"When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day's occupation that is known as the cocktail hour. It marks the lifeward turn. The heart wakens from coma and its dyspnea ends. Its strengthening pulse is to cross over into campground, to believe that the world has not been altogether lost or, if lost, then not altogether in vain.".
~ Bernard DeVoto, from his manifesto to this civilising ritual, 'The Hour'
"Man may be justly proud of his natural endowments ... such as physical beauty, physical strength, a great mind, good health. But all these are merely his materials or his tools; his self-respect must be based, not on these attributes, but on what he does with them....
"If a man says: 'But I realise that my natural endowments are mediocre--shall I then suffer, be ashamed, have an inferiority complex?' The answer is: 'In the basic, crucial sphere of morality and action, it is not your endowments that matter, but what you do with them.' It is here that all men are free and equal, regardless of gifts."
~ Ayn Rand, from her 1945 notes on 'The Moral Basis of Individualism'
"The child has a different relation to his environment from ours. Adults admire their environment. They can remember it and think about it, but the child absorbs it. The things he sees are not just remembered; they form part of his soul. He incarnates in himself all in the world about him that his eyes see and his ears hear."
~ Maria Montessori, from her book The Absorbent Mind.
In an October 2016 editorial, The Atlantic wrote of Donald Trump: “He is a demagogue, a xenophobe, a sexist, a know-nothing, and a liar.” We argued that Trump “expresses admiration for authoritarian rulers, and evinces authoritarian tendencies himself.” Trump, we also noted, “is easily goaded, a poor quality for someone seeking control of America’s nuclear arsenal. He is an enemy of fact-based discourse; he is ignorant of, and indifferent to, the Constitution; he appears not to read.”They remain guilty of understatement.
In retrospect, we may be guilty of understatement.
There was a hope, in the bewildering days following the 2016 election, that the office would temper the man—that Trump, in short, would change.
He has not changed.
This week marks the midway point of Trump’s term. Like many Americans, we sometimes find the velocity of chaos unmanageable. We find it hard to believe, for example, that we are engaged in a serious debate about whether the president of the United States is a Russian-intelligence asset. So we decided to pause for a moment and analyse 50 of the most improbable, norm-bending, and destructive incidents of this presidency to date.
Until capitalists are able and willing to go toe to toe with the Ocasio-Cortezes of the world on morality, she and her kind, whether from the collectivist left or collectivist right, will keep winning, no matter how deadly & disastrous the results.
The current state of political and intellectual conversation is increasingly like the world William Butler Yeats described in his masterpiece, “The Second Coming”:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
Maybe it’s paranoia but it’s been a long time since I’ve felt the thinness of the veneer of civilisation and our vulnerability to a sequence of events that might threaten not just the policy positions I prefer but the very existence of the American experiment.He's right to raise the point.
What disturbs me is how we talk to each other and our unwillingness to give even a modest hearing to the other side. The Trump phenomenon is just one example...
"In the Middle Ages, the Church was the most powerful institution in the western world. In England, the struggle between church and kings would take centuries to resolve. Interestingly, in the end, neither institution came out on top. Today, each is as powerless as the other. As people power emerged, we invented politicians. We're not bright."
~ Jodi Taylor, from her novel A Symphony of Echoes .
"I was born [in the Soviet Union] at the very height of [World War II] when millions of men were slaughtering one another to decide what colour the concentration camps of the future were going to be—brown or red."
~ Vladimir Bukovsky, from his memoir To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter
.[Hat tip Raymond Niles]
"Tell people what capitalism is. Tell them how it works, and how it has worked. Tell them why capitalism is good. That is what's required to change the world.".
~ Yaron Brook & Don Watkins
"We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, ... a truly liberal radicalism. ... The main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the success of the socialists [and fellow travellers] is that it was their courage to be Utopian ... which is daily making possible what only recently seemed utterly remote."
~ Friedrich Hayek, from his Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
"The secular meaning of the Christmas holiday is wider than the tenets of any particular religion: it is good will toward men—a frame of mind which is not the exclusive property (though it is supposed to be part, but is a largely unobserved part) of the Christian religion.
"The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: 'Merry Christmas'—not 'Weep and Repent.' And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form—by giving presents to one’s friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance . . . .
"The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialised. The gift-buying . . . stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decorations put up by department stores and other institutions—the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colours—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only 'commercial greed' could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle."
~ Ayn Rand, in answering the question of whether it is appropriate for an atheist to celebrate Christmas.
"One of the smarter than average swamp creatures that fester under the proportional list system. He was trounced whenever he could be bothered facing the people in a fair election. Along with Palmer, he is a key contributor to destroying the rule of law in this country and replacing it with racial apartheid."
"Not a single redeeming feature as a politician that I ever observed and as for the settlements -well he never ‘settled’ anything just fueled the greed for more and more money for the iwi elite. What a monument to futility.
A man who was never elected – and indeed couldn’t get elected, has been paid more than handsomely to give away billions and not solve a problem!"
"He would do well with settlements, after all he grew in the legal profession because of them. What a wonderful nest egg to return to."
"Finlayson is a smart man.His ego gets the better of him. Basically conferring a Q.C upon himself detracts from his career achievements."
"Given the sweetheart settlement deal he negotiated for Ngai Tahu, it was cheaper for NZ to have Finlayson in Parliament than out of it."He embodies what the great HL Mencken once said about lawyers:
“All the extravagance and incompetence of our ... Government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizens has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we’d be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.”
"A smile starts on the lips. A grin spreads to the eyes. A chuckle comes from the belly. But a good laugh bursts forth from the soul, overflows, and bubbles all around."
~ attrib. Carolyn Birmingham
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"The 'everything bubble' is deflating. The fact that it’s happening relatively slowly shouldn’t blind us to the real threat: The world is dangerously underestimating how hard it’ll be to deal with the fallout once it pops."
~ David Stockman, commenting on the article 'The Bubble’s Losing Air. Get Ready for a Crisis'
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“Play is the first means of development of the human mind, its first effort to make acquaintance with the outward world, to collect original experiences from things and facts, and to exercise the powers of body and mind...
“The Kindergarten is the free republic of childhood...”
~ Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852)
"Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts that make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape, -- he is a shaper of the landscape. In body and mind he is the explorer of nature, the ubiquitous animal, who did not find but at made his home in every environment."
~ Jacob Bronowksi, from his book Ascent of Man .
"'The process of observing the facts of reality and of integrating them into concepts is, in essence, a process of induction. The process of subsuming new instances under a known concept is, in essence, a process of deduction.'
"These brief and to the point sentences [from Ayn Rand's 'Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology'] state not just the two fundamental methods of cognition, but more importantly, the correct roles of induction and deduction in human life.
"And by 'human life,' I mean science as well as everyday life.
"Induction is the process of generalisation, of forming universal concepts based on our observation of particular objects or events. The definition of a single concept states a principle—all humans possess the capacity to reason, for example—and the combination of several or many concepts and principles builds our knowledge of reality and, in some cases, establishes the physical, biological, and human sciences.
"Induction is conceptualisation. From an early age, probably before we can assign words to them, we all practice the inductive formation of universal concepts...
"[Ayn] Rand’s identification describes in general terms the true nature of induction and makes the biological and human sciences as exact and valid as the physical sciences."
~ Jerry Kirkpatrick, from hist post 'On the Correct Roles of Induction and Deduction in Human Life:
Two Sentences from Ayn Rand’s Theory of Concepts'
"One often hears about the Trump administration’s deregulation push. But how real is it? Is the number of regulations rising or falling? One Mercatus Center study found that growth in federal regulations slowed during 2017 ...
"Slower growth is a good thing, but it doesn’t represent 'deregulation.'
"There are many areas where regulation is still increasing [especially] ... foreign investment, immigration paperwork and mail delivery. Three very different types of regulation, with one thing in common. The US government seems increasingly suspicious of the rest of the world. Look for the US to continue taking regulatory steps to close itself off from the rest of the world. I expect [the US] to remain much more open than places like Cuba and North Korea, but less so than places like Canada and Australia.
"Meanwhile, I’m increasingly suspicious of claims that we are in a deregulatory environment..."
~ Scott Sumner, from his post 'Regulation Watch' [Emphasis mine].
"[There may be] an implicit recognition by all parties ... that, although each may have preferences over the others' behaviour, any attempt to impose one person's preferences on the behaviour of another must be predicted to set off reciprocal attempt to have one's own behaviour constrained in a like fashion. An attitude of 'live and let live, ' or mutual tolerance and mutual respect, may be better for all of us, despite the occasional deviance from ordinary standards of common decency.
“Such an attitude would seem to be that of anyone who claimed to hold to democratic and individualistic values, in which each person's preferences are held to account equally with those of others. By contrast, the genuine elitist, who somehow thinks that his or her own preferences are ‘superior to,’ ‘better than, ‘ or ‘more correct’ than those of others, will, of course, try to control the behaviour of everyone else, while holding fast to his or her own liberty to do as he or she pleases.”
~ James Buchanan, from his essay on 'Politics & Meddlesome Preferences'
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”
~ Steve Jobs, Apple CEO[Hat tip Stephen Hicks]
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"Social-justice ideology does everything a religion should. It offers an account of the whole: that human life and society and any kind of truth must be seen entirely as a function of social power structures, in which various groups have spent all of human existence oppressing other groups. And it provides a set of practices to resist and reverse this interlocking web of oppression — from regulating the workplace and policing the classroom to checking your own sin and even seeking to control language itself. I think of non-PC gaffes as the equivalent of old swear words. Like the puritans who were agape when someone said “goddamn,” the new faithful are scandalised when someone says something “problematic.” Another commonality of the zealot then and now: humourlessness.
"And so the young adherents of the Great Awokening exhibit the zeal of the Great Awakening. Like early modern Christians, they punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame, and provide an avenue for redemption in the form of a thorough public confession of sin. “Social justice” theory requires the admission of white privilege in ways that are strikingly like the admission of original sin. A Christian is born again; an activist gets woke....
"[W]e’re mistaken if we believe that the collapse of Christianity in America has led to a decline in religion. It has merely led to religious impulses being expressed by political cults."
~ Andrew Sullivan, from his otherwise risible op-ed 'America's New Religions'
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"The world is a closed system in the way that a piano is a closed system. The instrument has only 88 notes, but those notes can be played in a nearly infinite variety of ways. The same applies to our planet.
"The Earth’s atoms may be fixed, but the possible combinations of those atoms are infinite. What matters, then, is not the physical limits of our planet, but human freedom to experiment and reimagine the use of resources that we have."
~ Marian Tupy, editor of Human Progress, and Professor Gale Pooley from Brigham Young University, quoted in
Allison Ryan's article 'Introducing the Simon Abundance Index: [How] every additional human being
born appears to make resources proportionally more plentiful'
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“Let us live and love, nor give a damn what sour old men say. The sun that sets may rise again, but when our light has sunk into the earth it is gone forever.”
~ Catullus.
"Separating the trading entities into national aggregates allows a variety of fallacious conclusions to be drawn by artful intriguers. Historically such intriguers formed practically an entire 'school' of economic policy now known as mercantilism. In his classic work 'The Wealth of Nations' (1776), Adam Smith exposed many of the errors and misconceptions of this school and argued forcefully for freedom of trade as the policy consistent with maximisation of people’s wealth as a whole rather than augmentation of the intriguers’ wealth at the expense of the general public. As Smith concluded, 'Nothing . . . can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade'.”[Hat tip Cafe Hayek]
~ Robert Higgs, from hist article 'Against the Whole Concept and Construction of the Balance of International Payments'
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It's a real shame, but Sir David has allowed himself to be used as a prophet of doom. Who knows what caused his mind to be sucked into this deviance from his once celebratory view of living creation? The demonisation of CO2 is an evil act against the most important food for life.Even if the doom-mongers were correct about the science, of course, that would say nothing at all about the action to be taken. Bjorn Lomborg for example warns that "strong global climate action would cause far more hunger and food insecurity than climate change itself.” And civilisation itself demands in any case that we take the doom-mongering cautiously.
Before any implication for action can be present, additional information is required.Nevertheless, there is a reason most people sleep far more easily than they should given all the doom-mongering going around -- and there is a very good reason for that: which is the many, many years of fatuous, fat-headed environmental predictions made by a litany of worry-worts and misanthropic headline-hunting doomsayers.
One essential piece of information is the comparative valuation attached to retaining industrial civilisation versus avoiding global warming. If one values the benefits provided by industrial civilisation above the avoidance of the losses alleged to result from global warming, it follows that nothing should be done to stop global warming that destroys or undermines industrial civilisation. That is, it follows that global warming should simply be accepted as a byproduct of economic progress and that life should go on as normal in the face of it.
Modern, industrial civilisation and its further development are values that we dare not sacrifice if we value our material well-being, our health, and our very lives. It is what has enabled billions more people to survive and to live longer and better. Here in the United States it has enabled the average person to live at a level far surpassing that of kings and emperors of a few generations ago.
The foundation of this civilisation has been, and for the foreseeable future will continue to be, the use of fossil fuels.
"Capacity is not the same as generation because intermittent renewables sit around doing nothing so much of the time." ~ Jo Nova, from her post 'Rampant solar, wind growth: Australia increases unreliable energy by 50% in 2018'
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"He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest."
~ Dylan Thomas
"You know, also, as well as I do, what is the great aim of all the governments of the earth: obedience and money. The object [of taxation] is, as the saying goes, to pluck the hen without making it cry out*; but it is the proprietors who cry out, and the government has always preferred to attack them indirectly, because then they do not perceive the harm until after the matter has become law…"
~ French economist A.R.J. Turgot, in a 1766 letter to David Hume on the subject of taxation
* Also translated as: "to so pluck the goose as to procure the largest quantity of feathers with the least possible amount of squealing." For reference to what this means, see Paris this week..
"A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."
~ George Bernard Shaw
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