In “Ghosts of Christmases Past” I recall family gatherings of long ago. “The Passing of Red Brick Schoolhouses and a Way of Life” laments the passing of the schoolhouses of my childhood, along with the innocence that was once a hallmark of non-urban America.

I was reminded of those trips into the past by a post at The Federalist by Nathaniel Blake, “What Good Is Cheaper Stuff If It Comes At The Expense Of Community?”. It prompted me to recall the long-vanished locally-owned businesses that provided groceries, meat, sundries, haircuts, baked goods, hobby supplies, and more. The owners worked in their stores. They knew you, and you knew them. Many of them were neighbors. Their livelihoods depended not only on providing products and services at prices that saved you a trip to the big city — but on their friendliness and reputation for honesty.

Of the many stores of that ilk that I remember from kindergarten until I went to college — 64 to 77 years ago — only one is still in business. It’s even at the same location, though in a new building, and it doesn’t carry the range of hobby supplies (e.g., model kits and collectible stamps) that it did when I shopped there in the 1950s.

Here are the sites as they look now (or looked recently), arrayed roughly in the order in which I first saw them (* indicates original building):

Grocery store and gas station*

Dairy store

Grocery store

Bakery

Grocery store and news stand

Grocery store with ice house in back

Meat market*

Meat market

Grocery store

Barber shop (left)* – Grocery store (right)*

Bakery (and owners’ residence)*

Grocery store (and owners’ residence)*

Grocery store

Hobby store*

Hobby store

Grocery store

Grocery store*

Barber shop – Drugstore (two separate buildings)

Grocery store

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From Cerdic to Charles III

I have updated the post (here) in which I trace the succession of the monarchs of Wessex, England, and the United Kingdom from Cerdic (r. 519-534) to Charles III (r. 2022- ).

The masses aren’t revolting.

Biden’s infamous speech on September 1, in which he derided and defamed half of the electorate, was received poorly by Republicans and independents. It was even given bad marks by a significant minority of Democrats. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that Biden’s standing in the Rasmussen Reports Presidential Tracking Poll hasn’t budged since the morning of the day on which Biden spoke. I am unaware of any development that might have offset the reaction to Biden’s speech.

I can only conclude that most voters are really indifferent to the aim of the speech: to endorse and encourage the shaming, shunning, and suppression of anyone who utters any kind of disagreement with leftist wokeism.

Indifference to fascism enables the tightening of its grip on nation.

For the victims of Cleotha Abston and his ilk.

Cleotha Abston, as you must know by now, is the “suspected” murdere of Eliza Fletcher. It is a sign of the times that as I publish this post neither name appears in a search of Wikipedia, that leftist propaganda outlet. Eventually, Wikipedia will publish something about Abston’s abominable record and heinous crimes, but with due reference to his “underprivileged” background, or some such horse***.

Paul Compos, writing at The New Republic some years ago, celebrated “The American Justice System at Its Best“:

[I]t’s reasonable to argue that the acquittal of Casey Anthony … represent[s] … the system working as it should. But accepting that argument requires acknowledging deep imperfections that our legal system must tolerate, even when it does exactly what it’s supposed to do.

The most disturbing of these inevitable imperfections is a product of our supposed commitment to the principle that we prefer a large number—whether it’s 10, 50, or 100, the precise number is never clearly stated—of guilty people going free to the conviction of an innocent defendant. That is the practical significance of requiring the state to prove guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt”—a standard that, interestingly, the system always avoids defining in any but the most general, non-statistical terms….

[In Anthony’s case] The state proved beyond a reasonable doubt that a two-year-old child was murdered, and that her mother was, at the least, a deeply irresponsible parent with a propensity to lie to authorities. The prosecution also demonstrated, in my view, that it is far more likely than not that Anthony committed the crime. But I also believe the jury’s verdict was correct….

The case against Anthony was largely circumstantial, buttressed by arguably—yet only arguably—strong forensic evidence. But the prosecution was hampered by its inability to provide a compelling narrative explaining either how Caylee Anthony was killed or why her mother purportedly murdered her. This failure was not, as far as we know, a product of prosecutorial incompetence. The hard truth is that it is extremely difficult to successfully prosecute a murder under these kinds of circumstances—and the harder truth is that we are supposedly committed to the principle that this is, on the whole, a good thing.

“We”, if you include me and millions of others, are certainly not committed to the principle to which Compos refers. That principle is stated in the dictum of the influential English jurist, William Blackstone:

Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

“n” — the number of guilty persons — has increased since the late 1700s, when Blackstone wrote.

Alexander “Sasha” Volokh offers some useful perspective:

Charles Dickens generously endorsed a value of n = “hundreds” for capital cases, and not just “that hundreds of guilty persons should escape,” but that they should escape “scot-free.” 99 Dickens was, in fact, so generous that hundreds of guilty persons escaping scot-free was not only better than one innocent person suffering — it was even better “than that the possibility of any innocent man or woman having been sacrificed, should present itself, with the least appearance of reason, to the minds of any class of men!” 100….

Of course, such blithe invocation could easily lead too far down the road to “inconsiderate folly” and “pestiferous nonsense.” As one author noted, there is “nothing so dangerous as a maxim”: 107

Better that any number of savings-banks be robbed than that one innocent person be condemned as a burglar! Better that any number of innocent men, women, and children should be waylaid, robbed, ravished, and murdered by wicked, wilful, and depraved malefactors, than that one innocent person should be convicted and punished for the perpetration of one of this infinite multitude of crimes, by an intelligent and well-meaning though mistaken court and jury! Better any amount of crime than one mistake in well-meant endeavors to suppress or prevent it! 108….

Jeremy Bentham, founder of utilitarianism, warned against the warm fuzzy feeling that comes from large values of n:

We must be on guard against those sentimental exaggerations which tend to give crime impunity, under the pretext of insuring the safety of innocence. Public applause has been, so to speak, set up to auction. At first it was said to be better to save several guilty men, than to condemn a single innocent man; others, to make the maxim more striking, fix the number ten; a third made this ten a hundred, and a fourth made it a thousand. All these candidates for the prize of humanity have been outstripped by I know not how many writers, who hold, that, in no case, ought an accused person to be condemned, unless evidence amount to mathematical or absolute certainty. According to this maxim, nobody ought to be punished, lest an innocent man be punished. 128 ….

James Fitzjames Stephen suggested that Blackstone’s maxim

resembles a suggestion that soldiers should be armed with bad guns because it is better that they should miss ten enemies than that they should hit one friend. . . . Everything depends on what the guilty men have been doing, and something depends on the way in which the innocent man came to be suspected. 134….

The story is told of a Chinese law professor, who was listening to a British lawyer explain that Britons were so enlightened, they believed it was better that ninety-nine guilty men go free than that one innocent man be executed. The Chinese professor thought for a second and asked, “Better for whom?” 238

That is the question: Better for whom?

It is certainly better for the guilty, who may go on to claim more victims. But it certainly is not better for those new victims.

A pox on Blackstone and his modern descedants.

Be careful what you wish for.

William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is quoted often these days, especially the line “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”. And with good reason, given the maelstrom of strife and lunacy in which the nation and the world seem to be swirling.

Science and mathematics are in the grip of irrational forces — the academic-media-information technology-corporate élites who have swallowed “wokeness” hook, line, and sinker. The same élites are responsible for the wholesale violation of immigration laws; the advancement of shiftless, violent, and less-intelligent citizens (and non-citizens) at the expense of blameless others; the risible belief that one’s sex is “assigned at birth”, to justify self-destructive and child-destructive gender-shifting; the repudiation of America’s past (the great with the inglorious); the suppression or destruction of the religious, social, and economic freedoms that have served all Americans well; the blatant theft of a presidential election; and much more that is equally distressing to contemplate.

Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919, in the aftermath of what was then the world’s most destructive war and in the midst of the pandemic known as the Spanish flu, which was far more lethal than the one of recent years that was prolonged and made more destructive by government actors in league with the information-media comples. It was a time of moral and physical exhaustion.

What is most remarkable about Yeats’s poem is its prescient second stanza:

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

And thus did those “rough beasts” Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese warlords — all “men on horseback” — emerge to take advantage of the moral and physical exhaustion of the time.

No such person is now on the horizon in America, though the élites feared that Trump might be that man. But if the maelstrom continues to swirl, a man on horseback will emerge, either from within or from without. In the latter case, given the feckless leadership in America, the man on horseback is likely to ride out of China, perhaps accompanied by a Russian.

And given a choice between a man or horseback and the élites who have corrupted America and who pamper the rabble, the man on horseback will be welcomed with open arms by those who are suffering at the hands of the élites. And the élites themselves will accept the inevitable, in the vain hope of surviving the whirlwind that they have sown.

All the more reason for a national divorce, to separate at least part of the country from élite control, to give predators within their just desserts, and to raise arms against predators without.

It can be complex and arcane, but so is astrology.

“Science” is a daunting concept to the uninitiated, which is to say, almost everyone. Because scientific illiteracy is rampant, advocates of policy positions — scientists and non-scientists alike — often are able to invoke “science” wantonly, thus lending unwarranted authority to their positions.

WHAT IS SCIENCE?

Science is knowledge, but not all knowledge is science. A scientific body of knowledge is systematic; that is, the granular facts or phenomena which comprise the body of knowledge are connected in patterned ways. Those patterns should extend to as yet unobserved phenomena, and if they do not, they should be re-examined and re-tested.

Science is not a matter of “consensus”. Science is a matter of rigorously testing hypotheses against facts, and doing it openly so that every can inspect the facts and the methods used to derive conclusions from them.

Imagine the state of physics today if Galileo had not questioned Aristotle’s theory of gravitation, if Newton had been not extended and generalized Galileo’s work, if Einstein had deferred to Newton, and if Einstein’s work on gravitation had not been openly tested.

The effort to “deny” a prevailing or popular theory is as old as science. There have been “deniers” in the thousands, each of them responsible for advancing some aspect of knowledge. Not all “deniers” have been as prominent as Einstein (consider Dan Schectman, for example), but each is potentially as important as Einstein.

It is hard for scientists to rise above their human impulses. Einstein, for example, so much wanted quantum physics to be deterministic rather than probabilistic that he said “God does not play dice with the universe.” To which Nils Bohr replied, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.” But the human urge to be “right” or to be on the “right side” of an issue does not excuse anti-scientific behavior, such as that of so-called scientists who have become invested in the hypothesis that human activity has been the main cause of warmin since 1850, and that it will drive temperatures to destructive heights (a.k.a. anthropogenic global warming, or AGW).

There are many so-called scientists who subscribe to AGW without having done relevant research. Why? Because AGW is the “in” thing, and they do not wish to be left out. This is the stuff of which “scientific consensus” is made. If you would not buy a make of automobile just because it is endorsed by a celebrity who knows nothing about automotive engineering, why would you “buy” AGW just because it is endorsed by a herd of so-called scientists who have never done research that bears directly on it? Why would you “buy” AGW from a “team” of so-called scientists who specialize in hiding their data and methods and adjusting (F the temperature record to fit their hypothesis about AGW? And why would you “buy” AGW at all, given the fact (conveniently unknown to or hidden by the media), that the models which predict dire climatic consequence have been disproved? Continued belief in such models isn’t science, it’s an emotional attachment to a totemic object. (For much more, see this and this.)

There are two lessons to take from this. The first is  that no scientific hypothesis is ever proven, though if tested stringently enough it may rise to the status of theory. All that means is that the theory is the best explanation of phenomon (or set of related phenomena) until a better theory comes along.

The second lesson is that scientists are human and therefore fallible. It is in the best tradition of science to question their claims. Here’s a stark example of why that is so:

The universe shouldn’t exist — at least according to a new theory.

Modeling of conditions soon after the Big Bang suggests the universe should have collapsed just microseconds after its explosive birth, the new study suggests.

“During the early universe, we expected cosmic inflation — this is a rapid expansion of the universe right after the Big Bang,” said study co-author Robert Hogan, a doctoral candidate in physics at King’s College in London. “This expansion causes lots of stuff to shake around, and if we shake it too much, we could go into this new energy space, which could cause the universe to collapse.”

Physicists draw that conclusion from a model that accounts for the properties of the newly discovered Higgs boson particle, which is thought to explain how other particles get their mass; faint traces of gravitational waves formed at the universe’s origin also inform the conclusion.

Of course, there must be something missing from these calculations.

“We are here talking about it,” Hogan told Live Science. “That means we have to extend our theories to explain why this didn’t happen.” [Christian Science Monitor, June 24, 2014, dead link]

No kidding!

If you think “the science is settled” about anything, think again, long and hard.

THE ROLE OF MATHEMATICS AND STATISTICS IN SCIENCE

Mathematics and statistics are not sciences, despite their vast and organized complexity. They offer ways of thinking about and expressing knowledge, but they are not knowledge. They are languages that enable scientists to converse with each other and with outsiders who are fluent in the same languages.

Expressing a hypothesis in mathematical terms may lend the hypothesis a scientific aura. But a hypothesis couched in mathematics (or its verbal equivalent) is not a scientific one unless (a) it can be tested against observable facts by rigorous statistical methods, (b) it is found, consistently, to accord with those facts, and (c) the introduction of new facts does not require adjustment or outright rejection of the hypothesis. If the introduction of new facts requires the adjustment of a hypothesis, then it is a new hypothesis, which must be tested against new facts, and so on.

This “inconvenient fact” — that an adjusted hypothesis is a new hypothesis —  is ignored routinely, especially in the application of regression analysis to a data set for the purpose of quantifying relationships among variables. If a “model” thus derived does a poor job when applied to data outside the original set, it is not an uncommon practice to combine the original and new data and derive a new “model” based on the combined set. This practice (sometimes called data-mining) does not yield scientific theories with predictive power; it yields information (of dubious value) about the the data employed in the regression analysis. Regression is a way of predicting what is already known with great certainty.

A science may be descriptive rather than mathematical. In a descriptive science (e.g., plant taxonomy), particular phenomena sometimes are described numerically (e.g., the number of leaves on the stem of a species), but the relations among various phenomena are not reducible to mathematics. Nevertheless, a predominantly descriptive discipline will be scientific if the phenomena within its compass are connected in patterned ways.

NON-SCIENCE, SCIENCE, AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE

Non-scientific disciplines can be useful, whereas some purportedly scientific disciplines verge on charlatanism. Thus, for example:

• History, by my reckoning, is not a science. But a knowledge of history is valuable, nevertheless, for the insights it offers into the influence of human nature on the outcomes of economic and political processes. I call the lessons of history “insights”, not scientific relationships, because history is influenced by so many factors that it does not allow for the rigorous testing of hypotheses.

• Physics is a science in most of its sub-disciplines, but there are some (e.g., cosmology and certain interpretations of quantum mechanics) where it passes into the realm of speculation. It is informed, fascinating speculation to be sure, but speculation all the same. It avoids being pseudo-scientific only because it might give rise to testable hypotheses.

• Economics is a science only to the extent that it yields valid, statistical insights about specific microeconomic issues (e.g., the effects of laws and regulations on the prices and outputs of goods and services). The postulates of macroeconomics, except to the extent that they are truisms, have no demonstrable validity. (See, for example, my treatment of the Keynesian multiplier.) Macroeconomics is a pseudo-science.

• If there is an ultimate pseudo-science it is exemplified in Marxism, the so-called science of human development in which the “science” (a cobbled-together set of hypotheses) conveniently predicts what the author wished it to predict.

CONCLUSION

There is no such thing as “science” writ large; that is, no one may appeal, legitimately, to “science” in the abstract. A particular discipline may be a science, but it is a science only to the extent that it comprises a factual body of knowledge and testable hypothoses, some of which may graduate to the status of theories while remaining fair game for further testing.

For the reasons adduced in this post (and given fuller treatment here), scientists who claim to “know” that there is no God are not practicing science when they make that claim. They are practicing the religion that is known as atheism. The existence or non-existence of God is beyond testing, at least by any means yet known to man.

Control freaks are always with us.

“The socialist calculation debate” is a provocative post by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. Cowen links to a review he wrote of G.C. Archibald’s Information, Incentives and the Economics of Control: A Reexamination of the Socialist Calculation Debate. The jacket flap says:

This book examines methods for controlling or guiding a sector of the economy that do not require all the apparatus of economic planning or rely on the vain hope of sufficiently “perfect” competition, but instead rely entirely on the self-interest of economic agents and voluntary contract. The methods involved require trial-and-error steps in real time, with the target adjusted as the results of each step become known. The author shows that the methods are equally applicable to industries that are wholly privately owned, wholly nationalized, mixed or labor-managed.

The suggestion seems to be that one can emulate the outcomes that would be produced by competitive markets — if not something “better” — by writing rules that, if followed, would mimic the behavior of competitive markets. The problem with that suggestion — as I understand it — is that someone outside the system must make the rules to be followed by those inside the system.

And that’s precisely where socialist planning and regulation always fail. At some point not very far down the road, the rules will not yield the outcomes that spontaneous behavior would yield. Why? Because better rules cannot emerge spontaneously from rule-driven behavior. (It’s notable that the book’s index lists neither Hayek nor spontaneous order.)

Where, for instance, is there room in the socialist or regulatory calculus for a rule that allows for unregulated monopoly? Yet such an “undesirable” phenomenon can yield desirable results by creating “exorbitant” profits that invite competition (sometimes from substitutes) and entice innovation. (By “unregulated” I don’t mean that a monopoly should be immune from laws against force and fraud, which must apply to all economic actors.)

I suppose exogenous rules are all right if you want economic outcomes that accord with those rules. But such rules aren’t all right if you want economic outcomes that actually reflect the wants of consumers.

It reminds me of the Turing test:

The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine’s capability to perform human-like conversation. Described by Alan Turing in the 1950 paper “Computing machinery and intelligence“, it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with two other parties, one a human and the other a machine; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. It is assumed that both the human and the machine try to appear human. In order to keep the test setting simple and universal (to explicitly test the linguistic capability of some machine), the conversation is usually limited to a text-only channel.

And so, the machine might — sometimes — emulate human behavior, but only then if it can engage in an interaction that’s limited to textual conversation. And that’s as far as it goes. The machine cannot be human, nor can it emulate the many, many other aspects of human behavior.

If you want to interact with a human, don’t talk to a rule-based computer. If you want an economy that produces outcomes desired by humans, don’t rely on an economy that’s run by the equivalent of rule-based computer. Why settle for a machine when you can have the real thing?

Of course, the whole point of socialist planning is to produce outcomes that are desired by planners. Those desires reflect planners’ preferences, as influenced by their perceptions of the outcomes desired by certain subsets of the populace. The immediate result may be to make some of those subsets happier, but at a great cost to everyone else and, in the end, to the favored subsets as well. A hampered economy produces less for everyone.

Spiked and The Wall Street Journal have the answer.

My answer to the question posed by the title is Biden (and his puppeteers, enablers, sycophants, and far too many Democrats).

Tom Slater, editor of Spiked, agrees with me:

Since [Biden] came to power he has made tackling ‘domestic terrorism’ a priority. In June 2021, his administration published the first-ever national strategy for tackling domestic terrorism, pledging new resources to fight this ill-defined threat…. [I]t is striking that this Democratic-led clampdown on extremism was sparked not by, say, the racist Charleston church shooting at the tailend of the Obama years, but by a big, dumb riot at which the only person shot was a Trump supporter….

… Some have criticised Biden for not introducing a full-blown domestic-terror law, an idea he floated at the beginning of his presidency. Perhaps in response to these criticisms, a new Justice Department unit to counter domestic terrorism was announced in January. Still, the atmosphere this has all created has had a chilling effect – not just on the activities of certifiable extremists, but also on dissenters more broadly. Contrary to various denials by attorney general Merrick Garland, FBI agents were reportedly even sent to investigate parents who were protesting against school boards over critical race theory and mask mandates being pushed on their kids.

The shock of Trump’s election, and with it the revelation that millions of Americans don’t agree with or much like the DC set, seems to have legitimised censorship in the minds of the Democratic elites…. Even before Biden came to power, the spurned elites were pushing for Trumpist voices to be silenced, often piling pressure on private actors to do their bidding. The prime example was Trump himself, who was kicked off the main social-media platforms after ‘January 6’. While the Capitol riot was the excuse, the mass deplatforming of Trump followed years of the Democratic elites demanding he be censored. And of course there was the Hunter Biden laptop story, an explosive New York Post scoop published in the run-up to the 2020 election, alleging corruption on the part of both Joe Biden and his crack-smoking son, Hunter. Twitter and Facebook suppressed the story as ‘intelligence experts’ reflexively dubbed it Russian misinformation. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed last week that Facebook’s suppression of the story followed a visit from FBI officers, who warned the company that a dump of Russian misinfo was on its way. When it arrived, the Hunter laptop story seemed to fit the bill, Zuckerberg said.

This revelation is worth dwelling on for a moment, particularly in light of Biden’s latest comments about the MAGA threat to freedom and democracy. Here we had agents of the American security state essentially leaning on Big Tech firms to censor certain content. As a consequence, a story that could well have influenced the 2020 election result was expunged from much of the digital public square, while Democratic politicians and former intelligence chiefs egged Big Tech on. If that’s not an authoritarian threat to democracy, I don’t know what is. In Twitter’s case, users were banned from sharing the link at all and the Post, America’s oldest daily newspaper, was locked out of its account. All of this utterly explodes the old deflection about Big Tech censorship – that it is just private companies doing as they please – and shows us how destructive this fusion of the security state, sections of the political class and big business is in American life today. Dissent can be crushed with incredible speed and efficiency, while the feds and the politicians can keep their hands clean.

The electoral demise of Trump has not sated this appetite for censorship one bit. Democrats continue to use the power of their offices and allied corporate media to try to limit the scope of debate. Tech CEOs continue to be hauled before Congress every year or so to be berated by Democrats, upset at the slow progress in silencing people they dislike. Leading House Democrats have even taken to writing to cable providers, demanding to know why they are still carrying right-wing channels like Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN – a move condemned by Brendan Carr, commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, as ‘legislating by letterhead’.

This is a recurring story of the Trump years. The Donald says or does something authoritarian or anti-democratic and then his infuriated opponents show him how it’s really done. Where he is showy and incompetent, they are brutally effective. And while he might have some bands of conspiratorial protesters on his side, his opponents have broad swathes of Big Tech, the corporate media and the US security state. They also have the White House, which makes Joe Biden’s fearmongering the other night about the threat posed to the republic by the MAGA-hatted hordes even more paranoid and ridiculous. America feels like it is caught between competing authoritarianisms. But right now, one is infinitely more threatening than the other.

Infnitely is the right word, given the combined power of the Democrat-controlled federal government and its allies in Big Tech, the corporate world generally, the governments of most major urban and suburban areas, the media, universities, and the public education indoctrination industry.

The Wall Street Journal, courtesy of Tom Smith, is also in fine form:

If there are fascists in America these days, they are apt to be found among the tribes of the left. They are Mr. Biden and his people (including the lion’s share of the media), whose opinions have, since Jan. 6, 2021, hardened into absolute faith that any party or political belief system except their own is illegitimate—impermissible, inhuman, monstrous and (a nice touch) a threat to democracy. The evolution of their overprivileged emotions—their sentimentality gone fanatic—has led them, in 2022, to embrace Mussolini’s formula: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Or against the party. (People forget, if they ever knew it, that both Hitler and Mussolini began as socialists). The state and the Democratic Party must speak and act as one, suppressing all dissent. America must conform to the orthodoxy—to the Chinese finger-traps of diversity-or-else and open borders—and rejoice in mandatory drag shows and all such theater of “gender.” Meantime, their man in the White House invokes emergency powers to forgive student debt and their thinkers wonder whether the Constitution and the separation of powers are all they’re cracked up to be.

Adolf Hitler, 1935:

Joe Biden, 2022:

What happened to summer vacation?

In days of yore, school stayed in session until mid-June and didn’t resume until after Labor Day. In fact, my college was on the quarter system, and classes didn’t resume until late September.

Does anyone know why, in most of the country, school now ends in early May and resumes in August, sometimes early August? It doesn’t make sense to me because (1) there’s still cool, rainy weather in May, (2) there’s still a lot of summer left after school resumes.

There are explanations for this idiocy (e.g., here), but I find them circular, unpersuasive, and rather like explanations of how the tail wags the dog. The only one that seems plausible is the avoidance of semester-ending exams after Christmas break. That’s easily avoided by doing why my college did: break the school year into quarters instead of semester.

But “educators” are herd-like in their behavior. Denying kids a real summer is just another “thing” that has become de rigeur, like indoctrinating kids in Marxism and gender-fluidity.

It’s an ugly sight.

Going back to 1946, the first year of peace after the end of World War II, the history of the consumer price index looks like this:

Year-over-year inflation looks like this:

Year-over-year inflation in 1946-48, 1973-75, and 1979-81 was higher than the recent rate of inflation. But the recent rate of change in inflation is higher than it has been since the end of World War II. (See the slope of the curve in the first graph.)

From January 1946 to January 2021, the annualized rate of inflation was 3.6 — a rate that includes the aforementioned periods of high inflation (reaching 19.7 percent, year-over-year). From July 1983 (the end of the Fed-induced recession that tamed inflation) to January 2021, the annualized rate of inflation was 2.6 percent.

From that low-inflation base, the rate of inflation jumped to 8.7 percent (annualized) for the period from January 2021 to July 2022. The rate may be lower than it was in earlier high-inflation periods, but it is high enough to throw the economy for a loop.

First, according to the equation that I derived here, a sustained increase of 6 percentage points would reduce the rate of growth in real GDP by 1 percentage point a year. That would be quite a blow to an economy that has slowed to a real growth rate of about 2 percent a year:

Then, throw in the lingering effects of futile and economically devastating government-imposed measures to combat COVID and to restrict the production and use of fossil fuels. Mix those ingredients with renewed enthusiasm for regulation and higher corporate and individual income taxes and you have a perfect setup for continued stagnation if not a prolonged recession.

That’s on top of the mega-depression in which America has been mired for more than a century.

Feeling better now that Trump has been replaced by an anti-business, anti-growth president?

Cheaper gas is evidently more important than liberty.

For many years I have measured the popularity of presidents, beginning with Obama and continuing with Trump and Biden. My yardstick is a tracking poll of likely voters conducted by Rasmussen Reports*. I derive from the published statistics a number that I call the enthusiasm ratio. It is the percentage of likely voters expressing strong approval of the incumbent president as a fraction of the percentage of likely voters expressing either approval or disapproval. That is, the ratio omits likely voters who express neither approval nor disapproval, and focuses on strong approval rather than mere approval.

Here’s the record of enthusiasm ratios for Obama (first term), Trump, and Biden:

Two observations (among many possible ones):

• Trump overcame the Russia hoax and left Obama in the dust. But the Marxist media will never admit it.

• Biden was headed in the right direction (toward zero) until June 2022, when the price of gasoline began to recede. That’s on a par with praise for Hitler because he liked dogs and children.

---

* I use this poll because of the strong record of Rasmussen Reports, which has been accused of pro-Republican bias because its polls are less biased toward Democrats than most other polls, and therefore generally more accurate.

Revolutionaries don’t need no rights.

Pierre Lemieux of Econlib says that “[a]n individual right of revolution follows from the primacy of the individual over the collective”….

To which I say this:

Lemiuex’s statement is too general. An individual may not violate group norms with impunity. Which norms, you may ask? Let’s start with the obvious one: the prohibition of killing that isn’t in self-defense. There are many more in the same category, that is, norms which work to the advantage of all members of the group (except, obviously, the renegades who wish to violate them). In the case of unjustified killing (murder), the murderer has committed an act of rebellion against a group norm, an act for which he will be punished unless he can flee to a safe haven.

What if a norm is a religious one, like praying at certain times of the day in a group setting, where absence or obvious abstention will be noted? Repeated violations of the norm, despite warnings, would be a kind of rebellion. It might even be on a par with murder in the traditions of the group.

So, where does group primacy give way to individual primacy? With murder, with grievous bodily harm, with theft, with extra-marital sex, with non-observance of traditional rituals? Or, to put it another way, where is the dividing line between an anti-social act (murder, etc.) and a justifiable act of rebellion? Those are the hard questions.

Professor Lemieux, in a gracious reply to my comment on his post (a comment that is essentially the same as the three preceding paragraphs), notes that Hayek had answered my objection. According to Professor Lemieux, Hayek’s position was that the group norms “to be enforced by law are only those those on which the existence of the whole social order depends” (i.e., societally essential norms).

I agree, in principle (and have elsewhere made the same point), but that still leaves me with the view that societally essential norms aren’t necessarily the same across societies. And to the extent that there are different essential norms within the United States, which is far from being one society, there is good reason to consider seriously a national divorce. It would be a more constructive move than a rebellion. The idea of rebellion attracts too many foolish hot-heads and would be a good excuse for overt suppression of all who dare dissent from “wokeism”, and leftism generally.

Neither one nor the other.

Eugene Volokh, patriarch of The Volokh Conspiracy, repeats a pointless exercise that he imposes on his readers from time to time. It’s a lecture about whether the United States is a democracy or a republic. His pedantry is misdirected because he is writing about the superficial form of governance under which Americans suffer or delight, depending on their political preferences.

The United States is in fact a bureaucratic a-theocracy that operates under the aegis of an anti-democratic oligarchy to advance the harmful credo of that oligarchy and the purported interests of the constituencies that it must placate in order to retain power.

Further, this arrangement, being so far from the democratic republic envisioned by the Framers, is always on the cusp of collapse as long as it depends on actual democracy. The oligarchy therefore actively seeks ways in which to maintain the semblance of democracy while subverting so as to obtain power in perpetuity.

There is a train of evidence for the latter proposition in the events of the past several years — the attempt to rig the election of 2016 by the creation of a hoax that was supposed to cripple Trump’s candidacy; the attempt to reverse (“deny”) the outcome of that election by a sham investigation; the use of that investigation and other sham evidence to impeach the Trump; the rigging of the election of 2020 through a conspiracy to suppress information, the privatization of election processes, the virtual stuffing of ballot boxes, and other forms of chicanery; the continuing effort to discredit the Trump so that he can’t return to power; and the overarching effort to shame, shun, and suppress anyone who expresses support for Trump or opposition to the oligarchy’s credo.

Not into the sunset, unfortunately.

This is the seventh and final entry in a series of recycled posts about David Brooks (mostly) and Bret Stephens (once), house “conservatives” at The New York Times. The original posts were published from 2009 through 2019. But I have detected no change in the dynamic duo’s faux conservatism since I stopped wasting pixels on them.

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Brooks was unhinged by the election of Donald Trump. He just couldn’t understand it, even though he’s supposedly a conservative. But being a conservative on the payroll of The New York Times means being more polite to left-wingers than Paul Krugman is to conservatives and libertarians.

So here he was, in full flight:

If your social circles are like mine, you spent Tuesday night swapping miserable texts. Not all, but many of my friends and family members were outraged, stunned, disgusted and devastated….

I was on PBS trying to make sense of what was happening while trying to text various people off the ledge….

Populism of the Trump/Le Pen/Brexit variety has always been a warning sign, a warning sign that there is some deeper dysfunction in our economic, social and cultural systems….

Trump’s bigotry, dishonesty and promise-breaking will have to be denounced. We can’t go morally numb. But he needs to be replaced with a program that addresses the problems that fueled his ascent.

After all, the guy will probably resign or be impeached within a year. The future is closer than you think. [“The View from Trump Tower”, The New York Times, November 11, 2016]

Social circles? I ain’t got no frigging social circles. I’ve got family and friends. Only The Crust of Manhattan, Vail, and San Francisco have social circles. Where I grew up a social circle was several boys huddled around a game of marbles.

Which just goes to show you what a clueless twit David Brooks is.

Later —

It’s hard to resist a pot-shot at a sitting duck, which is what Brooks resembled in his encomium to the “liberal world order” (which is the subtext of this post and this one). Specifically, Brooks wrote tearfully that

Americans take a dark view of human nature and withdraw from the world. Wolves like Putin and Xi fill the void and make bad things happen, confirming the dark view and causing even more withdrawal.

Americans (conservatives, at least) rightly take a dark view of human nature, but what does that have to do with “withdrawing from the world”? What serious (conservative) Americans want isn’t withdrawal, it is two connected things: security from military blackmail and defense of legitimate overseas interests, the most important of which is trade with other countries (on legitimate terms).

Those things don’t require meddling in other people’s business, which is what most Americans rightly reject. They do require robust military forces, and a demonstrated willingness to apply them when Amercans’ vital interests are at stake.

Brooks, in his usual way, omitted the obvious and correct view of what (most) Americans want because he is “conservative” only by the standards of The New York Times.

Hitler and Stalin couldn’t have improved on it.

Scapegoat and suppress.

Make sure that the main scapegoat — the “dangerous” political enemy — is discredited by years of false stories, false testimony, baseless prosecutions, and a conspiracy between government officials and his political enemies.

Then scapegoat his supporters. Then scapegoat anyone who defends him or his supporters in any way. Then scapegoat anyone who defends his policies, especially the ones that were intended to make America stronger and more prosperous and less beholden to the fascistic regime that has slowly but surely taken over the central government.

Scapegoat everyone who makes a stand against the extreme policies of the current administration. Throw some of them in jail as an object lession. Call all of them fascists and domestic terrorists (classic acts of psychological projection). Conspire with Big Tech and the “woke” who have infiltrated big business, the academy, and public education to shun, shame, and silence anyone who doesn’t toe the party line.

It makes me sick. So sick that I’m going to keep on doing what little I can do to fight it, which is to glow like a candle in the darkness of the coming oppression.

Will there be a civil war? Biden is trying to stoke violence so that he has an excuse to crack down on those who oppose him with all of the considerable force at his disposal. Don’t fall for it. Stay calm, keep up the opposition, and keep it peaceful or you’ll walk right into Biden’s trap.

If we, the true lovers of liberty, can keep our heads and stay the course, there’s still a chance to realize the only hope for liberty: a national divorce.