was blamed and that positive narrative was destroyed.
In 1947 President Truman appointed Hoover to a commission, which elected him chairman, to reorganize the Executive Departments. He was appointed chairman of a similar commission by President Eisenhower in 1953. The Executive benefitted from both commissions’ recommendations.

So the Department of Government Efficiency run by successful entrepreneurs is not new but success is not a certainty.

Taxes

Kamala for the Supreme Court?

***

The Kyiv residence of Estonian Ambassador to Ukraine Annely Kolk was hit by a Russian drone on Thursday, according to Estonia's foreign minister.

***

A reasonable question from Pino: "But if I did believe that American voters were racist and sexist, and I wanted to win the presidential election, I would not have nominated a non-white woman in that election."

***

Taxes

Kamala Harris’ proposed tax plan would increase taxes on corporations and the “ultra-rich” to achieve “equitable outcomes.” She plans to increase the capital gains tax rate from 20 percent to 28 percent, the top income tax rate from 37 percent to 39.6 percent, the investment income tax from 3.8 percent to 5 percent, and the corporate tax rate from 15 percent to 28 percent. She also plans to add an unrealized capital gains tax, moving it from 0 to 25 percent.

We are in a world where countries compete for investment. And investment goes where it is welcomed. And the 'unrealized capital gains' idea is as crazy as it is unconstitutional.

One's "fair share" is subjective. But it almost always comes with a big dose of envy.

The most recent individual federal income tax information from the IRS indicates, in 2024, American taxpayers paid $2.43 trillion to the federal government, a 43 percent increase in revenues over 2020.

That data also show the top one percent of taxpayers earned 26.3 percent of Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) but paid 45.8 percent of all personal federal income taxes. The top 0.1 percent of earners paid 24.7 percent and the top 5 percent paid 65.6 percent.

In contrast, the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers earned 10.4 percent of income but paid only 2.3 percent of the total tax burden. Over the past forty years, the rate paid by the bottom 50 percent has declined from just over 7 percent to just over 2 percent, while the percentage paid by the top 1 percent increased from just over 17 percent to nearly 46 percent of all individual taxes.

In 2021, the top one percent of taxpayers reported an average tax rate of 25.9 percent, while the bottom 90 percent averaged tax rates between 3.3 percent and 10.4 percent.

Fairness.

The Light Brigade

Happy Veterans Day

Is a foreign power attacking the president an act of war?

***

"Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants."--Epicurus

***

This is from the New Republic, the new explanation of Trump's win:
"This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.

And that is why Donald Trump won . . ."

The Left thinks there is an underground news cabal that is bigger--and more influential--than their own.

The Forbin Project. "There is another system!"

***

The Light Brigade

Neither the battlefields nor the plight of those who fight on them have changed.

The Light Brigade story that inspired the famous poem is surprisingly complex, with several contributing writers involved. Tennyson wrote his original [OEM after the event; he wrote the "Heavy Brigade" poem as a sequel in a charity effort. Rudyard Kipling later angrily wrote "The Last of the Light Brigade."
The Light Brigade attack during the Crimean War in 1854 was led by Lord Cardigan. French Marsha Pierre Bosquet said: "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre." ("It is magnificent, but it is not war.") "C'est de la folie" — "It is madness."
Of the 666 men known to have ridden in the charge there were 271 casualties: 110 killed (less than 17%), 129 wounded, plus another 32 wounded and taken prisoner. Additionally, 375 horses were killed.
The Heavy Brigade was led by Captain Scarlett

This battle, one of the most famous battles in military history, was fought at Balaclava, in the Crimea. Upon reading reports of the disaster in the Times five weeks later, Tennyson wrote "The Charge of the Light Brigade."
The line "someone had blundered" came from a newspaper account:

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!" he said.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred. . . .

The poem was so popular among those serving in the Crimea that a thousand copies were handed out at the front, and at Tennyson's funeral in Westminster Abbey survivors of the Balaclava battle lined the aisles.

Many of the surviving Balaclava soldiers, long returned to England and long forgotten, were so destitute that a charity drive was undertaken on their behalf. When little money was raised, the charity organizers suggested that the veterans visit Tennyson, who might rally support. When they did so, he wrote his "Heavy Brigade" poem and appealed for more donations. Money came in, and then the politicians gave a lot of it to other causes -- prevention of cruelty to animals, for one. This so angered Rudyard Kipling that he penned "The Last of the Light Brigade" documenting the scandal:

There were thirty million English who talked of England's might,
There were twenty broken troopers who lacked a bed for the night.
They had neither food nor money, they had neither service nor trade;
They were only shiftless soldiers, the last of the Light Brigade.

They felt that life was fleeting; they knew not that art was long,
That though they were dying of famine, they lived in deathless song.
They asked for a little money to keep the wolf from the door;
And the thirty million English sent twenty pounds and four !

They laid their heads together that were scarred and lined and grey;
Keen were the Russian sabres, but want was keener than they;
And an old Troop-Sergeant muttered, "Let us go to the man who writes
The things on Balaclava the kiddies at school recites."

They went without bands or colours, a regiment ten-file strong,
To look for the Master-singer who had crowned them all in his song;
And, waiting his servant's order, by the garden gate they stayed,
A desolate little cluster, the last of the Light Brigade.

They strove to stand to attention, to straighen the toil-bowed back;
They drilled on an empty stomach, the loose-knit files fell slack;
With stooping of weary shoulders, in garments tattered and frayed,
They shambled into his presence, the last of the Light Brigade.

The old Troop-Sergeant was spokesman, and "Beggin' your pardon," he said,
"You wrote o' the Light Brigade, sir. Here's all that isn't dead.
An' it's all come true what you wrote, sir, regardin' the mouth of hell;
For we're all of us nigh to the workhouse, an' we thought we'd call an' tell.

"No, thank you, we don't want food, sir; but couldn't you take an' write
A sort of 'to be continued' and 'see next page' o' the fight?
We think that someone has blundered, an' couldn't you tell 'em how?
You wrote we were heroes once, sir. Please, write we are starving now."

The poor little army departed, limping and lean and forlorn.
And the heart of the Master-singer grew hot with "the scorn of scorn."
And he wrote for them wonderful verses that swept the land like flame,
Till the fatted souls of the English were scourged with the thing called Shame.

They sent a cheque to the felon that sprang from an Irish bog;
They healed the spavined cab-horse; they housed the homeless dog;
And they sent (you may call me a liar), when felon and beast were paid,
A cheque, for enough to live on, to the last of the Light Brigade.

O thirty million English that babble of England's might,
Behold there are twenty heroes who lack their food to-night;
Our children's children are lisping to "honour the charge they made - "
And we leave to the streets and the workhouse the charge of the Light Brigade!





(From The Kipling Society and Steve King)

City Football

People who seek to find blame, as distinct from causation, often also seek a localized source of evil to blame. Professor Paul Krugman, for example, refers to slavery as “America’s original sin.” But it would be hard to find an evil less localized than slavery. Though universally condemned today, slavery was an institution accepted as a fact of life for thousands of years, even moral and religious leaders around the world. Christian monasteries in Europe and Buddhist monasteries in Asia had slaves.--Sowell

***

More than 6.1 million malaria cases, and 1,038 deaths, have been recorded in Ethiopa this year through the end of September, compared with 4.5 million cases, and 469 deaths, for all of 2023. Worse, cases are likely to soar far higher in the next couple of months because peak malaria season, driven by seasonal rains, begins in September and runs through the end of the year.

***

Government supplies money in proportion to failure, the private sector supplies money in proportion to success.--Vernon Smith

***

City Football

Westinghouse defeated Perry 68–0 to advance to the city championship game. It was an extraordinary win.

The previous week, in their game with University Prep, a fight broke out on the field and the Westinghouse bench emptied. Westinghouse won the game but all the players who left the sidelines for the scuffle were suspended for the next game, the city playoff game against Perry. At the time, their offense was on the field so the entire team, except the eleven offensive players, were suspended.

So in the game against Perry, the eleven offensive starters were the only players available. They played both ways. Only one player had played a single play on defense all year. Throughout the game, they rotated one player out to rest him so most of the game they played with ten players.

And they won 68-0.

They eventually won the city championship and the state championship.

Notes/Stats

 

Notes/Stats

Even before being appointed FTC Chair, Khan was one of the leaders of a strange—and often infuriating—school of thought about antitrust law. Known as neo-Brandeisians, new structuralists, or sometimes (by critics) as “hipster antitrust,” this school dismissed the idea that antitrust’s purpose should be to protect consumer welfare. Instead, neo-Brandeisians were concerned with an abstract promotion of competition—a fixation leading to the conviction that businesses getting too big, successful, or dominant was itself something to be feared and stopped.--Brown

***

Kamalakaze—fear of national suicide by left-wing politics.--Epstein

***

I can pinpoint the exact moment when I started to lose sleep over higher education in America. This was in the Spring of 2012, at my daughter’s graduation ceremony at Brandeis University. The main graduation speaker was in the midst of a not-memorable talk when she said “and I read this morning in the New York Times that America will be more than 50 percent non-white by 2050.”

To me, this would have been a straightforward observation, neither good news nor bad news. But the students greeted it as if they had just heard that their favorite sports team had won a championship or their favorite political party had won an election. They whooped and hollered and cheered for several minutes. It was by far the biggest applause line of her entire speech.

That outburst made me want to ask for a tuition refund. I realized that the students had been taught to be reflexively anti-white. At an institution where young people are supposed to learn critical thinking and careful perspective-taking, they instead had acquired a simple-minded way to view the world: minorities good, white people bad.--Kling

***

Coal consumption in 2030 is now estimated 6% higher than only a year ago. That may sound small, but it amounts to adding the equivalent of the consumption of Japan, the world’s fourth-largest coal burner. By 2030, the IEA now believes coal consumption will remain higher than it was back in 2010…

One notable statistic: Two-thirds of the total increase in energy demand in 2023 was met by fossil fuels, according to the IEA.

***

Even with a population of only about 7.5 million, U.S. already had more business corporations than any other country, and possibly more than all other countries put together, securing its role as the world’s first “corporation nation.”--from Sylla and Wright

Astounding

Notes

 

Notes

Clearing up some notes post-election:

Trump outperformed many of Republicans down-ballot.

Trump carried the 18-25 year old demographic.

FEC records show that Mothership Strategies, which has been scrutinized in the past for its aggressive fundraising tactics, has collected at least $48,712,448 over the last two years from advising an extensive array of Democratic PACs. That total does not include the money spent over the last few weeks given the FEC’s quarterly disclosure schedule. It is likely to be much higher. Many of the PACs tied to Mothership Strategies similarly used alarmist messages demanding donations to defeat Trump yet funneled vast sums of donor money back to consulting firms.

Migrants are abandoning a caravan headed for the United States because Donald Trump's election win has dashed their "dream of getting out".

There was an attack on Jews in Amsterdam after a soccer game. Very pogrom-like.

When the FBI released its numbers for 2023 in September 2024, it hid that it had revised its earlier crime data for 2021 and 2022, hiding the increase in 2022 and that there had been a net increase in crime over 2022 and 2023.

Professors at Harvard and Princeton have canceled classes following Trump's victory, and other units within the universities are offering "spaces" to process the election results.

12 officers of a New York environmental agency made an unannounced raid on a private home, captured the family's private pet--a squirrel with 500,000 followers on social media--and killed it.

New York City is ending its controversial scheme that gave migrant families prepaid debit cards worth a total of $18,500 each.