Overcoming Failure

You can bet on professional wrestling.

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Dilbert syndicator Andrews McMeel has called the strip “the most photocopied, pinned-up, downloaded, faxed and emailed comic strip in the world”.

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There is over $1.5 trillion in student debt in the U.S. Who pays that if those that assumed it do not? Are there other debts the government can cancel?

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Overcoming Failure

Readers who have followed the 1619 Project from its inception in 2019 as a New York Times Magazine special edition through its metamorphoses into a classroom curriculum in 2020, a book released in November 2021, an ongoing campus and library-lecture tour by 1619 Project impresario Nikole Hannah-Jones, and now a slickly photographed miniseries on Hulu narrated by Hannah-Jones, should by now not be surprised at four things.

First, while the project contains some useful perspective on the history of slavery, segregation, and racism in America, it is wrapped in a highly tendentious ideological framework that ranges from rank Democratic partisanship to Marxist economic and political theory. Second, it gets important facts glaringly wrong. Third, it advances arguments without the slightest shame or self-reflection after being called out publicly on getting the supporting facts for those arguments glaringly wrong in the past.

And fourth, it remains a lucrative brand entirely without regard to whether it gets its facts straight or peddles partisan or ideological agitprop. ---McLaughlin

Apparently, in American culture, quality and accuracy are not predictors of success or failure.

Sunday/

 

Is the appearance of a bumbling, stumbling, falling, stammering man in Ukraine a 'show of force?'

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A CNN panel discussing the East Palestine train wreck suggested the solution was higher corporate taxes and more regulations. 

Is this a typical view of the effectiveness of government?

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Sen. John Fetterman’s (D-PA) wife was slammed on social media Friday after she revealed that the first thing she did after her husband was hospitalized with severe depression was flee the country to go on a vacation. 

Are family decisions reasonable public discussion topics for strangers? 

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The Board of Trustees at the Catholic Marymount University, located in Arlington, voted 20-0 in favor of removing nine undergraduate majors and one graduate program due to low interest. Those eliminated are: B.A. Art, B.A. Economics, B.A. English, B.A. History, B.S. Mathematics, B.A. Philosophy, B.A. Secondary Education, B.A. Sociology, B.A. Theology & Religious Studies, and M.A. English & Humanities.

Sunday/ 

The readings today are brilliant and provocative.
The first is from Genesis where Adam and Eve are tempted based on two ideas, first, that God does not want us to be like Him or, two, that humanity is incapable of seeking the Good. Both positions demand we recognize an animosity between man and God.
The second is Paul's epistle where he argues that the Fall depended upon one man and that Christ's sacrifice was a symmetrical salvation.
The gospel is the Temptation in the Desert where Christ stands against the material and humanity's worst instincts and, at the same time, argues for Free Will.
Very interesting, concentrated stuff well worth the time to read and ponder. And something to include in the pondering: The devil in the first two temptations starts each with "If you are the Son of God..." Does that mean the devil was unsure?

Unintended Consequences

While the Western world was just as guilty as other civilizations when it came to enslaving people for thousands of years, it was unique only in finally deciding that the whole institution was immoral and should be ended.--Sowell

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The online sci-fi magazine Clarkesworld has seen a steep increase in submissions, driven by stories created using ChatGPT and similar systems. A graph makes it look like they had fewer than 20 submissions per month for every month October 2022 and prior and then:
December: 50
January: ~115
February so far: nearly 350

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In Utah, it is legal to forcibly sterilize a person with a disability.

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Unintended Consequences

A significant contribution to understanding the unintended effects of regulation was Peltzman’s 1975 study of the effects on traffic safety of a slew of US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulations on the design of cars. In the mid to late 1960s, the federal government made a number of safety features mandatory. These included seat belts for all occupants, an energy-absorbing steering column, a penetration-resistant windshield, a dual braking system, and a padded instrument panel. In his study, Peltzman stated that the mandates aimed to reduce traffic fatalities and serious injuries sustained as a consequence of vehicle accidents. But he found something different. Fatalities were not reduced at all. Instead, deaths of vehicle occupants fell but those of pedestrians and motorcycle drivers rose. Peltzman’s tentative explanation was that by reducing the probability of being killed in a given accident, the mandates caused drivers to drive more “intensely.” His finding became so well known that economists started referring to the “Peltzman effect.” 

Later studies found that drivers with anti-lock brakes tended to follow the cars in front of them more closely. A 2010 study of NASCAR accidents found that the “mandated use of a head-and-neck- restraint system has almost completely eliminated serious driver injury, while simultaneously increasing the number of accidents per race” 

(from Pope and Robert D. Tollison, 2010).

Can Government Be Funny?

Historical reenactors say new rules effectively ban reenactments of battles at state-owned historical sites in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission said it will no longer permit reenactments of “simulated warfare or violence between opposing forces” on sites it controls. Last year, the commission asked the organizers of the annual reenactment of the Battle of Bushy Run, which took place in the colonial era between British troops and American Indians, to cancel it because non-Indians are allowed to play Indians. The reenactment, which has taken place for 40 years, typically draws around 1,500 spectators.

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Can a show of strength be delivered by an infirm man?


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While a recent UN resolution does not force Russia into leaving Ukraine, it signifies an international censure against Moscow's aggression. Belarus, North Korea, Syria, Eritrea, Mali, and Nicaragua all joined Russia in opposing the declaration.

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Can Government Be Funny?

A Democratic lawmaker in Nebraska is being accused of "anti-religious bigotry" by Republicans after she proposed to ban children from attending church youth groups or vacation Bible schools.

State Sen. Megan Hunt says her amendment, which would ban children under 19 years of age from attending a "religious indoctrination camp," is intended to kill the underlying bill, LB 371, a measure put forward by Republicans to ban minors from attending drag performances. The text of the amendment asserts there is a "well-documented history of indoctrination and sexual abuse perpetrated by religious leaders and clergy people upon children."

It is a tongue-in-cheek response to Republicans who have said children should not be exposed to explicit sexual content at drag shows.

It defines a "religious indoctrination camp" as "a camp, vacation Bible study, retreat, lock-in, or convention held by a church, youth group, or religious organization for the purpose of indoctrinating children with a specific set of religious beliefs."

The text mimics the underlying bill, LB 371, which Slama said "keeps kids from attending hyper-sexualized events."

Funny, no?

Is it fair to compare groups where criminality is an accident at the event with one where the debatable behavior is the event's purpose? Is all education indoctrination? 

And how dangerous is self-parody to the very nature of politics, which demands a willing suspension of disbelief?   

 

The Third Rail

As sweeping layoffs plague Big Tech, DEI jobs are taking the brunt of the blow.
According to a Bloomberg report, listings for DEI roles were down 19% last year — a larger downtick than in legal or general human resources departments per data from Textio, a company helping businesses create unbiased job ads.
“I’m cautiously concerned — not that these roles will go to zero but that there will be a spike in ‘Swiss army knife’ type roles,” Textio Chief Executive Officer Kieran Snyder told Bloomberg.
Other sectors besides have dramatically carved into their DEI departments after deploying mass layoffs in anticipation of a pending global recession.

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Buoyed by imports from China and exports to Russia, Turkey’s economy grew by 5.3% in 2022, after expanding 11.4% in 2021. Only two years ago, the country’s currency was melting down and government bond yields spiked to 24%.
Now its stock market is the world’s top performer with a year-on-year gain of 70% while the Turkish lira has stabilized.
This is the most remarkable turnaround in the checkered history of emerging markets, and what makes it all the more remarkable is that domestic economic policy had little to do with it. Turkey’s wily president Recep Tayyip Erdogan traded political chips with China, Russia, the Gulf States, Israel and Europe to position Turkey in the middle of a flood tide of trade flows created by American sanctions on Russia.--Goldman

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Jamaica experienced no economic growth in exports per capita from the Napoleonic Wars to the end of the Second World Wars. Since there is a high correlation between exports per capita and GDP per capita, at least after 1850, Bulmer-Thomas argues that there are solid grounds for concluding that the Jamaican economy on a per capita basis experienced no growth at all for more than a century after the end of slavery.

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The Third Rail

Social Security and Medicare.

Spending on these two programs alone consumes 45 percent of the federal budget. Along with Medicaid, these programs drive our current and future debt. And to emphasize the seriousness of our predicament, note that Medicare and Social Security together face a shortfall of $116 trillion over the next 30 years.

$116 trillion!

This is not a situation created by serious people. So where will the solutions come from?

Well, not from the Democrats or the Republicans. Joe Biden's State of the Union address included many slurs amid the astonishing volume of personal invasions and fine tunings he thinks we need. One slur was the charge that the Republicans want to cut Social Security. The Republicans were outraged. Cries and catcalls! Of course, the Republicans would never think of such a thing.

That's probably true. As Sowell has said, "If the Democrats came up with a plan for all Americans to jump off a thousand-foot cliff tomorrow, some Republicans would come up with an “alternative’ plan in which we would all jump off a 500-foot cliff next week."

How can we escape these numbers?

Limits on Social Security and Medicare are a minor threat to the elderly in this country compared to the disaster of a $116 trillion deficit in 30 years. The evil is not in its control, it's in the mindless pandering that created it. And the insincere and foolish claim that such a deficit will not be interfered with is not open to debate; the question is how it will be interfered with and how much destruction will be reaped from what the incompetents disguised as American leaders have sown.

Diversity: True Only to Itself

The growth in American productivity was sufficient to produce real hourly earnings for high school dropouts in 2017 that were higher than those earned by high school graduates with some college or technical training in 1967. High school graduates in 2017 had higher real hourly earnings than college graduates in 1967, and high school graduates with some college in 2017 earned about as much as people with advanced degrees earned in 1967.--Myth of American Inequality

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World Bank president David Malpas is stepping down.

Mr. Malpass was under particular pressure to turn the bank into another slush fund for financing green-energy boondoggles. Some in the media are crowing, without evidence, that he’s been pushed out after Al Gore and the media climate conformity caucus raked him for comments last year they misconstrued as climate “denialism.”

The critics prefer to ignore the evidence that developing countries have figured out that Western-imposed carbon policies will trap their people in poverty. The danger is that the global climate clique will take the opportunity of Mr. Malpass’s retirement to remake the bank in their image.

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Social Security and Medicare.

Spending on these two programs alone consumes 45 percent of the federal budget. Along with Medicaid, these programs are the drivers of our current and future debt. And to drive home the seriousness of our predicament, note that Medicare and Social Security together face a shortfall of $116 trillion over the next 30 years.

This is not a situation created by serious people.




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Diversity: True Only to Itself

Originally diversity meant exotic, interesting. Nobody hoped for diversity that was, for example, criminal or perverse or insane or degrading. Diversity always had an underlying assumption, that of quality. Diversity always implied an enhancement of one's life or circumstance with "the different," the hard personal view fleshed out. At the worst, it would be spice.

That very element, the element of specialness, was its undoing. Specialness opposes sameness and, while we encourage elitism in our political and thought leaders, we hunt it to ground in us. Diversity changed and became egalitarian in its most destructive way. One could no longer pick and choose diversity, find one edifying or expansive and reject one less so. Diversity became un-judged. Random. When we encounter a community that practices mutilation, we open our hearts and turn our minds away. Like art, the diverse was true only to itself. Everything is of equal value. Equality became sameness. The very lack of judgment.

Diversity is no longer a celebration of human breadth and scope. It is a weapon against quality.

Flogging

Envy plus rhetoric equals “social justice.”--Sowell

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For much of our history, we were indeed one of the freest, most democratic, most “equal” countries in the world. Where we were bad, other countries were (and are) much worse. America was never utopia; it has always been a mix of good and bad, plus and minus. It began as an experiment in letting people run their own country. Not all people, but more than were allowed to have power in England or France, or anywhere else. The experiment worked. But it also meant that law reflected, and had to reflect great waves of popular sentiment. It could never stray too far from the mean. It could express ideals, it could express “enlightened” opinion, but it could never be dramatically better or worse than the values of articulate people. That was its weakness, and also its strength.--Freidman

This is an important observation and demands, demands, the country emphasizes raising the vision and aspirations of its people.

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Reason has an article that discusses the reviews of the climate book Unsettled. It's damning. Here's the gist:

We couldn't find a single negative review of Unsettled that disputed its claims directly or even described them accurately. Many of the reviewers seem to have stopped reading after the first few pages. Others were forced to concede that many of Koonin's facts were correct but objected that they were used in the service of challenging official dogma. True statements were downplayed as trivial or as things everyone knows, despite the extensive parts of Unsettled that document precisely the opposite: that the facts were widely denied in major media coverage and misrepresentations were cited as the basis for major policy initiatives.

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Flogging

In Defense of Flogging by Peter Moskos.
Moskos has a semi-Swiftian thesis: Prisons are so bad, it would be better if we punished convicts with flogging instead of incarceration. I say “semi-Swifitian” because he makes his case so eloquently that you struggle to believe that he’s not serious. The two main flaws: First, Moskos barely mentions one of the strongest arguments for flogging over incarceration: Criminals are impulsive and macho, so front-loaded, humiliating punishments are extra-good ways to deter them. Second flaw: Moskos tries so hard to convince readers that flogging isn’t too harsh that he barely tries to convince readers that flogging is harsh enough. Yet that’s probably the greater concern, at least according to this poll: