"This past June, Trump hinted he had a book in the works. 'I’m writing like crazy anyway, however, and when the time comes, you’ll see the book of all books,' Trump said in a statement after news broke that Pence landed a seven-figure book deal with Simon & Schuster, something that ... had been 'grating on' Trump. Nearly six months later, all that 'writing like crazy' has produced … a picture book."
Children these days are inundated with diagnoses for “bad” behaviour: if they haven’t got major depression they have bipolar disorder, or ADHD; if they don’t endure infrequent counselling then they’re prescribed therapy or medication. Or all three.
Too many diagnoses are bogus, that’s true, But far too many are not, and too few parents and clinicians have any clue about causes.
So what’s happening? Both parents and clinicians may be “barking up the wrong tree” says psychologist Victoria Dunckley, who suggests too many of both have refused to look at the bloody obvious.
That is, they’re trying to treat what looks like a textbook case of mental disorder, but failing to rule out and address the most common environmental cause of such symptoms—everyday use of electronics.
Time and again, [says Dunckley] I’ve realised that regardless of whether there exists any “true” underlying diagnoses, successfully treating a child with mood dysregulation today requires methodically eliminating all electronics use for several weeks—an “electronics fast”—to allow the nervous system to “reset.” … But why is the electronic fast intervention so effective? Because it reverses much of the physiological dysfunction produced by daily screen time. Children’s brains are much more sensitive to electronics use than most of us realise. In fact, contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t take much electronic stimulation to throw a sensitive and still-developing brain off track. Also, many parents mistakenly believe that interactive screen-time—Internet or social media use, texting, emailing, and gaming—isn’t harmful, especially compared to passive screen time like watching TV. In fact, interactive screen time is morelikely to cause sleep, mood, and cognitive issues, because it’s more likely to cause hyperarousal and compulsive use.
Dunckley lists “six physiological mechanisms that explain electronics’ tendency to produce mood disturbance”:
Screen-time reduces physical activity levels and exposure to “green time”
In today’s world, she says,
it may seem crazy to restrict electronics so drastically. But when kids are struggling, we’re not doing them any favors by leaving electronics in place and hoping they can wind down by using electronics in "moderation." It just doesn't work. In contrast, by allowing the nervous system to return to a more natural state with a strict fast, we can take the first step in helping a child become calmer, stronger, and happier.
Or to put it anther way, Put that bloody iPad down NOW and go outside!
We welcome our irregular roving Asian correspondent, Suzuki Samurai, who files this report from in hiding somewhere near Darwin, Australia…
Drive 1200km from Darwin along the northern right-hand coastal tip of the Northern Territory of Australia,1 and you will end up in the purpose-built mining town of Gove.
The general area (and sometimes the town) is also known as Nhulunbuy. It is still called that by the Aboriginals and the more historically minded—and Null-And-Void by cunning linguists. It is a surprisingly nice place to look at, blessed with a blue sea the colour of the Skype icon, and sandy beaches as clean and fine as Cate Blanchett's face.
Of course there is a down side. This is Australia, so everything wants to kill you: everything from buffalo, crocodiles, spiders, snakes, sharks, & jellyfish to things you’re bloody sure have still not even been named. So think Whangamata, stuck inside a zoo, and very much closer to the sun.
The bauxite mine & refinery are operated by Rio Tinto (a sister facility to Tiwai Point you could say), and have been in operation for near-to forty years. Rio leases the area from the local aboriginal clans in exchange for a quarterly royalty which appearances suggest they spend on beer and pizza.
Anyway, Gove has been in the news in the last week both here and in NZ due to the announcement that the refinery will start to shut down and 1500 jobs are to be lost. Added to ancillary losses this will likely reduce the town's population from 4000 down to 1500 or so, the folk remaining likely being a mixture of the retired and retarded; bureau(rats), cops and doctors, and a few (a very few) retailers.
The reason for winding things down is the same as it was in Invercargill: Rio has been losing money here for years – and lots of it.
The good folk here however are pissed off to say the least about the golden goose leaving town, bleating about “destroying our community,” “taking away our children's future...” “This is our town” blah blah blah. No doubt the Aboriginals felt the same way when these white fellas arrived forty years ago.
As you'd expect this is a heavily unionised town, so they are whining about things like a reincarnation of Arthur Scargill2. What’s unusual however is the aren't screeching at Rio Tinto. Instead, they’re laying all the blaming on the Northern Territory government, Chief Minister Adam Giles to be precise.
Why? Because Rio said they'd stay if they could get a cheaper form of fuel, but said they were in no position to pay themselves for the 600km pipeline necessary to deliver this cheaper fuel. (Stop me if you’ve head something like this before.) So they kindly suggested, in cahoots with some tame politicians, that if the government were to pay for the pipeline “then we might be able to stay.” (This should be sounding awfully familiar to Bill English about now.)
So, after more than a year of negotiating, a deal was finally reached. And then is wasn't. And then it was. And then wasn't again. Anyway, Rio has finally decided that they can no longer burn any more capital on this dead loss and they’re taking up their bed and walking away.
Why am I telling you all this?
Well, being a resident here (and in hiding after writing this post) I've watched first hand how moral hazards become expectations, how expectations become entitlements, and how when things go wrong for some folk everyone expects the government will fix whatever it is that's wrong—and go batshit crazy when they don’t3.
a situation in which a party will have a tendency to take risks because the costs that could result will not be felt by the party taking the risk.
In business terms you might say it’s the direct consequence of inviting businesses to privatise profits and socialise losses. In this sense, Australia is now built on moral hazard.
Holden can't make money from shit cars? Government will give them enough money so they can continue making shit cars to keep incompetents in work.
Banks are illiquid because they did stupid things? Government will bankroll their losses, fill them with cash, and demand they do the stupid things again.
Your arse is broken? Government will pay you to rest it.
You can't stop breeding? It's ok, the government will pay for you to have more.
Rio can't operate their mine? Hell, get the government to fund a nine hundred million dollar pipeline so they can keep operating (that’s a nine with eight taxpayer-funded zeroes behind it), just so that people who are comfortable in their lifestyle can remain so.
What started with the expectation of profits being privatised and losses being socialised ends with the creation of the sort of leisure class even John Kenneth Galbraith would be surprised to meet.
And it is this moral hazard of government trying to make everything risk-free that makes people believe they can stop thinking, stop planning their lives, and stop taking responsibility for their own decisions.
It becomes for them an automatic assumption that regardless of what happens, regardless of the morality involved, regardless of the size of the already gargantuan government debt4, government will always make everything better.
Well, on this occasion they can't. And the proletariat everywhere, both white- & blue-collared, had better start getting used to it—because governments everywhere are running out of Other People’s Money.
Having been summarily ejected from China for offending his hosts, Suzuki Samurai is now in hiding at an undisclosed but reportedly very hot and sweaty location in the Northern Territory. Keep up with his (ir)regular reports here at NOT PC.
NOTES:
1. The Northern Territory? Well, ask an Australian to list all eight states, and it will be the one they forget about. The one where dentists go bankrupt, residents think health cover mean buying crocodile insurance—and pedants point out that technically it’s not a state at all. But who cares about pedants. 2. No, Arthur hasn’t actually died yet. But he is completely braindead. 3. Mind you, those Australians who could find Northern Territory on a map often define the place as “the place where batshit crazy people go to die.” So some/many/all (pick one) residents may have already been batshit crazy before moral hazard arrived. 4. At a public meeting here in Gove an unusually sane NT government minister told the crowd that the government is already “well into the billions” in debt. At which point a screeching harpy responded that “government debt doesn't matter.” For which she received a round of applause.
Thomas Piketty has written a popular economics book. In 1936, a difficult-to-read academic book appeared that seemed to tell politicians they could do what they wanted. This was Keynes’s General Theory. Following on from an earlier Guest Post, Hunter Lewis argues that while Piketty has been praised for his data collection, there are problems.
Keynes’s keynote book, The General Theory, is loaded with economic theory. There are only two pages of data in that book, and Keynes dismisses the scant data he cites as “improbable.” By contrast, Piketty’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, is stuffed with data. Indeed Piketty considers himself a successor to the economist whose data Keynes dismissed, Simon Kuznets. Almost everyone admits that Piketty’s theoretical case is weak — but, his supporters say, look at all this data. You can’t argue with this mass of historical evidence!
Piketty’s primary argument is that wealth (which tends to be concentrated in few hands) grows faster than the economy, so that those with a lot of wealth keep getting richer relative to everyone else. This is supposed to be an inescapable feature of capitalism. (If this sounds familiar, it should be. It echoes both Marx and Keynes, although we should remember that Keynes mocked most of what Marx said as “hocus-pocus.”)
So what then is the evidence that wealth has grown faster than the economy?
The step-sister of Oregon’s mass-murderer said the shooting didn’t make sense. “All he ever did was put everyone before himself, he wanted everyone to be happy,” she told KCBS-TV. This is key to understanding the crime’s root cause, suggests Dr Michael Hurd:
“All he ever did was put everyone before himself, he wanted everyone to be happy,” she told KCBS-TV. [The murderer]’s step-sister (like most people) thinks self-sacrifice is a virtue. But when you have no rational concern for your own interests, you don’t have much of a life, you possess no self-esteem, and you have nothing much to live for; mix those qualities with a tendency and fascination for violence, and you’ve got a recipe for tragedy... ...Another of [the murderer]'s blog articles reportedly lamented materialism as preventing spiritual development. He probably did not like capitalism, since he condemned materialism. People who detest capitalism tend to detest America most of all. They see millions of others having a reasonably good time in a cultural and economic environment they consider rotten to the core. In some, the festering hatred turns to violence, but the hatred towards America (by Americans, especially younger ones) is probably more widespread than most of us realise. Anti-materialism, anti-capitalism. Anti-individualism. These are the dominant themes of many public schools and certainly most of academia, with regard to philosophy, culture, social/behavioural science and the humanities. Could these ideas be toxic and unhealthy? Not as an excuse for violence, but as an explanation for mental unhealthiness which only varies in degree from one young person to another, unless they reject those ideas? ...Again and again, these shooters are young men who seek out educational settings. It’s almost as if they’re trying to tell us something, in a dark and twisted way: “The ideas you’re teaching us are wrong, toxic, silly and unfounded. See what you’ve created?”
The arguments for gun control or gun confiscation basically boil down to this: “If guns were illegal, they would not be available. If they weren’t available, people like that crazy killer in [fill-in-the-blank-with-location-of-latest-shooting-here] would not be able to use them.” This assumes that a crazy psychopathic killer, hell-bent on murder, would let an obstacle like finding a gun legally stop him. This is absurd… The people who claim that violence can be controlled by outlawing guns show how little they understand about the nature of criminals and criminal psychology. I suppose this is why the self-same people who favour gun confiscation are the very same ones who plead for all manner of excuses for criminal behaviour. They tend to be the same type of people who feel that everything and everyone is responsible for criminal behaviour, other than the criminal himself. They can’t understand, or perhaps don’t want to understand or come to grips with, the psychology of evil. It’s admittedly disturbing to try and do so. But this is no excuse for eliminating the right of the nonviolent, noncriminal majority to protect themselves from violence by making it harder or impossible for them to purchase weapons for self-defence.
Climate strike leader Luke Wijohn attracts a crowd
School children will be out across the country this lunchtime blocking city streets. Why? "We're basically looking at the death of our generation," says Year 12 student Luke Wijohn, the co-organiser of what they're calling a "strike." That's what we're fighting for, it's our own lives now."
The death of a whole generation? No wonder they're going crazy. No wonder a small scared Scandinavian has become so influential.
Where on earth did they learn all this?
That "we're going to hit 3 degrees of warming by 2050."
That "this will result in billions of people being killed, or displaced from their homes."
That "we're told at school," says Wijohn, "that we're basically going to be killed by 2050!" [Audio, 3:56]
This is what he told Morning Report this morning. Taught at school what to think, but not how. And he thinks we are the crazy ones for not joining them out there!
"Why do people not panic [like we do] when they hear that billions of people are going to die!?"
But where do we hear that?
More importantly, since it's just not true, where are they hearing it?
Because, let's acknowledge that it's heartbreaking to hear this. How must these young people feel. At the time they should be bursting with excitement for their own future, being told instead that they have no future. That they are a generation fated to die! Imagine if the young people immediately before the First World War had been told their own fate in advance: that tens of millions of them would be killed in Flanders by bombs and bullets, and more tens of millions immediately afterwards by influenza. What would that have done to them? How would that have damaged their psychology? yet this generation is apparently being told that they are fated to die in their billions. No wonder they want to leave school, wave placards and block roads.
Anger is an energy!
Young Mr Wijohn is right, the situation is outrageous. But his anger and the anger of those blocking the streets today is pointed in entirely the wrong direction. Their outrage, their anger, should be directed at those telling them this vicious untruth: at their schools, at their teachers, at those who should know better who are telling that their generation is going to be extinguished. Wiped out. Annihilated. At arseholes like this who say of "the many millions of people directly threatened, living in low-lying nations": "They will die."
The best students believe their teachers. They believe the experts. They become filled with passion and intensity. But what they're being told is patent lies.
Because, bad as they are, not even the worst of the serious climate stories is saying what they are saying.
Even the alarmists are only saying that 187 million people will be displaced by rising tides. Not killed, not flooded, just displaced. And the very paper that contains that figure suggests that around 0.02% of GDP would be sufficient to buy protection against flooding. The sort of protection the Netherlands bought. At the sort of price that a much richer generation could much more easily afford.
A more sober Scandinavian, environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg, points out that even this is unlikely. These 187 million would only be seriously disturbed "in the unlikely event that, in the next 80 years, no one does anything to adapt to dramatic rises in sea level." The truth is that, even in the very worst case, if sea-level rise were to become dramatic over 80 years -- a grand claim, since its rise has been a steady and constant story of non-acceleration since well before modern industrialisation -- then these people will not die. They will move.
In real life ... humans “adapt proactively,” and “such adaptation can greatly reduce the possible impacts.” That means “the problem of environmental refugees almost disappears.” Realistic assumptions reduce the number to between 41,000 and 305,000—at most, less than 1/600th of the figure in those headlines.
And many many parts per million less than Mr Wijohn's billions.
It's true that blowhards and environmental scientists have been inflating their claims for years. Climate scientist Stephen Schneider once counselled colleagues: "we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have." So no wonder so many are so wrong:
In 1989, exactly thirty years ago, Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) said that by the year 2000, global warming would melt enough polar ice to put Maldives and other flat islands underwater, that “Ecological refugees will become a major concern,” and that governments had only a ten-year window to solve the greenhouse effect before the damage would be irreversible. In 2007, Professor Wieslaw Maslowski of the U.S. Navy’s Department of Oceanography predicted that by 2013, the Arctic Ocean would begin to experience ice-free summers. That same year, the IPCC predicted that by 2020, global drought will reduce agricultural yields by 50 percent—a prediction it has already retracted. In 2012, University of Cambridge physicist Peter Wadhams predicted that by 2016, the Arctic ice sheet would collapse. Some climate scientists have also predicted, among other things, that human activities would cause an ice age, an increase and decrease in snowfall, a decline in polar bear populations, more tropical storms, and global food shortages.
These scientists have all been wrong—not just within a normal tolerance for what admittedly are extremely difficult predictions—but way wrong. Their threats of catastrophe have been, in essence, mere empty words—at least for adults who have heard enough such claims not to fly off the handle in a visceral panic at each new one. Not so for the young.
Their childhoods are being stolen from them, says young Mr Wijohn. "It's outrageous to steal the lives from these kids ... " And it is. And they should certainly be angry. Instead od being told abouth human flourishing, "They’ve been misled by the hysterics of doomsayers to spend their formative years trembling with dread."
You think they're angry now? Just wait until they realise they've been cheated.
Arch-Republicans Ann Coulter and Jack Wheeler agree: Don't back McCain. Says Coulter, "I'd rather deal with President Hillary than with President McCain. With Hillary, we'll get the same ruinous liberal policies with none of the responsibility." You can see video of Coulter's admission here. For Wheeler's part, he explains:
I would not in any circumstances vote for John McCain, not if either Hillary or Obama were the alternative. Evil is safer than crazy. Leftie amateur inexperience is safer than crazy...
A McCain presidency will be the destruction of the Republican Party. It needs to be rebuilt, not wiped out with the field clear for the fascists of the left to consolidate power and eliminate freedom. And maybe the only way to rebuild it is in dedicated impassioned opposition to a Clinton White House. That should be the subject of Ann Coulter's next book. I've already got the title for her. Her last book was If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans. Ann needs to now write this book: If Republicans Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans.
Wheeler's opposition to McCain is visceral -- "psychologically unstable" he calls him. Worse, says Wheeler:
That John McCain is clinically nuts is scary enough. What worries a small group of GOP Senators and Congressmen even more is a deep and dark skeletal secret in McCain's glorified past to which they are privy, and which [they believe] the Clintons will use to blackmail him.
While politicians here in NZ bicker about who should get credit for an Amazon data centre that either is (or isn't) opening, over in the States they're already wondering whether these data centres are part of an AI bubble that's starting to show clear signs of being about to burst.
"Even Open AI boss Sam Altman is now talking about an AI bubble," notes Ted Gioia. "Of course, he knows better than anyone because he is seeing it up close—the disappointing release of ChatGPT-5 played a key role in setting off the current turmoil."
Consider this:
AI buildout is contributing more to measured US economic growth than all of consumer spending.
I want you look long and hard at this chart, and consider the implications.
Another sign? Mark Zuckerberg just paid US$14 billion for a stake in Scale AI, the data-labelling startup that's never made a dollar.
Meanwhile in the real world, McDonald’s CFO told Bloomberg that the company is struggling because many customers are now too poor to afford breakfast. And this isn’t some isolated anecdote—it’s a data-driven report from the biggest restaurant chain in the world. ...
There’s a mismatch here between two visions of the emerging economy. So which one is real? Are we entering an AI-driven boom time like an out-of-control Monopoly game? Or will [Americans] be too broke to eat breakfast?
Several signs, maybe, that both are happening —many signs of businesses struggling, closing, unemployment and debt rising, customers at any price simply disappearing. And meanwhile,
half the gains in the stock market are due to betting on the shares of five companies, who are betting everything on their spending up AI data centres
consumers however are spending so little that this "investment" spending on AI by just four CEOs (two of whose money is made mostly by selling ads) totals more in the last 6 months than all the spending by all those consumers
the energy grid simply can't support this growth in AI data centres, and there’s no indication that consumers are willing to pay for the enormous infrastructure.
That last is the biggest sign right there.
Fewer than 1% of ChatGPT users are paid business accounts. That total is no larger than the number of paid Substack subscribers (but what a difference in company valuation!).
In fact, most of ChatGPT’s traffic disappears when students go on summer vacation.
That tells you how wide the chasm is between reality and the crazy claims of AI fanboys—but many of them (I bet) are also reluctant to pay for AI. ... The tech simply doesn’t live up to the hype. The more people deal with it, the less they like it. That’s why AI companies must give it away (or bundle it into an already successful product) in order to gain any reasonable usage.
So everywhere I go online, companies are touting free AI. That’s funny. It doesn’t fit the narrative of a transformative technology.
But even four billionaires can’t change reality," warns Gioia.
Yes, they are spending like drunken sailors, but that just makes the bubble bigger. It can’t stop it from bursting. The crazy level of investment only makes the eventual fallout all the worse.
How much longer can it last? Maybe a few weeks or a few months or a few quarters. Billionaires often throw good money after bad. But the whole economy is fragile—or beyond fragile—right now. And that’s the bigger reality.
By any reasonable measure, the current trend is unsustainable. And there’s one thing I know about unsustainable trends—there’s a day of reckoning, and it’s not a happy one for the people who caused it. But, even sadder, they take down a lot of others with them when the bubble bursts.
Read the whole thing here. (NB: He's opened up the article from behind the paywall.)
PS: How is this AI capital malinvestment even possible? Because of absurdly low interest rates set by the state's economic planners at the US Federal Reserve — rates that are so "economically absurd" they are only made possible "because the monetary fraudsters on the Fed's Open Market Committee (FOMC) had their big fat thumbs on the scales in the bond pits."
And we do mean fraud: The Fed’s balance sheet rose by $1.2 trillion or 17% during the 12-month period ending on July 7, 2021, and at a time, as we will amplify below, when the Fed’s balance sheet should have actually grown by essentially zero.
That is to say, the FOMC was buying government debt and GSE paper hand-over-fist with fiat credits snatched from thin digital air, thereby starkly falsifying yields and prices in the bond pits. There is not a chance in the hot place that tax-paying, real money savers left to their own devices would accept such niggardly real yields.
Ludwig Von Mises explains the inevitable results of malinvestment — "meaning bad investment in lines of production that would not otherwise take place."
Italian philosopher Umberto Galimberti argues the rupture of Covid is an ideal time to re-examine and reform the disaster that is modern schooling. "Philosophy must be extended to all schools," he argues, "and included in the first grade." The schools, furthermore, “should take advantage of Covid to make structural investments that change it forever, how to reduce pupils per class: no more than twelve, if we really wants to educate our young people. [Instead, they are producing] more and more nihilists, deprived of the future and induced to live at night or to take drugs and drink because during the day no one recognises them."
“[School teachers] should be selected using personality tests, to prevent teachers unable to teach and lacking any passion for their profession, from ruining in 40 years of their career the life of entire generations of students.” "[Furthermore], I would expel parents from schools. They must be expelled from school because their presence prevents the child from taking on his own responsibilities. Parents are interested in promoting their child -- and the teacher, to avoid appeals to the TAR [Tribunale Amministrativo Regionale], another institution that should be eliminated by law, ends up promoting everyone. "And in high schools, the children have to be left alone without the protection of their parents, they have to learn to see what they can do without that protection. If it is prolonged over the years, as I see it, it leads to the indolence we see in adulthood. At school you have to become men, to grow up. "But in this way a meritocratic structure is not built.... And until it comes to merit, we won't have any civil society. This is my school reform but it will never happen. "At school you have to bring literature back.... Literature is the place where you learn about things like love, despair, tragedy, irony, suicide. If you learn to deal with these concepts, you are polite and respectful, and can avoid doing the tragic things that we periodically witness. What kind of society we are building?” "But we fill schools with digital technology instead of literature? It's crazy. We look on the trains: while in other countries young people read books, we play with our mobile phones. Today kids know two hundred words, but how can you formulate a thought if you lack words? You don't think or think little if you don't have the words."
“If passions are things found fully formed, and your job is to look around the world for your passion—it’s a crazy thought,” says Greg Walton of Stanford University. “It doesn’t reflect the way I or my students experience school, where you go to a class and have a lecture or a conversation, and you think, That’s interesting. It’s through a process of investment and development that you develop an abiding passion in a field.”
~ from Olga Khazan's article 'Find Your Passion’ Is Awful Advice'
"Why do consumers, who interact with markets every day, have essentially no idea where prices come from? I think it’s because they have zero incentive to learn. If I’m a price-taking customer buying in a competitive spot market, then all that matters to me is the price. I could have a crazy theory about where the price comes from that involves the phases of the moon and the appetite of my pet cat. Or I could have a sophisticated theory based on supply and demand analysis. The market won’t punish me for my crazy theory any more than it will reward me for my sophisticated theory. In many areas, knowing something makes you better at it. Knowing about ocean currents and weather patterns makes you a better sailor. Knowing about chemistry and physiology makes you a better pharmacist. But knowing about supply and demand does nothing to make you better at grocery shopping. This is one of the virtues of free markets–they require precious little economic knowledge from their participants. On the other hand, this is one of the great challenges of economic education. People have little tangible incentive to learn and understand economics."
"Q: 'So I want to ask you about Philistines and how Philistines have taken over the culture. I think the phrase you used is ‘Philistine supremacy’?'
"A: 'That's right. A lot of the time, when we talk about Philistines, we mean, oh, that awful person I know who doesn't appreciate the high arts. And it's a kind of snob thing. I'm not interested in that. Everyone's a Philistine, right? I'm a Philistine. You're a Philistine.
"'The really important thing is whether the literary elite are Philistines. And what we have now are English professors saying that, you know, Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley. And the guy who runs the New York Times book review section hasn't read Middlemarch and doesn't think it's a problem. And there are just so many examples like that—that sort of suggest that the elite tier has kind of given up on being elites in a way.
"'I think part of it is we had what was called prestige TV, and people wanted to write about that and talk about that.'
"Q: 'Let me play Devil’s Advocate for a moment and say, no, 'Succession' is really good. The writing is very interesting. The cinematography adds a new layer to its presentation. The storytelling's good. It gives you room to explore various themes in a way that a play doesn’t because of its runtime and multi-season arc. Tell me why that’s crazy.'
"A: 'There are two questions here. Is Succession good? And is Succession the sort of thing that merits the cultural elite giving it the kind of attention that they have? And those are separate questions.
"'Maybe Succession is good. I neither know nor care. I found it boring. I couldn't watch very much of it. Personally, I think the cinematography is hugely derivative. ... But should we be talking about it in partnership with King Lear? Should we be devoting the kind of space and the kind of critical attention that we give to it, that we also give to the great works of fiction and drama? That’s obviously a no. Even the advocates can't really make a serious case for it. And, you know, King Lear is 400 years old at this point and is acknowledged as one of the great masterpieces of the West. No one's printing out the Succession scripts and doing a close reading. ...'
"Q: 'What would you do specifically about Shakespeare?'
"A: 'So the first thing I would say is, you’re not at school and you’re not that person anymore. And there are a lot of things you did and didn’t like at school that are no longer relevant. So just move on. Put that to one side. That’s over. Shakespeare’s the best. People get a little fussy about, can we say the best, and can we have rankings? Whatever. Yes, he’s the best. He’s the heart of the English canon. He’s the best reading experience you can have. You owe it to yourself to see or read some Shakespeare in the way that you would travel to see amazing landscapes, amazing buildings, have the best food of the world, hear the best music of the world. No one thinks it’s crazy to jump on a plane for eight hours to go and do something incredible on the other side of the world. But spending three hours with this book is too scary?'"
~ from an interview with Henry Oliver on developing literary taste in an age of TV binge-watching and dumbed-down mass culture: 'How to Be a Serious Reader'
"I think that practically the whole human race is out of its goddamed mind and could use therapy. All of them, not equally so, are crazy. Males and females are biologically prone to think crookedly. They don't get it from their mothers, or [the latest political cause celebre]. They think crookedly because they are easily prone to do so. All humans are somewhat nutty because they refuse pigheadedly to accept reality and, therefore, make themselves depressed, anxious, and enraged. "Because they won’t accept the reality that things should be exactly the way they are right now because that’s the way they are. (Now, I'm not saying it's good that they're that way, it's bad, often quite crummy. So it's crummy. But that's the way it is).... "But if you’re pretty crazy then you’re in very good company, because the human race as a whole is really out of its goddam head. Now all of you, of course, know this about others – about your mother and father and sister and brothers and friends and wives and husbands. You know how nutty they are. Now the problem is to get you to admit this about yourself and then to do something about it."
~ Albert Ellis, quoted in Michael Bernard's book Staying Rational in an Irrational World
The great plot twist in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is all but buried to a modern audience. Only now, says author Ben Cohen, only now in our own time of pandemic can we understand that Shakespeare was writing -- and his audience were watching -- in a time bathed in plague. And as Ben Cohen explains to Russ Roberts on his EconLog podcast, that made all the difference:
Russ Roberts: Well, let's turn to Shakespeare.... So, Shakespeare has a really good year in, I think, 1605, right? He publishes--he writes King Lear, MacBeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. ...
Ben Cohen: ... [W]hat changed in 1605 and 1606 that allowed Shakespeare to get hot, it was not just Shakespeare: it was the world around him.
What changed is that it was a plague year. The plague was sort of Shakespeare's secret weapon, in many ways. The plague was this constant force in Shakespeare's life, which I didn't realise until writing this book. I mean, he probably should have died from plague when he was an infant. His parents had already lost children to the plague when the plagues swept through Stratford-upon-Avon when he was very, very young, and it killed sort of indiscriminately.
So, the fact that he lived was a matter of chance. He baked the plague into Romeo and Juliet. I mean, the plague is really what turns the most famous love story ever into a tragedy, which, I'm sort of embarrassed to admit that I did not realize when I read the play in eighth grade and I did not realize when I majored in English in college--one of those faults is probably much worse than the other.
And, then, the plague is what allows him to get hot in 1605 and 1606--for many reasons. It puts theater-goers into a state of mind where they want to see his plays again. It closes certain playhouses. In a very macabre way, it sort of kills off his competition a little bit.
But, he is able to take advantage of these very unlikely circumstances....
Russ Roberts: So, let's digress for a minute, just because it's too much fun to talk about Romeo and Juliet ... And, we forget that when it was performed the first time, nobody knew how it ended. So, when Juliet takes a potion that's going to put her to sleep, and make her look like she's dead, Romeo finds her, thinks she is dead, kills himself. She wakes up, sees that he's dead and kills herself instead of them being reunited. And that's the spoiler alert.
And when the crowd sees this on stage first time, the gasp of shock and horror and realisation of how this is going to turn after they're all wanting it to go a different directions, it's so--it's so powerful.
Ben Cohen: It's so interesting, though, because when she does take the potion, you could easily see it becoming a comedy, right? Where they have this crazy twist that leads to them running away--
Russ Roberts: Yeah, run off to Rio, start a new life. Yeah, it's going to be great.
But, what I didn't realise, which I learned from your book ... is that that plot twist that he doesn't know that she's faking the potion and that it's a coma, not death, and she's going to wake up, he was supposed to get a message about that. And the reason he doesn't get the message is?
Ben Cohen: Because the messenger who is sent gets stuck in quarantine...
And so, the reason why Romeo doesn't know that Juliet has taken this potion and that she is simply sleeping and not actually dead is because this whole harebrained scheme had not been explained to him because he never gets the letter.
So, if you think about it, it's really a bonkers plot line. The flyer says, 'I will--Juliet, take this sleeping potion, it will knock you out. Your family will think you're dead. When they think you're dead, Romeo is going to come back and he's going to sweep you away and take you and live happily ever after.'
Now, this is the stuff that like you wouldn't even see on a reality show or some terrible soap opera now. And yet, it's our most famous love story.
And so, why does it fall apart? She takes the sleeping potion, right? She gets knocked out. Her family thinks she's dead. Romeo comes back and sees her in the open crypt. All of the crazy stuff actually turns out--where the whole scheme falls apart--is simply on getting a letter to Romeo. And it falls apart because the plague is sweeping through and the messenger gets stuck in quarantine.
So, all of this is the plague.
Russ Roberts: And, as you point out, which I thought was a brilliant insight--it's four lines where the guy says to the other guy, 'Oh, did you get that message to Romeo?' 'Oh, no I couldn't get it to him. Sorry.'
Ben Cohen: But, the subtext was so clear back then. You don't hit the audience over the head.
Now, 400 years later, you kind of do, right? I think I write in the book that it's the same as if someone now were to tweet something and end it with "Sad!" We all know what that's a reference to.
But, if someone is reading that tweet 400 years from now, God forbid, they might not understand that we are making an allusion to the way that the President of the United States tweets--
And so nobody in the theater would have wanted to hear about the plague. It's like being on a cruise ship and watching Titanic. I mean, you understand the risk and you don't want to think about that. But they all understood what was happening. We just don't understand what was happening, now....
Russ Roberts: But, I think that point, which is so fabulous that you don't need a two-page, 10-minute dialogue about the letter not getting there, because everybody in the crowd has experienced horrible things because of the quarantine--they all are very aware of it. And so, this is just a standard real life plausible thing.
Looking back on it before this COVID tragedy, we would have said, 'Oh, that's weird. Why didn't he make it clearer?' Because: they didn't need to then.
Ben Cohen: Or, why didn't the messengers just leave the quarantine house? Right? Could it really have been that bad?
And yet, that scene now feels oddly resonant in the same way that people in 1606 would have understood: of course he's not leaving the quarantined house. I mean, we all understand that now. Like, yeah: you're not going out to deliver a letter to somebody ... that was a plague, and it was a lot worse.
So taxing the hell out of foreign companies will encourage them to do more business here? Really?! The Apple Tax – DIM POST
One reason house-price inflation took off: QE.NZ. We may not have had QE officially, but compared to “New Zealand has had the second fastest rate of money supply growth” of all major developed countries – around half of which was borrowed into existence to buy houses. A strange op-ed from a business lobby group – CROAKING CASSANDRA
A new Facebook campaign... if Britain votes Brexit, get Britain into a Commonwealth free-trade zone. “Facebook campaign to get New Zealand to be the first Commonwealth country to seek to strike a free trade and free movement of people and capital deal with Britain upon June 24th, should her people choose to leave the EU. Welcome Home, Prodigal Mum – Andrew Bates, FACEBOOK Commonwealth 'free movement' widely supported: poll – ABC
David Seymour: “If you haven't seen this heartbreaking story, it helps explain why I've introduced my End of Life Choice bill to the parliamentary ballot.” 'Rachel should have right to choose' – STUFF
It’s not like the ignoramus hasn’t been answered centuries ago: “Along came Adam Smith and made a different argument, that mercantilism punished consumers and the poor, while rewarding producers and the rich; that imports were a good thing because they raised people’s standard of living by giving them what they wanted at lower prices. With money to spare, consumers bought more things from producers, creating jobs and generating prosperity. If bread was cheaper, people could afford more textiles. Gradually, with the help of David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, Britain was persuaded of this and by the time Robert Peel, William Ewart Gladstone and Richard Cobden were in charge, Britain had declared unilateral free trade and dared the world to follow.” The Case Against Mercantilism – Matt Ridley, MATT RIDLEY Donald Trump versus Adam Smith- Richard Ebeling, FACEBOOK
“If you listen to Trump’s answers to almost any question about how he will fix a problem, he uses up the first 95 percent of his time explaining, re-explaining and demagoguing about how bad the problem is. (That is, if he’s not talking about polls.) Then in the last few seconds, he says we’ll fix the problem by being really smart or by winning or by hiring the best people. "In other words, he has no idea how to fix it." A Slow-Motion Invasion of the Body Snatchers ... – Jonah Goldberg, NRO
“No one who is as obsessed as Clinton obviously is with gaining power should be trusted with power. Nothing good will come of a Clinton presidency; it will be calamitous, at home and abroad. “But I do understand those who fear Trump more than they fear Clinton. Trump's lack of a political track record makes a President Trump even less predictable than a President Clinton. And while being less predictable means, in the abstract, that the policies pursued by Trump might turn out to be surprisingly better than those pursued by Clinton, in practice such an outcome is unlikely. “Nearly everything spouted from Trump's loud mouth should frighten the bejesus out of sane adults. Build a border wall? “Protect” ourselves from low-priced goods from China? “Rough up” protesters at political rallies? Really? These are the rantings of a thug, not the proposals of a civilized liberty-loving man.” Which presidential candidate will do the least harm? - Donald Boudreaux, TRIB LIVE
“"Whenever you see the inequality gimmick at work, you can be sure that the goal of the speaker is not to end hardships or remedy injustices, but to smash the successful." Bernie Sanders and the Inequality Gimmick – Don Watkins, YOU TUBE
“Today’s right is always complaining that the left holds the cultural high ground and that we need to do more to influence popular culture. But Ayn Rand is the only figure on the right who has really succeeded at it. She wrote some of the world’s most popular and enduring fiction, which has succeeded in the marketplace—for 70 years and still going strong—in the face of unrelenting hostility from mainstream critics." 5 Things the Right Can [Still] Learn from Ayn Rand – Robert Tracinski, THE FEDERALIST
“Conservatives wonder why they keep losing to the leftists. It’s because conservatives justify capitalism, individual rights and private property with faith. “God says it’s true!” This makes it easier for leftists to argue, “We have science, reason and logic on our side.” Conservatives apologize for human nature by saying, “Socialism may be ideal, but human nature requires capitalism.” “That’s not so. “Capitalism is great because it enables the best and the brightest to lift everyone out of poverty and because under capitalism, individuals are free to think and reason. Prayer and faith do not create comfort and material wealth...” Governments, Rights Should Be Religion-Neutral – Michael Hurd, NEWSMAX
“But there is no justification, in a civilised society, for the kind of mass civil disobedience that involves the violation of the rights of others – regardless of whether the demonstrator’s goal is good or evil. The end does not justify the means. No one’s rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others. Mass disobedience is an assault on the concept of rights: it is a mob’s defiance of legality as such." ~ Ayn Rand in “The Cashing-In: The Student ‘Rebellion’” 1965.
“A minimum wage law is a balancing act for politicians. They have to have the wage be just high enough to create a constituency for the wage that will support them but not so high that people who actually vote will lose their jobs...For every two people who benefit from a minimum wage law, one is put out of work. That’s okay if the people who are out of work don’t vote." Oregon Legislature Repeals Laws of Supply & Demand – CATO
“Consider that Arabs wandered for centuries across desert sands that concealed vast petroleum deposits, but it was Western investors who actually made Middle Eastern petroleum valuable. These companies searched for many years in a vast wilderness, moving in frustration from one dry hole to another, risking utter failure and financial ruin. Eventually, by virtue of their ingenuity, courage and perseverance, world markets were flooded with oil that Middle Eastern governments should have deemed private property — 100 percent private. “Instead, those governments muscled in, claiming public ownership based on nothing but their sovereignty over the geographical areas where oil deposits happened to reside.” Nationalisation Is Theft – Tom Bowden, ARI
“Under a proper gold standard, the rate of interest is kept in a band that is not only narrow, but which is also stable over long periods of time. This is the principal virtue of the gold standard. It does not fix the level of prices, which would be neither possible nor desirable. It keeps the rate of interest consistent, which serves the interests of wage earners, pensioners, and other savers, and of entrepreneurs whose work provides the goods, services, jobs, and interest payments, on which everyone else depends (and which they take for granted)." Interest Rate Stability: The Primary Virtue of the Gold Standard – Keith Weiner, THE SAVVY STREET
“St. Patrick's Day in the United States is a celebration of immigrants. … People across the country will be celebrating today the legacy of a relatively more open boarders immigration policy of an earlier period. Between 1820 to 1860, roughly 2 million Irish arrived in the US, most fleeing the famine ravaging Ireland. They came poor, uneducated, and facing prejudice and discrimination. The lesson that this experiment was a strong net gain for America hopefully isn't lost amongst the fearmongering of politicians or the abundance of green beer.” Celebrating Immigration – Emily Skarbek, ECON LOG
“It just came to my attention that if you don't like the group of organized racist thugs known as "Black Lives Matter," it makes you a racist. Who knew? A refresher article for those interested in a response. “I don't like black supremacist groups any more than white supremacist groups. Morally, they should be regarded as one and the same. "The moment you start treating black lives as either more or less important than anyone else’s life is the moment you have become a racist." Do Black Lives Matter ... Or Do Lives Matter? – Michael Hurd, LIVING RESOURCES CENTER
The Road Runner episode we've waited 20 years to see:
Fairly fascinating look at the origins and use of the language we speak (or try to) every day—and immigration plays a large part! Not sure however whether “fo shizzle” would really constitute part of an expanded vocabulary. 25 maps that explain the English language – VOX
“Are you a “worry wort?” If so, then read on. If not, then don’t worry about it — unless you’re worried that you might miss something good….” What, Me Worry? – Dr Michael Hurd, LIVING RESOURCES CENTER
“To understand Ayn Rand’s view that selfishness is a virtue and altruism a vice, one cannot take for granted the conventional meanings ascribed to these terms … “ Exploring ARI Campus: Ayn Rand on Altruism – AYN RAND CAMPUS
“This 1967 lecture is Ayn Rand’s flagship talk on capitalism. In it she explains in depth what capitalism is, why it is often misunderstood and why it is the only social system consonant with man’s nature.” What Is Capitalism? – AYN RAND CAMPUS
“Secluded behind a screen of tall bamboo shoots in West Hollywood, Los Angeles, the Kings Road House (above) may be considered the first [American] home ever built in the Modernist style. Designed by Rudolf Schindler in 1921, the architect’s use of tilt-slab concrete construction (highly innovative at the time) and an informal studio layout, set it apart from its contemporaries; indeed, the design would set the tone for other Modernist residential design for decades.” AD Classics: Kings Road House / Rudolf Schindler – ARCH DAILY
See: I really did learn something useful at architecture school: “Architecture school is a peculiar beast. It almost never actually prepares students to be practicing architects, and 90% of what is written by architects and architectural theorists is incomprehensible garbage. But being able to discern what is and what is not incomprehensible garbage is a profoundly useful life skill." 6 Phases Every Architecture Student Goes Through – ARCH DAILY
A fourth consecutive win and reported new world record for combined take-off/landing! 20 foot landing, 24 foot takeoff:
Is there anybody who hasn’t seen this yet? New Order on old instruments:
It really shouldn’t matter who the President is. (Or the Prime Minister for that matter.) Yet over the years folk have attached an almost god-like reverence and celebration to the office.
At best the president should be a manager of the simple and limited affairs of the state, says our guest poster Jeffrey Tucker. An equal with the Supreme Court and Congress. But people become enamoured with power, both politicians who one assumes are perpetually power hungry but also everyday people who want to believe that the person in the White House will deliver prosperity, and perhaps more importantly, goodies to them.
Freedom lovers everywhere are biting their nails, wondering how the damage can be limited. Depending on who gains control, we could have trade wars, nationalised health care, the pillaging of Wall Street and Main Street, more wars in the Middle East, a VAT tax, surveillance of your smartphone, mass deportations, internment camps, and worse.
Read that sentence slowly in a deep voice and it sounds like the trailer to a dystopian film. But it’s not.
Another Way
Let’s take a step back and ask whether it has to be this way. What if the power of government were so limited that it didn’t matter who occupied the White House? Wouldn't that be a vast improvement?
Let’s say that Rutherford B. Hayes, who was president from 1877 to 1881, had been revealed to be a fascist demagogue and bearded would-be dictator. Maybe the same could be said of Presidents Chester A. Arthur (1881-1885), James Garfield (1881), or Benjamin Harrison (1889–1893). Let’s say they were all crazy authoritarians who longed to rule the country as a private fiefdom.
Would it really matter? Probably not.
These were not the presidents who “made history,” and good for them. Hardly anyone remembers them, which is to their credit. They are usually listed by historians among the “worst” presidents, because (in those historians’ view) they simply made too little history. Which is to say they didn’t cause giant upheavals. They inhabited the office at a time when the private sector was growing at incredible rates while the government was playing a relatively diminished role.
No Power, No Problem
As a result, they had no large bureaucracy to control. There was no CIA, NSA, FBI, HUD, DHS, DOL, EPA, and so on. These agencies didn’t exist, and neither did their functions. The Supreme Court didn’t do much. There was no IRS for the president to lean on to persecute his enemies. Surveillance of the population wasn’t yet possible. The government owned no weapons of mass destruction. Not even a printing press.
There was no central bank to bail out wars and welfare. In fact, the federal government had to balance the budget year to year (as the states still do) because the country was on a strict gold standard. You couldn’t just print money without limit. If the money wasn’t there, it had to be borrowed at market rates. The military was tiny. There were virtually no migration controls, direct taxes, or even passports.
There was no federal government involvement in education, health care, or commerce generally. There was no antitrust regulation, no social security tax, no regulation of consumer products, no environmental land management, no price controls or labor laws to stand between workers and employment, no drug war, no decades-long process of pharmaceutical testing, no gun-free zones, no giant military contacts, and no ability to tax earnings.
Most of the power that presidents had amounted to steering some infrastructure contracts to their friends. And here, their corruption was truly revealed, but the damage they could do was limited. Their money came from a few very small tariffs, and the tiny federal budget reflected that. Presidents were managers of a limited government that didn’t intrude into any intimate aspects of life, much less on the whole population. The governments these men headed had strict, meaningful, and practical limits on what they could do. They had no policy plans to speak of, because policy as we know it barely existed.
Leviathan as we know it had not been invented yet. That came later, in the 20th century. Whatever great ambitions of Gilded Age presidents, they couldn’t be realised through their official capacity. Therefore, the stakes of any one election were extremely low for the country at large. That's why these men’s names are barely known (much like that of the Swiss president now). Even back then, hardly anyone paid attention to the presidency as such. The president was a caretaker, holding an honorary position, of interest to only those directly affected.
As bad as the candidates are this year — as threatening as each of them is to someone’s rights and liberties — none would pose a threat if the power to act on ambition were still limited.
"Good Guys" in Office
Limited government means that, no matter how bad a person is who holds office, he or she lacks the tools necessary to inflict great damage on the population. They are chained up constitutionally. We may do whatever we please unless it is proscribed by law; while they may do, as part of their office, only what the law allows them.
Under a small government with limited and well-defined powers, Americans are safer, not because a “good guy” won the election, but because the institutions he or she controls cannot be used as tools of oppression. This is what the old liberals meant when they spoke of "a government of laws and not of men."
There is a sense, then, that when we talk about how grim the policies of a Trump or Clinton will be, we are not getting to the core of the problem. We should not have to worry about the character or ambitions of the person we elect. A good system of government is one that is protected against control by wicked people such as these. (Although absent their ability to use the levers of power to be wicked, the office would attract many fewer of this ilk.) The system should even be protected against good people who want to use state power to realise their “noble” ideals. Government should be impervious to the personal zeal of its temporary managers.
Under such a system, we would have fewer hysterics from both right and left demanding that power be used for this group and against that one. You can scream all you want, but it has no more effect than yelling at the paint on the wall to change color. This is what it means to live under rules rather than arbitrary dictates.
Mo' Power, Mo' Problems
Blaming those who are currently demanding crazy, scary, destructive policies misses the deeper point. The real blame should go to the generations who, over the course of a century, overthrew a system of laissez-faire and replaced it with the planning state, a central government with the power to run our lives, take our income, redistribute wealth, manage the industrial sector, enter into unlimited military conflicts, create financial bubbles, and bail out and pardon their cronies.
Power once created will be used. That the special interests and then the masses clamour for it to be used on their behalf is the inevitable result.
With power also comes a divided population, people seething with hatred against those who stand in their way, interest groups consumed by loathing for anyone with a chance of using power to their own advantage.
The presence of power itself, not the people who seek to turn it to their advantage, is the source of conflict. And such a conflict threatens to destroy friendships and even the social fabric itself. Overweening government is the reason we all can’t get along.
Most of the people who created this mess are long dead, but they still rule us. They bequeathed us a monster that the present generation must contend with.
There is really only one responsible way forward: dismantle Leviathan before it destroys us.
Keynes’s keynote book, The General Theory, is loaded with economic theory. There are only two pages of data in that book, and Keynes dismisses the scant data he cites as “improbable.” By contrast, Piketty’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, is stuffed with data. Indeed Piketty considers himself a successor to the economist whose data Keynes dismissed, Simon Kuznets. Almost everyone admits that Piketty’s theoretical case is weak — but, his supporters say, look at all this data. You can’t argue with this mass of historical evidence!
