Lionel Shriver

"Membership of a larger group is not an identity. Being Asian is not an identity. Being gay is not an identity. Being deaf, blind, or wheelchair-bound is not an identity, nor is being economically deprived.” --Lionel Shriver


Lionel Shriver delivered the Brisbane Writers Festival opening address on September 8, 2016. The American author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005 and more recently The Mandibles created quite a stir; the topic of the speech was the freedom of the writer and "cultural appropriation" was the engine. It did not go well.

First, a definition: The author of Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law, Susan Scafidi, a law professor at Fordham University (who is white), defines cultural appropriation as “taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission. This can include unauthorised use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.”

Shriver listed many such crimes:  Tiny sombrero party-favors at a tequila-theme party at Bowdoin College, Katy Perry dressing like a geisha at the American Music Awards 2013, Iggy Azalea committing “cultural crimes” by imitating African rap (Daily Beast), students at Oberlin College in Ohio who have protested “culturally appropriated food” like sushi in their dining hall whose inauthenticity is “insensitive” to the Japanese.

"... who," Shriver asks, "is the appropriator par excellence, really? Who assumes other people’s voices, accents, patois, and distinctive idioms? Who literally puts words into the mouths of people different from themselves? Who dares to get inside the very heads of strangers, who has the chutzpah to project thoughts and feelings into the minds of others, who steals their very souls? Who is a professional kidnapper? Who swipes every sight, smell, sensation, or overheard conversation like a kid in a candy store, and sometimes take notes the better to purloin whole worlds? Who is the premier pickpocket of the arts? The fiction writer, that’s who."

And who "...regard[s] other peoples' attempts to participate in their lives and traditions, either actively or imaginatively, as a form of theft?" "Those who embrace a vast range of “identities” – ethnicities, nationalities, races, sexual and gender categories, classes of economic under-privilege and disability."

Shriver's main concern is art and there is reason to worry. The reviewer of The Mandibles in the WashPo wrote: “The Mandibles are white. Luella, the single African American in the family, arrives in Brooklyn incontinent and demented. She needs to be physically restrained. As their fortunes become ever more dire and the family assembles for a perilous trek through the streets of lawless New York, she’s held at the end of a leash. If The Mandibles is ever made into a film, my suggestion is that this image not be employed for the movie poster.”

Sudanese-born Australian social activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who was attending the Brisbane Writers Festival event, walked out in a huff and then quickly penned a comment piece which argued that Shriver’s speech was “a celebration of the unfettered exploitation of the experiences of others, under the guise of fiction.”

"exploitation of the experiences of others?"

A NYT editorialist wrote of Shriver's speech: "Failure is less the work of political correctness and more the evidence of a morally inadequate imagination from those who already have the stage."

"morally inadequate imagination?"

Nonetheless, Shriver has a point. Must the mystery writer kill before writing the mystery? Must Melville go to sea? (He and Conrad both did.) What experience are writers writing about anyway? Is science fiction--clearly entirely made up--valid as an art form? And what to do about Stuart Little?

While there are certainly subsets in humanity and certainly writers who exploit them, the entire idea of art is broadening and unifying. Homer was writing about Greeks but also about us; that is why it is good. Our modern view--where art is personal and consequently beyond judgment--is new and probably untenable. But this personal validity argument cuts both ways and authenticity is an awkward tool. Is Starling Marte Black?  A man? A Hispanic man? A Hispanic, Dominican man? A Hispanic, Dominican, black outfielder man--who is heterosexual--who throws right handed---who bats right handed--who has a golden glove--who is an immigrant--a legal immigrant--a catholic--a father--someone's son--several siblings's sibling....Does all this just depends upon what the definition of "is," is?

It all sounds like the old question about the blind men trying to define the elephant but, in this instance, a blind elephant is trying to define itself.

And this is the broader point: How should a person define himself? Or should he just let himself be defined? We, each of us, are amalgams of genes and peoples, races and tribes, nations and families, occupations and diversions, religions and beliefs, passions and tendencies, hardware and software--and Lord knows what epigenetics means. We are a collection of incidentals. To cover ourselves in the cloak of one or two characteristics swallows us, makes us soulless.

Narrowing us, micro-defining us, making us excluding rather than exclusive--diminishes each in the shadow of the whole. Worse, it makes us subject to a tiny part, one of many elements, an accident of our lives we allow to limit us. It is the tool of the huckster and the politician who are looking for an edge to exploit; it demeans us when we accept.  It is a world shrinker, a fence builder, a mind closer, a life limiting and isolating personal and world view where every encounter jangles with some potential conflict or reward, and where every individual demands some advantage or deference not for what they are but for what circumstance says they are.

We are confusing the spice in our lives for our lives.

Lionel Shriver is a case in point. Contrary to expectation, Lionel Shriver is a woman, too.

Kaliningrad

Any political entity that is separated from its main political entity is an "exclave." Any political entity that is entirely surrounded by another political entity is an "enclave." Vatican City is an enclave. Kaliningrad is an exclave.

Kaliningrad is getting some interest lately because it is an important military outpost--it gives the Russians a port on the Baltic Sea--and it is tucked in by the Baltic States between Poland and Lithuania. It appears in novels as a sort of nexus of history and ethnicity. Recently the Russians have been stepping up their arming of the area to confront, intimidate and generally upset Europe and NATO. This kind of belligerent risk-taking is apparently the function of the modern state. In 2013, Russia deployed short-range Iskander ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads in the region, in what it said was a response to U.S. plans to deploy a ballistic missile defense system in Europe.

The city was founded by the Teutonic Knights in the Middle Ages as a fortress and trading center that was named Königsberg. It was part of Prussia and capital of East Prussia, which was physically severed from the rest of Germany following World War I. It continued as German until the second war when it was annexed by the Russians at the Potsdam Conference that divided Europe between the allied powers in 1945.

The Soviets renamed the seaport after a Bolshevik hero. The German population was expelled by Stalin, and it and the Baltic states were absorbed by the USSR. When the Baltics regained independence in 1991, Kaliningrad became an exclave again, as part of the Russian Federation.

It has a population of less than one million and is heavily forested. The city was severely damaged during World War II, both by British bombing raids and the Soviet assault to take the city. Much of its historic architecture was ruined, and the Soviets rebuilt much of the city in the classic communist style with concrete high-rises and industrial housing blocks. Some landmarks remain: The tomb of philosopher Immanuel Kant who lived most of his life in Königsberg is still at Königsberg Cathedral, and the magnificent stock exchange is now a cultural center.

Sunday 12/11/16

In today's gospel, John the Baptist has been arrested for criticizing Herod's marriage to his living brother's wife and is looking at Christ and His ministry; he is having doubts. John the Baptist is having doubts. He sends a messenger to Christ to ask if He is whom John thinks He is. “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?”      

Was he really having doubts or, like the rest of us, was he hoping Christ would give him a declarative sentence defining Himself?

Christ, typically, asks John to look at his actions. Then Christ says something strange; he says "And blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.” Christ places Himself as an inconvenience, a hindrance and annoyance in the human, material world.

Then, amazingly, rather than defining Himself for John, He defines John for them! And to finish the abstraction from human life, Christ says this: "among those born of women there has been none greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”


After praising John, Christ reverses the the physical world and places it in the shadow of the spiritual, as if the material world was a non sequitur.

John, unshaken by the wind:

Cab Thoughts 12/10/16

"As the saying goes, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Community organizers like Huerta don't teach anyone how to fish: they teach activists how to steal their neighbors' fish. This is what Huerta and her ilk call social justice." --Matthew Vadum

A geoglyph, meaning “land picture,” is a large— sometimes huge— image formed on or carved into the surface of the earth. The most famous are probably the Nazca lines, the enormous figures of people, animals, plants, and geometric shapes written into the ground in southern Peru by the ancient Nazca people roughly 1,500 years ago.
Geoglyphs can be found all over the world, including in North America.  more than 5,000 geoglyphs  can be found on the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, home to the largest collection of geoglyphs in the world.

The Uffington White Horse in the parish of Uffington, in south-central England, is big, about 374 feet across. 

In his speech following his win at the Nevada caucus, Trump said,  “We won the evangelicals, we won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”

The reporter covering the story then wrote this: "That last line was, as you might expect, the sound bite of the night. Indeed, “I love the poorly educated” was trending on Twitter early Wednesday morning, with users expressing a mix of bewilderment, consternation and other big words such supporters might not understand."
And these guys are surprised when there are pitchforks in the street.

Clinton attacked Trump for his support of the invasion of Iraq. There are a number of elements here: Do we have responsibility to Iraqi people brutalized by Saddam, can and should we try to impose a new kind of government on another country, the validity of the WMD threat--all these are reasonable questions. But Trump's opinion on Iraq--he says he was opposed to the war--was that of a private citizen reading editorials; his opinion meant nothing then and nothing now. She knows that. But Hillary was a senator  and she voted for the war; indeed her position on the war was one of Bernie Sanders' main points of attack against her. This holding Trump guilty of something she did is very bizarre thinking--like attacking him for wealth he did not earn when she has never worked a non-political job in her life and everything she owns, including the foundation worth zillions, is derived from politics.
I wonder if subtly this kind of defiant insincerity gets under people's skin.

A bear market certainly won’t be blamed on the Federal Reserve and their quantitative easing and ultra-loose monetary policy, and their inability to raise rates even with unemployment low. It won’t be blamed on providing so much liquidity for so long that even the slightest withdrawal of it causes a global recession. It will be blamed on "capitalism" and its partner-in-crime, freedom. The result will be more regulations and higher taxes on investments.

Apercu:  n: 1. a brief survey or sketch :  outline 2. an immediate impression; especially :  insight

French, aperçu is the past participle of the verb apercevoir ("to perceive" or "to comprehend"), which in turn comes from Latin percipere ("to perceive"). (The same verb also gave us apperceive, meaning "to have consciousness of oneself, and the noun apperception, meaning "introspective self-consciousness or "mental perception.") Aperçu in French is also a noun meaning "glimpse" or "outline, general idea." English speakers borrowed the noun aperçu, meaning and all, in the early 19th century.

Jemima Lewis, writing in the Telegraph: "…the Zuckerberg-Chans have the most ambitious vision yet: developing new technologies and medicines to tackle every disease ever invented. We’d better hope they don’t succeed. What would it do to the human race if we were granted eternal health, and therefore life? Without any deaths to offset all the births, we would have to make room on earth for an extra 208,400 people a day, or 76,066,000 a year – and that’s before those babies grow old enough to reproduce themselves. Within a month of Mr Zuckerberg curing mortality, the first wars over water resources would break out. Within a year, the World Health Organisation would be embarking on an emergency sterilisation programme. Give it a decade and we’d all be dead from starvation, apart from a handful of straggle-bearded tech billionaires, living in well-stocked bunkers under San Francisco.."

Intellectuals are crazy. They just say anything. Maybe "intellectual" needs redefined.

Who is....Carl Jung?

In an email obtained by Campus Reform, a Kansas University employee with the school’s student housing department writes to a resident advisor, who wishes to remain anonymous, to explain to him that he cannot use an image of a gorilla for a routine floor decoration. “I think it would be best if your floor chose a different theme animal to be more inclusive,” Assistant Complex Director Dale Morrow wrote in an email at the start of this academic year. “First, gorillas represent a very masculine image, and I feel that this would not be inclusive to all of our residents on that floor.”
Grownups. On a campus.

Nearly 1 in 5 Americans has a disability of some sort, according to a report last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Imagine disability as a cultural norm.

The draft of 1863 allowed individuals to pay a bounty to someone else to fight in their place rather than be drafted. The usual price was $300--a fortune at the time.
"Bounty jumpers" were men who enlisted in the Union or Confederate army during the American Civil War only to collect a bounty and then leave.  

The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note hit an all-time low in July, and bond yields across the developed world have plunged—with some even falling into negative territory.

Murray: "The thing about the Trump campaign that has been most disheartening has been the realisation that the electorate on the right, voting for Republicans, has many more people in it than I ever realised who don’t give a damn about freedom. They are motivated by the kinds of tribal instincts that you describe, and they are also populist in an authoritarian sense, in that they don’t want to limit government, they just want to use the powers of government for their own ends. In the short-term, then, I’m very pessimistic. I am very undecided about what will happen, but I suspect the Republican Party is going to go into serious decline. And, insofar as it does not go into decline, it is not going to represent policies that foster limited government and freedom. It will be a party that fosters a different kind of authoritarianism than the left does. The only difference will be in the type, not the authoritarian nature of the policies."

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-melting-pot.html

On a delicate balance:

"Scientists must be free to maintain, reject, or invent paradigms or theories according to their own largely inarticulate judgments as to what they find intellectually convincing.  They must be free to believe in ideas that they cannot fully defend.  But at the same time this freedom does not say that anything goes; it is intimately bound up with the sense of responsibility the scientist feels toward the attainment of valid meaning, and it requires a willingness on the part of each scientist to submit to the authority of specialists in areas beyond his own expertise."--Lavoie

"The sense of responsibility" is the key here, a sense that must transcend an individual or a cause. What is that responsibility to?


For Carl Jung, flying saucers were mirages of the mind, a collective disorder that indeed spoke all too sharply of the apocalyptic anxieties in the Age of the Atom. “The present world situation is calculated as never before to arouse expectations of a redeeming, supernatural event”, he wrote in his short book on this subject (translated by R. F. C. Hull in 1959). “


Wolf wrote: "The shrinking import-competing industry is not competing with imports from foreigners, but with what its own domestic export industry can pay." That is, the domestic industry can not afford to keep its workers and facilities devoted to those competitive pursuits because those assets earn more elsewhere.

Roman coins, probably Constantinian (early fourth century AD), have been found in a medieval castle in Japan. What does this imply? "Inference" is probably better than "implication." Along with the Roman coins, there were Ottoman coins of the seventeenth century. That sounds like a collector's horde, not trade.

The Census Bureau defines a family as poor if its income falls below a specified income threshold. For example, the poverty threshold for a family of four in 2015 was $24,036. But in counting family “income,” Census excludes nearly the entire welfare state.  Last year, the government spent $221 billion on cash, food and housing benefits for low-income families with children — more than twice the amount needed to end all child poverty. But the Census Bureau ignored more than 90 percent of these benefits for purposes of measuring poverty. When welfare benefits are counted, the poverty rate for children is cut by half or more.

AAAAAAAaaaaannnnnndddddddd..... a picture of The Uffington White Horse:

The Great Sheridan

In 1809, London's Drury Lane Theatre burned down. When those watching the spectacle from a nearby pub with theater owner-parliamentarian Richard Brinsley Sheridan remarked on his composure, he famously responded, "A man may surely take a glass of wine by his own fireside."  

Sheridan was fifty-seven years old, decades past the days when such quips made his School for Scandal the talk of the town, and made him a fortune -- upwards of a million dollars in today's money, some historians calculate.
Most biographers view the Drury Lane fire as the beginning of Sheridan's personal ruin. Sheridan had been high-living and free-wheeling for some time; the Theatre had drained much of his capital, but he had depended on its day-to-day operations for income. With it gone, and with his defeat in the elections of 1812, thereby removing the protection of Parliamentary privilege for such things, he was now fair game to his creditors.

Sheridan is also included among the great British speeches. This was his "Begums speech" in 1787, advocating the impeachment of Warren Hastings, governor-general of India. Before Parliament sitting as a High Court in Westminster Hall in 1788, Sheridan spoke--without notes for five and a half hours--with such skill and feeling that both sides of the House, reportedly for the first time in its history, jumped to their feet with cheering and applause. Imagine speaking for five and a half hours without notes. 

As biographer Fintan O'Toole has pointed out in A Traitor's Kiss (1997), Sheridan not only showed his mastery of rhetoric but of characterization, turning Hastings into a politician's version of Joseph Surface from The School for Scandal. Bad enough are his deeds, and that "In his mind all is shuffling, ambiguous, dark, insidious, and little"; worse is what Hastings does to words: "Nay, in his stile and writing there is the same mixture of vicious contrarieties; -- the most groveling ideas are conveyed in the most inflated language; giving mock consequence to low cavils, and uttering quibbles in heroics; so that his compositions disgust the mind's taste, as much as his actions excite the soul's abhorrence."

 

When Sheridan had spoken the final word, “My lords, I have done,” he was caught by Burke in his arms and “hugged with the energy of generous admiration.” So says Macaulay, but Macaulay represents that Sheridan “contrived with a knowledge of stage effect which his father might have envied, to sink back, as if exhausted, into the arms of Burke.” 

Only one of Sheridan’s speeches has been preserved in anything approaching an adequate report.

Palestine

The modern conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine dates back to when both groups laid claim to the British-controlled territory they received in the Mandate that followed the first war. The Jews were Zionists, recent emigrants from Europe and Russia who came to the ancient homeland of the Jews to establish a Jewish national state. The native Palestinian Arabs sought to stem Jewish immigration and set up a secular Palestinian state.

Beginning in 1929, Arabs and Jews openly fought in Palestine, and Britain attempted to limit Jewish immigration to appease the Arabs. Fleeing the Nazis in Europe, many Jews illegally entered Palestine during World War II. Radical Jewish groups employed terrorism against British forces in Palestine, which they thought were hampering the Zionist cause. The terrorist group Lehi (aka the Stern Gang) assassinated Lord Moyne, British Minister Resident in the Middle East. Eliyahu Bet-Zuri actually suggested sending agents of the Stern Gang to London to kill Churchill.

At the end of World War II Britain, unable to find a practical solution, referred the problem to the United Nations, which on November 29, 1947, voted to partition Palestine. The Jews were to possess more than half of Palestine, though they made up less than half of Palestine’s population.

On May 14, 1948, Britain withdrew with the expiration of its mandate, and the State of Israel was proclaimed by Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion. The next day, forces from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded.

Cab Thoughts

Every debt is ultimately paid, if not by the debtor, then eventually by the creditor.--Jim Grant


The nature of Communism as a recognition of the true class struggle sees members of a "class" as enemies. So one would kill the enemies' kin. Like cartels. Ideology as a criminal enterprise.
The leftist obsession with “equality” and leveling means the state must insinuate itself into employment, finance, education, private clubs — pretty much every nook and cranny of civil society. In the name of diversity, every institution is forced to look exactly like every other one.
The left can’t ever be satisfied because its creed is a permanent revolution in the service of unattainable ends like “equality.” People of different skills and endowments will reap different rewards, which means constant intervention into civil society. Moreover, equality vanishes the moment people begin freely exchanging money for the goods they desire, so again: the state must be involved in everything, at all times.
Moreover, each generation of liberals undermines and scoffs at what the previous one took for granted. The revolution marches on.--Rockwell (from Mises)


The U.S. Census has a segment on poverty showing, every year, that it tends to be a temporary state. A quote from it: "The Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) provides monthly data about labor force participation and income sources and amounts. The data yield insights into the dynamic nature of these experiences and the economic mobility of U.S. residents. For example, the data demonstrate that using a longer time frame to measure poverty (e.g., 4 years) yields, on average, a lower poverty rate than the annual measures presented in this report, while using a shorter time frame (e.g., 2 months) yields higher poverty rates." And "During the 4-year period from 2009 to 2012, 34.5 percent of the population had at least one spell of poverty lasting 2 or more months." And "Chronic poverty over the 4-year period from 2009 to 2012 was relatively uncommon, with 2.7 percent of the population living in poverty all 48 months."


Vatican City is the world's smallest country. Since its incorporation, it has never had a birth.


Between 1948 and 1994--the 46 years during which Italy had 50 different governments--the country wasn't politically unstable: it has been remarkably, perhaps excessively, stable instead. All these governments were voted by a parliamentary majority in which the biggest party was invariably the Christian Democracy. One theory is that the majority was a solid consensus--the Communists being the outlying and awful second party--so that struggles for government power continued within an establishment.

In their 2008 book, Minimum Wages, economists David Neumark and William Wascher found that 2/3rds of studies on minimum wage legislation find negative effects on employment.

During the Apollo missions, the Soviets were trying to get a robotic probe to land on the Moon and bring back a soil sample. They called the probes “Luna,” and one of them—Luna 15—went out into space three days before Apollo 11.
The two countries shared their flight plans to make sure the ships didn’t collide. The Soviets hid the purpose of Luna 15, but they let America know where it would be so Apollo 11 could touch down safely.
While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their first steps on the Moon, Luna 15 was touching down on the surface. It crashed into the side of a mountain and was destroyed.

“Master” and “associate master” are titles for professors who reside at one of Yale’s colleges and are responsible for its academic and social life. The title has since been changed to “head of college” in the wake of last year’s protests, as many students thought the term was racist.

Solipsism is the belief that the self is the only thing that we can be sure exists. It’s Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am”—but what about the rest of you? The question of how we should act in light of this belief is one of those eternal issues for philosophers, both in their work and their thought-obsessed lives. One wonders what the modern world, with its electronic and isolated connection, will allow.


Who is....David Horowitz?



Tobacco has killed 50 million people in the last decade. If trends continue, a billion people will die from tobacco use and exposure this century, which equates to one person every six seconds. I wonder if anyone could sue the Indian Nation casinos for reparations.

David Horowitz was raised by parents who were members of the Communist Party. From 1956-75, Horowitz was an outspoken adherent of the New Left. He later rejected leftism completely and has since become a leading proponent of conservatism. (wiki) It seems as with all converts, he embraces his new ideology fiercely.

Horowitz objects to the claim that the U.S. is "racist," and angrily rejects Obama's claim “racism is still part of our DNA that’s passed on.” He writes: "Black Africans were enslaved by other black Africans and sold at slave markets to western slavers. America inherited this slave system from the British Empire, and once it was independent, ended the slave trade and almost all slavery in the northern states within twenty years of its birth. America then risked its survival as a nation and sacrificed 350,000 mostly white Union lives, to end slavery in the south as well. In other words, as far as blacks are concerned, America’s true legacy is not slavery, but freedom. As noted, American blacks today have more freedom, rights and privileges than blacks in any black nation in the world." And, "The U.S. has twice elected a black president, had two black secretaries of state, three black national security advisors and two successive black attorneys general along with thousands of black elected officials, mayors, police chiefs and congressmen. In addition, blacks play dominant roles in shaping America’s popular and sports cultures, and thus in shaping the outlooks and expectations of American youth."



The only thing worse than making a mistake is refusing to admit it. This is also true for investing and dating.


Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/01/jack-lew-and-you.html

Jack Lew and You steeleydock.blogspot.com Jack Lew is Obama's new nominee for Treasury to replace the semi-esteemed Geithner. According to the news release on Yahoo, Lew "doesn't ha...

Common knowledge states that anyone who trusts e-mail messages promising wealth from Nigerian princes is a complete fool.  So why is it not knowledge equally as common that anyone who trusts political messages promising wealth from politicians is no less a fool?--Bordeaux


This policy of pristine — and preening — disengagement from the grubby imperatives of realpolitik yielded Crimea, the South China Sea, the rise of the Islamic State, the return of Iran. And now the horror and the shame of Aleppo.--Krauthammer on the Obama's reinvention of American foreign policy to "universal norms, mutual obligation, international law and multilateral institutions."

United States Air Force's X-37B space plane has cruised beyond 500 days in Earth orbit since its launch last year.  The U.S. military launched the robotic X-37B space plane on May 20, 2015, marking the fourth flight for the Air Force program. A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket lofted the spacecraft from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station to kick off the OTV-4 mission (short for Orbital Test Vehicle-4).
Exactly what the winged space plane's duties are while it's in orbit continues to remain a tight-lipped affair. Similarly, how long the vehicle will remain in orbit has not been detailed. 

If you buy into the belief that scorers produce at their peak levels between the ages of 23 and 25 (and there is plenty of evidence to suggest they do) Crosby was only able to play 99 out of a possible 212 games during that stretch due to complications from injury and a half season lockout. It has already helped make his career one of the all-time great “what-if” careers in hockey.
When he was on the ice during those seasons he was scoring at a pace that was at a completely different level from every player in hockey. For those three years the gap between him and the No. 2 scorer (his teammate, Malkin) was the same as the gap between the No. 2 scorer and the No. 49 scorer. It probably cost him a couple of more scoring titles, maybe an MVP award, and perhaps even another Stanley Cup.


If we look over the entire spectrum of government activity, we observe immediately that the creation of monopolies is one of the government’s major preoccupations.  It is traditional to say that the tariff is the “mother of monopolies,” and certainly no one who contemplates the U.S. trade-barrier structure would raise any question about this, except possibly to call attention to the existence of quotas as well.  Agriculture has been thoroughly monopolized by the Department of Agriculture, which not only restricts production, thus raising the price of food, but also uses the taxpayers’ money to subsidize the farmers in return for their agreeing to reduce production.--Gordon Tullock

AAAAaaaaaannnnnnddddddddd.......An artist's depiction of the U.S. Air Force's unmanned X-37B space plane in orbit with its solar array deployed and payload bay open: