Rogue China

The rights of individuals to their Millian liberties [are] directly opposed to the basic commitment to a deliberately embraced collective moral goal...Under socialism, every dissenting voice raises a threat similar to that raised under a democracy by those who preach antidemocracy.--socialist economist Robert Heilbroner

The murder of Sulaimani, in Iraq no less,  is one of those rare, clarifying moments squeezed in among simpleton notions like Lines in the Sand, Arab Springs, "We came, We saw, He died," and Man's Thirst for Democracy. We act as if the Middle East is not a cauldron of war, savagery and homicidal mania sitting, boiling, on the crossroads of international commerce. Those situations cannot be escalated; they are already quite extreme. The Americans inherited these problems from the idiot Europeans after the Second War and promptly made them worse. I can't wait for the proposed solutions but I'll bet they all focus upon Trump as the problem.

I accidentally brought several tough books for this holiday including Second Sleep, Serotonin, and The Dark Forest. We may see  a version of The Forest play out in the Middle East one day. Not relaxed reading, especially Sleep, whose obscenity I felt I had to explain to the family should they accidentally come across it.

Is there a better professional coach in sports than Sullivan?


This chart shows the relationship between: a) median household income by race from the Census Bureau and b) the share of births to unmarried mothers from the Center for Health Statistics, both for 2018. Based on a statistical measure of the correlation between two variables, there is almost a perfect negative relationship (correlation coefficient = -0.988) between median household income by race and the share of births to unmarried mothers by race.









                          Rogue China

The climate pamphleteers have a new direction, "production gap." This is the difference between fossil fuel production and the ideal level to prevent their warming predictions. If they can't kill the beast, they want to starve it. All this is in preparation for the new, expensive and well catered meeting in Madrid. 
Surprisingly China, which has always been ignored in favor of the dreadful West, comes under criticism for their relentless growth policies. 
China is set to add new coal-fired power plants equivalent to the EU’s entire capacity, as the world’s biggest energy consumer ignores global pressure to rein in carbon emissions in its bid to boost a slowing economy.

Across the country, 148GW of coal-fired plants are either being built or are about to begin construction, according to a report from Global Energy Monitor, a non-profit group that monitors coal stations. The current capacity of the entire EU coal fleet is 149GW.While the rest of the world has been largely reducing coal-powered capacity over the past two years, China is building so much coal power that it more than offsets the decline elsewhere.

Global Energy Monitor

From January 2018 to June 2019, countries outside of China decreased their total coal power capacity by 8.1 gigawatts, while China increased its coal capacity by 42.9 gigawatts.

One can only wonder what the more militant wing of the global warriors would suggest be done with the rogue China. If this is as serious as they say and the Chinese are the clear offender, what is just?

Cacao Market

But in the end what Obama did that is unforgivable is increasing centralization in a complex system.-- Taleb

My Uber driver, a Russian, dropped me at church. As I opened the door he said, "You are a Catholic?" "Yes," I said. "I am Muslim," he said. I was unsure of my response and finally said, "Yes, there are not many of us now." "Us?" he asked. "Yes. People who believe in God. We are a minority."  He was still nodding when I closed the door.

The present is so full of lies, only the future historians can be the present's arbitrator. So, it now is the plan of the lying present to revise the past.

Regarding the Taleb quote above, are Trump's efforts at the economic manipulation any different?

8000 years ago there was a supernova reported by middle eastern astronomers. The Sumerians said it stimulated agriculture and writing.

                                                Cacao Market

Extreme policies inhibit market functioning. By 1982, for example, Ghana had lost its historic domination of the world cacao market after centralized control meant that Ghanaian cacao exporters received only 6 percent of the world price of cacao. With so little incentive to produce, there were not many cacao exporters left. Moreover, those who tried to smuggle their product out of the country in order to find better prices faced the death penalty. This was but one example of the draconian controls of markets in Ghana that are associated with a steep decline in living standards in the decades after independence in 1957. After a drought in 1983 made things even worse, economic reforms to liberalize markets finally began — reforms that have been associated with healthy, positive growth. 
But the elite always knows best.

Hogmanney

In Double A baseball, no one can hit the 97 mph fastball, in Triple A, some can't hit anything but. --Chris McCague

Happy New Year. 2020. Good vision to all.

Walked back from church, a trip I had made Sunday when I lost my internet connection and could not Uber back. Today I walked past the Million Dollar Bar where they were three deep at 8 am, past Sandy's where I could not understand the coffee options, The Best Coffee stand--which might be, along the city preserve where they are raising raccoons and presumably comfort snakes but where very tough looking guys emerge with backpacks and tougher guys with only beer. Several Hemingway impersonators. Several attack roosters and menacing dogs, inappropriately chipper walkers. A much more challenging walk Sunday when I did not know where I was or where I was going and I thought I was living a post petroleum life.. And longer.

When economists argue (as Adam Smith did, forcefully) that consumption is the sole end of production – and therefore that production should be guided by the demands of consumers and not by those of people in their roles as producers – they’re often misunderstood as asserting that consumption is more important than production. (Cass operates with this misunderstanding.) But in fact they assert no such thing.

What economists mean when they insist that consumption is the sole end of production is that there is no economically meaningful production if the materials or activities that are the outcome of the exertion of human time and toil satisfy no human desire. That is, to produce is to generate some output that satisfies a human want or wants. Merely toiling to transform physical materials from arrangement X into arrangement Y is not productive unless arrangement Y contributes to the satisfaction of some consumption desire.

To use my favorite example, if I work hard to bake a sawdust-and-maggot pie, the result of my work is not really production. --Bordeaux

Climate change alarmism at its very core is a despicably, anti-human ideology. We are taught to look down upon our achievements with guilt, shame and disgust and not even to take into account the many, many benefits we have gained from using fossil fuels as our main energy source. Because look around. We’re living in such an amazing era of fast progress and innovation and we’re not allowed to be proud of that at all? --Seibtt


                                 Hogmanney

Hogmanney is the Scottish New Year, a mixture of ancient traditions and, possibly, a more modern reaction to the strict Cromwellian restrictions of the Middle Ages. It has a number of characteristics. Bonfires are a part, perhaps from Viking or Clan days. "Redding" the house is another. It is a ritualistic cleaning, a readying for the new year. The fireplace is swept and some read the ashes, like auguries. After midnight, neighbors visit, bringing small gifts, usually food, and receiving them, usually whiskey. Importance was placed on the first to enter in the new year, the "first foot." (Tall handsome men were good, redheaded women bad.) The house and the livestock are blessed with water from a local stream--which sounds really old--and then the woman of the house would go from room to room with a smoldering juniper branch, seemingly counteracting all the "redding" with smoke. Robert Burn's version of the traditional Scottish Auld Lang Syne, which translates to “times gone by,” is sung.

Madison on Mars

The crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness, and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o'clock--Margaret Hasley

A wind farm requires far more concrete and steel than an equivalent system based on gas. Environmental opposition to nuclear power has hindered the generating system that needs the least land, least fuel and least steel or concrete per megawatt. Burning wood instead of coal in power stations means the exploitation of more land, the eviction of more woodpeckers — and even higher emissions. Organic farming uses more land than conventional. Technology has put us on a path to a cleaner, greener planet.--Ridley

Preclinical studies and clinical trials have shown that intermittent fasting has broad-spectrum benefits for many health conditions, such as obesity, diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, cancers, and neurologic disorders. Animal models show that intermittent fasting improves health throughout the life span, whereas clinical studies have mainly involved relatively short-term interventions, over a period of months. It remains to be determined whether people can maintain intermittent fasting for years and potentially accrue the benefits seen in animal models. Furthermore, clinical studies have focused mainly on overweight young and middle-age adults, and we cannot generalize to other age groups the benefits and safety of intermittent fasting that have been observed in these studies.--nejm

Second Sleep is very good but it is tough.

It’s a very important and mostly overlooked point that a key difference between socialism and capitalism is that socialism is a “system” that necessarily requires a top-down “consciously created system manipulated by it creators” — elected officials and government bureaucrats — and free-market capitalism is an unplanned, organic, anti-systematic, bottoms-up form of economic organization directed by spontaneous order and impersonal market forces. And the main difference between socialism and capitalism? Capitalism works. --Perry

                                 Madison on Mars

The talk about a Mars colony is beginning to warm up. The motives are many between NASA and SpaceX, some wildly optimistic, some just crushingly depressing. But a common theme is, how to govern the colony. Of course, everyone feels obligated to make their own improvement on the U.S. Constitution--which contains the always-welcome opportunity to bash the Americans. But, despite the profound philosophical and practical appeals of the U.S. founding documents, the source for inspiration has drifted toward unintended communities in the past and what we can learn from them. I.E. Shipwrecks. Shipwrecks! Nothing better than setting up a political structure using as a blueprint an unplanned catastrophe. The elites probably see anything done without their control is exactly that. 

Acting as if these events have a lot of commonalities other than disaster, these people are dissecting these events for clues. In a recent article by Michael Shermer in Quillette,
"lessons from the Federalist Papers may be less useful than lessons from what may be called unintentional communities, such as shipwrecked sailors stranded on remote islands. These are explored by the evolutionary sociologist Nicholas Christakis in his 2019 book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society ."
"At the core of all good societies, theorizes Christakis, is a suite of eight social characteristics, including: (1) The capacity to have and recognize individual identity; (2) Love for partners and offspring; (3) Friendship; (4) Social networks; (5) Co-operation; (6) Preference for one’s own group (“in-group bias”); (7) Mild hierarchy (that is, relative egalitarianism); and (8) Social learning and teaching.

To test this hypothesis, Christakis analyzed a database of shipwreck survivors over a 400-year span from 1500 to 1900, with initial survival colony populations ranging from four to 500, with a mean of 119. (The number of rescued survivors ranged from three to 289, with a mean of 59.) The duration of these unplanned societies ranged from two months to fifteen years, with a mean of twenty months."

"Some of the survivors killed and ate each other, while others survived and flourished. What made the difference? 'The groups that typically fared best were those that had good leadership in the form of mild hierarchy (without any brutality), friendships among the survivors, and evidence of co-operation and altruism,' Christakis concludes. The successful shipwreck societies shared food equitably, took care of the sick and injured survivors, and worked together digging wells, burying the dead, building fires and building escape boats. There was little hierarchy…While onboard their ships, officers and enlisted men were separated, but on land, successful castaways integrated everyone in a co-operative, egalitarian and more horizontal structure."

An inviting one is The Bounty mutiny and its aftermath.

Shermer continues. "Arguably the most famous of these unintentional communities began taking form in the early morning hours of April 28, 1789, when Fletcher Christian, a Master’s Mate and acting lieutenant on the HMS Bounty, seized control of the ship from Captain William Bligh. Christian released the captives into a 23-foot launch (all but one of these men would survive), and sailed the Bounty into the mists of history. A decade later, when the only surviving mutineer, John Adams, was found on Pitcairn Island, he would relate a cautionary tale for future Martians about how not to set up a new society.

The Bounty originally had departed Portsmouth on December 23, 1787. Ten months and 27,010 miles later, it arrived in Matavai Bay, Tahiti, where it was anchored for five months, plenty of time for the young male crew members—along with Christian, the leading mutineer—to become romantically involved with native women. After departing Tahiti, a number of the smitten men grew restless without their love interests, and bristled under the discipline imposed on them by Bligh for relatively minor offenses. This is what led to the explosive response that fateful April morning in 1789.

After seizing the ship, Christian and his followers returned to Tahiti (folllwing a brief and bloody attempt to settle on the island of Tubuai). But on September 23, 1789, they left Tahiti for good, knowing that death awaiated them when the Royal Navy tracked them down. At this point, the Bounty was carrying a total of nine male mutineers, six Tahitian men, and eleven Tahitian women. On January 15, 1790, they arrived at one of the remotest rocks in the Pacific, Pitcairn Island. There, they unloaded the ship, and later torched it in a final gesture of commitment to their new life on this far-flung outpost.

A 1790 painting by Robert Dodd depicts mutineers casting off Captain William Bligh and 18 others.

The seeds of failure already were apparent in the sex ratio: 15 men, 11 women. Not good. After three years, the woman living with mutineer John Williams died, so he took the wife of one of the Polynesian men, leading to jealousy, violence and, on September 20, 1793, retribution. Five of the mutineers ended up dead, including Christian, along with all of the Polynesian men. In the years after the massacre, one mutineer committed suicide, another was murdered, and another died of asthma. By 1808, the only male survivor was Adams, who told the tale of the Bounty’s fate and the horrors of Pitcairn Island in the years following his discovery by American sealers in 1808. (He lived until 1829, and eventually was granted amnesty for his role in the mutiny.)

The mutineers failed to find the right balance between hierarchy and egalitarianism. Both Bligh and Christian were products of the Royal Navy, very much steeped in its rigid protocols. On the Bounty, it was the hierarchical tensions between Bligh and Christian that led to the mutiny. And on Pitcairn island, corresponding tensions between Christian and the mutineers, and between the mutineers and the male Taitians, when added to the sex-ratio imbalance and accompanying jealousy and violence, led to almost everyone’s demise.

The lessons from Pitcairn are clear enough: Start off with a balanced sex ratio, structure a political system more horizontal than hierarchical, eliminate bigoted attitudes, and accentuate co-operation and attenuate competition."

So, the sociologists and amateur kingdom-builders are leading the way to new and better human associations, using as models, calamities. It is hard to believe anyone takes these people seriously. But they have an ace. We've got a lot of confidence in models. But as Charles Krauthammer wrote, “You can have the most advanced and efflorescent cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933...Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.”

Beyond Price

The American Constitution is, as far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at any given time by the brain and purpose of man---Gladstone

Arrived in Key West. Slept through the Ohio State game. And the Steeler game was not broadcast yesterday.

Travel can be clarifying for a culture. Sleepless, jangled by coffee, everyone fends for themselves with even the elderly and cripples lugging luggage along. The only people for whom there is any consideration are service personnel and nursing mothers. And outliers. The ticket counters are slanted for some unsaid benefit to the handicapped so the unwary place their coffee there and it slides onto him and the floor.. You are then issued a ticket with a lot of information but landing time conspicuously absent. Then through the obnoxious screening; I was selected for specific bomb evaluation. As we sat in the waiting area the urgent announcement came that there was a passenger with a peanut allergy in the area. We were then issued appropriate instructions on our behavior. We all looked about anxiously, like a 2 a.m. Amber Alert.

That said, it's really beautiful here. 

And the activist Pope Francis said something profound. He said the Christchild was not born in a hotel or a manger, He was born in a family. It makes the inclusion of Joseph more important than on first impression. 

A lot of coaches look to be in trouble in the NFL but their failures correlate well with disappointing quarterbacks. The Press really looks  stupid asking the poor guys about it, though.




                         Beyond Price

A recent WSJ article commented on a dichotomy between price and value. Infection is a common health problem and it’s important that antibiotics are affordable. Amoxicillin, azithromycin, ciprofloxacin and doxycycline cost a few dollars and treat a wide array of nasty infections. But Western manufacturers make little profit, if any, from making most antibiotics because of low prices. As a result, they either do not make the products at all or outsource production to companies in emerging countries with the lowest costs, notably China and India.

But quality does not necessarily follow. Typically cheap medicines are formulated in India, often with slipshod production, with Chinese ingredients, often made in even worse conditions. The products are sold under a myriad of banners (some western, some Asian), which do not always work. When the antibiotics don’t function as expected they endanger the receiving patient and can drive population-level resistance to even properly made versions. Ironically, the savings on “cheaper” antibiotics result in patients using more expensive products, sometimes with more side effects.

So, while many drugs are hugely overpriced, some are too cheap.  

Gas Charts

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. ~mathematician Blaise Pascal, 1670


A day behind.                       

Between now and 2050, CO2 emissions are projected to decrease by 4% in the OECD countries and increase by 36% in the non-OECD countries. To combat rising CO2, perhaps Greta Thunberg is lecturing the wrong people.

Where did the Russian oligarchs come from? Bill Bowder has some explanations in his book Red Notice. Voucher privatization was supposed to be a system in which every Russian citizen—all 150 million—would receive a privatization certificate exchangeable at public auctions for stock in one of the new companies. It turned into a scramble among insiders to “acquire” these vouchers by any means. This included, according to Browder, the hedge fund manager and the largest foreign investor in Russia at the time, the closure of regional airports to prevent employees and rival elites from getting to the auctions in Moscow. With competition suppressed, the value of each voucher did not exceed $20. As Mr. Browder notes: “Since these vouchers were exchangeable for roughly 30 percent of the shares of all Russian companies, this meant that the valuation of the entire Russian economy was only $10 billion! That was one-sixth the value of Wal-Mart!” 

This is how the oligarchs were born.

Kunstler, (from W.E.): "A trial ..[impeachment].. would be a rich spectacle for sure after subjecting the nation to three years of malicious, perfidious sedition. But other gusts of rumor intimate that senators on the Republican side would prefer to not open any cans of Ukrainian worms in a trial, since money laundered through the Ukrainian oligarch mills may have found its way into their pockets as well. Who knows…?"

On this day in 1688, William of Orange makes a triumphant march into London as James II flees.

                                Gas Charts

Thanks to their enterprising innovations in directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing, domestic petroleum output has tripled over the past decade to more than 12 million barrels per day, while supplies of natural gas have surged 60% to a daily 113 billion cubic feet. The biggest overall beneficiaries have been everyday Americans—who now pay $100 billion less per year for fossil fuels. And because gas burns far cleaner than coal (which has lost a third of its market share), our national carbon dioxide emissions have dropped 15% from the 2007 peak. 

Rules of Behavior

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. -William Pitt, British prime minister (28 May 1759-1806)

Pitt was part of a historic game last night with a dramatic comeback win topped off by their opponent's QB punching a ref.

An interesting article recently argued against "Capitalism" being a philosophy. It is, rather, an emergent order.

The ever-expanding powers and pretenses of the presidency have become a menace to America’s Madisonian balance of separated powers. The powers and pretensions of presidents should long since have become an embarrassment to the public. Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed, That he is grown so great? The presidential office has fattened on the exigencies of a sprawling, intrusive government and on the (somewhat consequent) childishness of its citizenry.--Will

Of the 50m children currently learning the piano worldwide, as many as 40m may be Chinese.--The Economist

From the St. Louis Fed(!): The college income premium—the extra income earned by a family headed by a college graduate over an otherwise similar family without a bachelor’s degree—remains positive but has declined for recent graduates. The college wealth premium (extra wealth) has declined more noticeably among all cohorts born after 1940. Among non-Hispanic white family heads born in the 1980s, the college wealth premium is at a historic low; among all other races and ethnicities, it is statistically indistinguishable from zero [emphasis added]. ...our estimates of the value added by college and a postgraduate degree fall by 30 to 60 percent. Taken together, our results suggest that college and post-graduate education may be failing some recent graduates as a financial investment.

Wages for the typical worker—nonsupervisory employees who account for 82% of the workforce—are rising at the fastest rate in more than a decade, a sign that the labor market has tightened. (wsj)

Paris Opera dancers have a bespoke pension plan dating back to the 17th century. It includes the right to retire on a full pension at the age of 42, two decades earlier than the average worker. They stand to lose those benefits if Macron pushes ahead with a planned overhaul of a convoluted pension system that he says will be fairer, incentives workers to stay in the labor force until 64 and balance the pension budget.

On this day in 1968, Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, returned safely to Earth after a historic six-day journey. On December 21, Apollo 8 was launched by a three-stage Saturn 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, Jr., and William Anders aboard. On Christmas Eve, the astronauts entered into orbit around the moon, the first manned spacecraft ever to do so. During Apollo 8‘s 10 lunar orbits, television images were sent back home and spectacular photos were taken of the Earth and the moon from the spacecraft. In addition to being the first human beings to view firsthand their home world in its entirety, the three astronauts were also the first to see the dark side of the moon. On Christmas morning, Apollo 8 left its lunar orbit and began its journey back to Earth, landing safely in the Pacific Ocean on December 27.

                       Rules of Behavior

From an old O'Sullivan article:
Robert Michels — as any reader of James Burnham's finest book, The Machiavellians, knows--was the author of the Iron Law of Oligarchy. This states that in any organization the permanent officials will gradually obtain such influence that its day-to-day program will increasingly reflect their interests rather than its own stated philosophy. To take a homely example, congressmen from egalitarian parties somehow end up voting for higher pay and generous expenses for congressmen. 

My copy of the current Mother Jones (well, it's my job to read that sort of thing — I take no pleasure in it) contains an advertisement for Amnesty International. Now, AI used to be a perfectly serviceable single-issue pressure group which drew the world's attention to the plight of political prisoners around the globe. Many people owe their lives and liberty to it. But that good work depended greatly on AI's being a single-issue organization that helped victims of both left- and right-wing regimes and was careful to remain politically neutral in other respects. Its advertisement in Mother Jones, however, abandons this tradition by calling for an end to the death penalty.

The ad itself, needless to say, is the usual liberal rhubarb. "In American courtrooms," it intones, "some have a better chance of being sentenced to death." That is true: the people in question are called murderers. But Al naturally means something different and more sinister — namely that poor, black, and retarded people are more likely to face the electric chair than other murderers.

Let us suppose this to be the case. What follows? A mentally retarded person incapable of understanding the significance of his actions cannot be guilty of murder or of any other crime. A law that punishes him (as opposed to one that confines him for his own and society's safety) is unjust and should be changed — whether or not he faces the death penalty. On the other hand, someone who is guilty of murder may be executed with perfect justice. His race or economic circumstances do not affect the matter at all. The fact that other murderers may obtain lesser sentences does not in any way detract from the justice of his own punishment. After all, some murderers have always escaped scot-free. Would Amnesty have us release the rest on the grounds of equality of treatment? Finally, Amnesty's argument from discrimination could be met just as well by executing more rich, white murderers (which would be fine with me) as by executing no murderers at all. Significantly, Amnesty's list of death-penalty victims" does not include political prisoners. America does not, have political prisoners, let alone execute them. Why, then, Amnesty's campaign on the issue?

That is explained by O'Sullivan's First Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don't like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. At which point Michels's Iron Law of Oligarchy takes over — and the rest follows.

Is there any law which enables us to predict the behavior of right-wing organizations? As it happens, there is: Conquest's Second Law (formulated by the Sovietologist Robert Conquest):

The behavior of an organization can best be predicted by assuming it to be controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.