Guilt by Association

President-elect Donald Trump selected Kimberly Guilfoyle, his son’s fiance, and a former Fox News host, to be the next ambassador to Greece.

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When the DOJ released the hopeful assassin Routh's letter offering a bounty on Trump's life, Bill Barr said he was "gobsmacked" that such an inflammatory letter would be publicized.
The adjective gobsmacked means flabbergasted, astounded, apparently, in reference to the shock effect of being struck in the mouth. this adjective is from:– the noun gob, of Irish-Gaelic and Scottish-Gaelic origin, denoting the mouth;– the adjective smacked, meaning struck, slapped.

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In 2023, the Times of London reported, “The Chinese navy has lost 55 sailors after one of its nuclear-powered submarine [sic] was caught in a trap intended for American and British vessels, leaked intelligence reports”:

The British report, based on defense intelligence seen by the newspaper, said: “Our understanding is death caused by hypoxia [lack of oxygen] due to a system fault on the submarine.

“The submarine hit a chain and anchor obstacle used by the Chinese navy to trap US and allied submarines. This resulted in systems failures that took six hours to repair and surface the vessel. The on-board oxygen system poisoned the crew after a catastrophic failure.”

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Guilt by Association

The Harvard disaster was clearly signaled by earlier events, most notably the 2019 firing of Dean Ronald Sullivan. Sullivan is a noted criminal defense attorney; he was the director of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia and he is the Director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School, he advised President Obama on criminal justice issues, and he represented the family of Michael Brown. He and his wife were the first black Faculty Deans in the history of the college.

Controversy erupted, however, when Sullivan joined Harvey Weinstein’s legal defense team. Student protests ensued. The students argued that they couldn’t “feel safe” if a legal representative of a person accused of abusing women was also serving in a role of student support and mentorship. This is, of course, ridiculous. Defending an individual accused of murder does not imply that a criminal defense attorney condones the act of murder.

Harvard should have educated their students. Harvard should have emphasized the crucial role of criminal defense in American law and history. They should have noted that a cornerstone of the rule of law is the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial, irrespective of public opinion.

Harvard should have pointed proudly to John Adams, a Harvard alum, who defied popular opinion to defend hated British soldiers charged with murdering Americans at the Boston Massacre. (If you wish to take measure of the quality of our times it’s worth noting that Adams won the case and later became president—roughly equivalent to an attorney for accused al-Qaeda terrorists becoming President today.)

Instead of educating its students, Harvard catered to ignorance, bias, and hysteria by removing both Sullivan and his wife from their deanships. Harvard in effect endorsed the idea, as Robby Soave put it, that “serving as legal counsel for a person accused of sexual misconduct is itself a form of sexual misconduct, or at the very least contributes to sexual harassment on campus.” 

Thus Harvard tarred Sullivan and his wife, undermined the rule of law, and elevated the rule of the mob. Claudine Gay, then Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, contributed to the ignorance, bias, and hysteria. (It’s also notable, that Sullivan also criticized Harvard’s handling of the investigation of Roland Fryer as being “deeply flawed and deeply unfair.” This may have been Sullivan’s real sin, as the investigation of Fryer was under Dean Claudine Gay.)

Good and Evil

Mangione reviewed Kaczynski’s book, Industrial Society and Its Future, on Goodreads. He rated it four out of five stars and offered measured praise for it in a public post.

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For the first time in modern American history, young men are now more religious than their female peers. They attend services more often and are more likely to identify as religious.

“We’ve never seen it before,” Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, said of the flip.

Among Generation Z Christians, this dynamic is playing out in a stark way: The men are staying in church, while the women are leaving at a remarkable clip.

Church membership has been dropping in the United States for years. But within Gen Z, almost 40 percent of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared with 34 percent of men.

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Albuquerque is in the top 20 most dangerous cities in the world, per capita.

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1,000 Israeli strikes on Syria last night.

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Good and Evil

The CEO murderer will stimulate a lot of discussion, including moral reflection. Remember Kaczynski had a lot of support from American academics.

Here is an article (the source I can't remember), written about another topic, that has application.

Biden's speech at the UN was a sad farewell. As Israel ramped up its attack on Hezbollah positions in Lebanon, Biden prattled on about his hopes for peace. If possible, he projected a sad, discouraged optimism about a world with unfocused threats. Global warming was mentioned 6 times, Iran twice. The UN was quiet; you could not hear the explosions in Lebanon, the gunfire in Ukraine, or the war engines of China.

We want to think that the line between good and evil is clear and that individuals fall into one camp or another. In The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.”

Because the line between good/evil is not as straightforward as we wish, an essential principle for organizing society is, in F. A. Hayek’s words, to ensure that a “bad man can do least harm.”

Many know these famous words by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”

Those who deny this truth of human nature often believe that giving “good” people – those possessing the right ideology – enough power to control others solves the problem of organizing society.

Solzhenitsyn’s famous line doesn’t appear until page 746, and most people are unaware of the context. The famous sentence begins, “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good…”

Who disclosed this truth to Solzhenitsyn? It was his own experiences in the Gulag.

In the same section of his book, he wrote, “Looking back, I saw that for my whole conscious life I had not understood either myself or my strivings.” He then draws out what he saw in himself:

It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor.

Insightfully, Solzhenitsyn saw the fallacy of using good intentions as a guide to action: “In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments.”

The worst villains can delude themselves into thinking they are doing good. We should not be fooled into believing that freedom can be preserved by relying on good people’s good intentions.

Take an honest look at your stream of thinking and notice how self-interested it is. Yes, notice your thoughts of kindness and generosity toward others, too. But there is no reason for society to trust your good intentions, or mine, with the power to control others.

To find goodness, Solzhenitsyn had first to see his darkness. And then, having done so, a path to goodness opened up: “And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.”

Following his famous sentence about “the line separating good and evil” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains . . . an un-uprooted small corner of evil.”

That the line between good and evil oscillates is a truth Solzhenitsyn expressed repeatedly. In Volume 1, he wrote:

During the life of any heart this line [between good and evil] keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood.

Clearly, Solzhenitsyn wanted us to understand our work is never done. Cultivating our goodness is the work of a lifetime.

In both Volumes 1 and 2, Solzhenitsyn repeats Socrates’s admonition, “’Know thyself.” In Volume 2, he added, “There is nothing that so aids and assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one’s own transgressions, errors, mistakes.”

It’s not only the other guy Solzhenitsyn was writing about. Evil can come through any of us if we don’t work to recognize and choose against it. Solzhenitsyn would say we are deluding ourselves when we think evil is only out there. This is a truth that continues to be vindicated.

Recently, Jonathan Mayo compiled new details of the November 2008 terror attack when ten youthful terrorists from the Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba murdered 164 people in Mumbai, India. Their targets were ordinary Mumbai residents, people at a Jewish Center, and visitors at a famed hotel catering to tourists.

What stood out about the attack is that, in real-time, the ten terrorists were in communication with controllers, messaging them from Pakistan.

Mayo reports that while terrorists were at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, they received messages that the controllers in Pakistan “are furious there is no sign of a fire at the Taj.” The controllers phoned the youthful terrorists: “Nothing is going to happen until you start the fire. When people see the flames they will begin to be afraid. And throw some grenades, my brother. There’s no harm in throwing a few grenades.”

The terrorists in the hotel seemed “overwhelmed by the opulence of the hotel and [told] their handlers: ‘There are computers here with high tech screens! It’s amazing!’ The controller [insisted] they ‘start a proper fire’ immediately.”

After the attack, one terrorist at the train station drove to a police roadblock and said: “Please sir, I have done what I came to do. Please kill me.” The young man told police that “his father, a street seller, sold him to [the terrorist group], telling his son: ‘We’ll have money, we won’t be poor anymore.’”

The line between good and evil, even in the youthful terrorists, was moving in real-time.

Solzhenitsyn’s testimony helps us see that evil cannot be eliminated, but, in his words, “it is possible to constrict it within each person.”

If Solzhenitsyn is correct about the potential for evil existing in each of us, then Thomas Sowell, in his book A Conflict of Visions, has an important warning:

"Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late. Their prospects of growing up as decent, productive people depends on the whole elaborate set of largely unarticulated practices which engender moral values, self-discipline, and consideration for others."

Steven Pinker echoed Solzhenitsyn when he wrote, “Humans are not innately good (just as they are not innately evil), but they come equipped with motives that can orient them away from violence and toward cooperation and altruism.”

It would be a foolish bet to expect that each person will grow up civilized and exercise their moral agency to turn towards good. Human cooperation and flourishing are enabled by moral traditions and the rule of law that constrains evil.

When unconstrained ideology triumphs over rights and morality, we quickly discover how fast evil triumphs over good.

In contrast, the extended social order created by the free market expands our opportunities to cooperate with others, and crucially, accepts human nature for what it is. The more we cooperate, the more we see our well-being depends on others. The thicker the interdependence, the greater the incentives to cultivate the good side of our human nature. (from somewhere)

Johnson on the US and Europe

Japan’s a nursing home, Europe’s a museum, and China’s a jail. --Larry Summers

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Around 420 million years ago, life was predominantly aquatic. It was then that the ancestors of the modern sharks first appeared. So they're older than trees.

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Zelenskyy said 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and 370,000 wounded. That compares with 600,000 dead and wounded reported in Russia.

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So Assad is gone. And apparently, no U.S. intel agency had a clue. Reminiscent of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and Biden's offer to Zelenskyy of sanctuary. Not a clue.

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Johnson on the US and Europe

Boris Johnson recently published an editorial in, of all places, The Daily Mail, discussing the relationship between the economies and the cultures of America and Europe. Here are some of his points.

In the year 2000, the average worker was 8 percent more productive even than the average German worker,

Today the gap is widening, and the average German worker – swaddled with EU laws on workers’ rights – is now 16 percent less productive. As for Britain, the story is even worse. They started the century 18 percent behind. They are now 27 percent behind the Americans.

The US taxpayer provides about 60 percent of the defense budget of the entire 32-strong Nato alliance. To understand the scale of the US commitment, in hardware, NATO currently has about 5,000 fighter and ground attack aircraft – of which about 4,000 come from the US, with the 31 other countries of NATO supplying the rest.

Great Britain plans to push defense spending up to 2.5 percent of GDP; yet most other countries are barely on 2 percent, while the US is spending 3 percent of a vastly greater GDP.

Europe will have to learn from America because there is plainly a link between the culture of freedom – the constitutionally protected freedom of speech and thought – and the American culture of innovation. There is a link between American risk and reward, tax cuts and growth, and deregulation and dynamism.

Why should Americans work all the hours God gives, and take a week’s holiday a year (as many Americans do) to pay for the defense of Europeans who can’t even be bothered to go into the office?

Johnson writes, "We need to reacquire some of the incredible energy and can-do spirit propelling their economy. We may not want their healthcare system or their gun laws. But we would be mad to sneer at the US economic model when it is such a storming success. Above all, we can’t sneer at the American economic model and simultaneously sponge off America."

Two Tales

 

The big difference, however, is that market entities deal with each other only through voluntary transactions, so both sides must agree that they are better off for the transaction to occur. The threat of force stands behind transactions with government entities.--Holcombe

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The British Government sent 470 delegates on a 5,000-mile round trip to the Cop29 climate summit in Azerbaijan.
The delegation, including seven ministers, more than 100 civil servants, and two official videographers prompted allegations of net zero “hypocrisy” against the Government. The UK registered 470 delegates to the summit, according to figures reported by the Mail on Sunday, compared with 405 from the US, 437 from Italy, and 115 from France.

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Two Tales

Modern life has turned over two cases with a strange, common thread: the healthcare murder and the Biden pardon. Both acts, one criminal and shameful, one just shameful, have stimulated peculiar sidebars. Some commentators say, 'the insurance industry is abusive,' the Biden apologists say, 'one must empathize with a father's grief.'

This is not simply an argument that two wrongs make a right, it is a muddying moral equivalence that blunts ethical code. and law. This is the hallmark of vigilanteism.

The vigilante does not demand justice, he demands satisfaction. As such, it is egocentric, and not ethical. Any greater vision is subjugated to the demands of symbolism. This is the uncluttered pre-civilized mind.

Civilization sees the individual as such, not as a representative of some larger concept or group. So Hatfield will always hate McCoy and Montague will hate Capulet. The bigot never bothers to see an individual. Civilization changes that. The individual suddenly has value and is no longer reduced to a symbol or a representative.

The healthcare murderer and the child pardoner sidestep the fragile construct of the law. They sacrifice the law--and us--for a businessman or a relative. They demand a 'bigger picture' that includes those dark pre-civilization days of dehumanizing groupthink. 

Neither is Antigone.

Pearl Harbor

 Pearl Harbor Day. And, in 1988, an earthquake in Armenia killed an estimated 100,000 people

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Pearl Harbor

2,403 Americans were killed in the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941. The Americans then entered World War 11. One could argue that it pushed a hesitant America onto the world stage.

After Pearl Harbor, the country was terrified, especially along the West Coast. The proximity of the attack was exaggerated by the large presence of the American Japanese in California. Since there was no evidence of any Japanese-American involvement in the attack, the argument was made that the Japanese were lying low, waiting to pounce. 

Critical Race Theory. 

Thus, the absence of something was proof it existed.  

Executive Order 9066, ordering the forcible removal of Americans of Japanese descent from the Pacific coast, was signed by the liberal President Roosevelt in 1942. 120,000 American citizens--Americans--were moved out of their homes into squalid camps and ancient Indian reservations.

This is another example of a rule in politics that should caution anyone expecting the government to do the right thing: "When the going gets tough, everyone loses their principles."

Sat Stats

An old and common law on many cities’ books was meant to crack down on houses of prostitution. Today those same laws are used to ban boarding houses or college student housing.

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manqué
adjective
1. that falls short of the goal; unsuccessful or defective
2. potential but unrealized; would be placed after the noun it modifies [a scholar manqué]: also used of a woman, in which case it is spelled 

manˈquée
Ety: after a noun, "that might have been but is not," 1778, from French manqué (fem. manquée), past participle of manquer "to miss, be lacking" (16c.), from Italian mancare, from manco, from Latin mancus "maimed, defective," from PIE *man-ko- "maimed in the hand," from root *man- (2) "hand." Also "defective, spoiled, missing" (1773). Compare obsolete or dialectal mank "maimed, mutilated, defective" (1510s), which seems to be a nativized form of the French word. Modern British slang manky "bad, inferior, defective" (by 1958) might also be from these.
Fascinating pedigree: It is the hypothetical source of/evidence for its existence is provided by: Hittite maniiahh- "to distribute, entrust;" Greek mane "hand," Latin manus "hand, strength, power over; armed force; handwriting," mandare "to order, commit to one's charge," literally "to give into one's hand;" Old Norse mund "hand," Old English mund "hand, protection, guardian," German Vormund "guardian;" Old Irish muin "protection, patronage."
Hittite!!!

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A recent study conducted by researchers from London’s Natural History Museum and the Institute of Philosophy at KU Leuven has strengthened the argument that Neanderthals and modern humans (Homo sapiens) should be classified as distinct species.

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Stats

Average vs. median. According to Federal Reserve data, the average retiree's net worth is $1.79 million. Still, the median net worth for retirees aged 65 to 74 is just $409,900 – less than a quarter of that lofty $1.79 million. And it gets worse for those 75 and older, whose median net worth drops to $335,600.

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Europe accounts for just over 7% of the world’s population, 25% of its economy, and 50% of global social welfare spending.

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Nearly half of American households have no retirement savings at all.

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According to Vanguard data, the average 401(k) balance for people nearing retirement (ages 60–69) is just $182,100.

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Amazon paid $250 million to buy the television rights to The Lord of the Rings from the estate of British author JRR Tolkien who wrote the original books in the 1950s. The six movies by New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson then grossed a combined $5.9 billion.

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California's solar power is not being used. In some cases, power lines in the state don’t have the capacity to take on and deliver energy; in others, generation exceeds customer demand. Either way, California’s grid operator tells solar producers to cut production using price drops or direct orders. According to the Times, oversupply has occasionally gotten so bad in California that the prices go negative, forcing solar plants to pay energy traders to take it off their hands. “

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The opioid epidemic has been ravaging the country for more than a decade, killing hundreds of thousands, and has reduced US male life expectancy by a whole year. But the deaths are declining.

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In June 2020, the Prince of Wales and the head of the annual Davos summit launched an initiative calling for the pandemic to be seen as a chance for what they called a Great Reset of the global economy.
A flashy launch video interspersed images of a world in chaos - a dead killer whale, a hurricane, a kangaroo caught in a fire - with a speech by Prince Charles.
"We have an incredible opportunity to create entirely new sustainable industries," the prince said. "The time to act is now."

The 'program' is vague with some chestnuts such as wealth tax, withdrawal of petroleum financing, and the like. 

Germany has been trying to be on the vanguard.

Woodrow Wilson

Disease X is a mysterious illness circulating in a remote part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Current figures: almost 400 cases and 79 deaths.

Astonishing quote: "Situations like this occur probably several times a year around the world."--Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, who has been tracking the DRC outbreak.

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Fortune tellers licensing in Massachusetts: issued by cities and towns. Requires 1-year residence in the city or town where the license is granted.

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Most common baby names in Great Britain: Muhammad was the top name for baby boys, with Noah dropping to second place after coming in first in 2021 and 2022, followed by Oliver. Olivia was the most popular baby girl's name for the eighth straight year.

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'Black Doves' is the new streaming spy thriller, compared by critics to 'Slow Horses.' While I always like Knightley, the first two installments have been a serious disappointment.  

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Woodrow Wilson

In recent years, biographies by nonacademics have rescued some presidents from progressive academia’s indifference or condescension: John Adams (rescued by David McCullough), Ulysses S. Grant (by Ron Chernow), Calvin Coolidge (by Amity Shlaes). The rehabilitations of those presidents’ reputations have been acts of justice, as is Christopher Cox’s destruction of Woodrow Wilson’s place in progressivism’s pantheon.

In “Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn,” Cox, former congressman and former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, demonstrates that the 28th president was the nation’s nastiest. Without belaboring the point, Cox presents an Everest of evidence that Wilson’s progressivism smoothly melded with his authoritarianism and oceanic capacity for contempt.

His books featured ostentatious initials: “Woodrow Wilson Ph.D., LL.D.” But he wrote no doctoral dissertation for his 18-month PhD. He dropped out of law school; his doctorate of law was honorary. But because of those initials, and because he vaulted in three years from Princeton University’s presidency to New Jersey’s governorship to the U.S. presidency, and because he authored books, he is remembered as a scholar in politics. Actually, he was an intellectual manqué using academia as a springboard into politics.--Will