Chertok’s career encompassed both military and space-exploration projects, and in late October 1962 he was focused on preparations for launching a Mars probe. On the morning of Oct 27, he was awakened by “a strange uneasiness.” After a quick breakfast, he headed for the missile assembly building, known as the MIK.

This meme, which I’ve seen being circulated on social media, lays out a view of the Democratic positions and worldview versus those of the Republicans.

I’m willing to bet a double-batch of our famous-quality gourmet Christmas gift fudge (which my daughter and I make only at Christmas to give to neighbors and friends) that Donald Trump’s secret superpower is the ability to make his enemies run mad and implode, all on their own. What other explanation is there for Elizabeth Warren’s triumphant announcement – that an analysis of her DNA proved that she was really part Native American, or what used to be called Indian – that is, part Cherokee as she has claimed for years! Take that, Trump-monster! seemed to be her attitude, as she flung the winning hand of cards on the table … and then the announcement crashed in flames, once everyone got a good look at the minuscule proportion of so-called Native American DNA involved … and hearty horselaughs resounded in the halls. So, one of her ancestors, six to ten generations in the past might have been from the North or South American aboriginal community. One teensy, teeny single drop … but apparently sufficient to be hired and described by a couple of her previous employers as a woman of color. White and blond of color and wouldn’t have been out of place on a Hitler Youth recruiting poster in her younger days. Kind of makes one wonder about the validity of the concept of “white privilege” – when all the trendy political figures are trying to trade on an identity as an ethnic minority. Is Senator Warren’s political career well and truly sunk? Probably not in Massachusetts; after all, they kept reelecting Teddy Kennedy for decades. But on the national level? Always possible, I’d concede, but having become a laughingstock all across the political spectrum would be a challenge to come back from. Read the rest of this entry »

What lies beyond the portal?

[START: #1]
 
[Dear Professor,]
 
I am sure you have read the news reports about Senator Warren. I am wondering what you think of the position you put forward some years ago. See …, Intersectionality and Positionality: Situating Women of Color in the Affirmative Action Dialogue, 66 Fordham L. Rev. 843, 898 (1997) (“Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995.”); id. at 898 n.284 (citing to …, News Director, Harvard Law School (Aug. 6, 1996)) ….
 
Perhaps a follow up or letter to the editor (at Fordham Law Review) might be interesting and worthwhile. See Fordham Law Review (e-mail); (alt e-mail) ….
 
[. . .]

Read the rest.

Four years ago, I posted But Would You Want Your Daughter to Marry One?, which showed a sharp increase in the % of parents who would be displeased if their son or daughter were to marry a supporter of the opposing party.  I was reminded of this post by the launch of a dating app called Donald Daters, intended for single supporters of President Trump.  It seems to fill a need: one early user remarked that he would meet women on other dating apps, but often on the first date, politics would come up.  “Literally didn’t matter if I had cured cancer for the whole world or if I was the best-looking man on the planet, these ladies turned into hardcore Trump-hating people and needless to say, we didn’t see each other again because it was a dealbreaker for them.”

Another user says just a few years ago, he didn’t find that people cared so much about political opinions. “It just shocks me that people aren’t willing to listen to each other anymore,” he said. “So might as well just look for someone with the same set of ethics, morals and common sense.”  (He says he would absolutely be open to dating someone who wasn’t a Trump fan.)

(If you’re interested in using this app yourself, you might want to wait a while–from the article, it sounds like there may be some early security issues with the product.)

See also my related post Life in the Fully Politicized Society, continued.

So now Brett Kavanaugh has been confirmed to the Supreme Court, duly sworn in – after weeks of sturm, drang and drama such as a reasonable person can hardly credit, of unproven accusations of every kind of sexual misconduct on the part of Justice Kavanaugh by hysterical and/or malicious people. Seriously, have the Move On, MeToo, Pussy-Hat crowd gone so far off the rails as to believe that the presumption of innocence standard must be utterly disregarded, and the commandment against bearing false witness be revoked entirely? Apparently – and never mind that this single-minded attitude towards accusation and punishment leads straight back to the era of strange fruit hanging from the poplar tree, blood on the leaves and blood at the root. Only not black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, but the actual or metaphorical bodies of husbands, friends, sons and brothers. Requiring proof of an accusation against any male appears to be an utterly outré notion to the vicious brigade of professional 21st century feminists – and the fact that ordinary women of every color and inclination are not merrily following the tumbrils as our uteri are supposed to direct us, appears to be cause for volcanic outrage among the vicious brigade.
Well, life is full of these little tragedies, kids. Better luck next time. Go louder, more obnoxious, and double down on the personal threats – that will so convince us and win overwhelming support to your side! Read the rest of this entry »

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Via Instapundit, exerpts from this column by Reihan Salam:

The study should also make progressives more self-critical about the way in which speech norms serve as a marker of social distinction. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the affluent and highly educated people who call others out if they use “problematic” terms or perpetrate an act of “cultural appropriation.” But what the vast majority of Americans seem to see—at least according to the research conducted for “Hidden Tribes”—is not so much genuine concern for social justice as the preening display of cultural superiority.
 
For the millions upon millions of Americans of all ages and all races who do not follow politics with rapt attention, and who are much more worried about paying their rent than about debating the prom dress worn by a teenager in Utah, contemporary callout culture merely looks like an excuse to mock the values or ignorance of others. . .
 
[. . .]
 
In a democracy, it is difficult to win fellow citizens over to your own side, or to build public support to remedy injustices that remain all too real, when you fundamentally misunderstand how they see the world.

. . . which links to this column:

Shortly before the 2016 presidential election, The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat observed that though the left has always had a disproportionate presence in the commanding heights of culture, “the swing toward social liberalism among younger Americans and the simultaneous surge of activist energy on the left have created a new dynamic, in which areas once considered relatively apolitical now have (or are being pushed to have) an overtly left-wing party line.” This, he argued, has engendered a sense of panic and resentment among those who don’t embrace social liberalism, and as a consequence, “the feeling of being suffocated by the left’s cultural dominance is turning voting Republican into an act of cultural rebellion.” At the time, I recall that Douthat’s argument was widely ridiculed, especially among those who found the notion that Donald Trump might win the White House risible. That has changed.
 
[. . .]
 
What is new, I would argue, is the second development: that the number of people who are susceptible to elite influence has grown larger. Here is where I must tread lightly, as what follows is necessarily impressionistic. I get the sense that the most aggressively “woke” young people are precisely those who find themselves in the most fiercely competitive environments. Status and prestige matter to everyone, of course, but they matter to some more than others. Most of all, they matter to those who find themselves in precarious industries where one’s reputation counts for a great deal and, just as importantly, to lonely, unattached people who long to feel valued and desired. Delayed marriage and child-rearing ensure that many more young people spend many more years in the mating market and, by extension, orienting their lives around fulfilling their own social and sexual appetites over the care and feeding of children. This is especially true among children of the culturally powerful upper-middle-class, who’ve been trained to fear downward mobility in a stratified society as much as our primitive ancestors feared being devoured by toothy predators. The result is what you might call a culture of “competitive wokeness.”
 
To people in this world, traditionalism must look like a dead end. A commitment to it will do nothing to improve your status in ferociously competitive environments, as those who’ve already scrambled to the top of the ladder tend to hold traditionalist ideals in disdain. Besides, to embrace traditionalist ideals would be to reject the terms of the social tournament to which you’ve chosen to dedicate your life—to decide that devotion to family and community ought to trump individual achievement. If you were to find yourself in this hyper-competitive world, well, you’d be foolish not to emulate the highest-status people you could find. Thanks to social media, you can access their opinions on all and sundry in an instant. The result is a kind of swarm effect in which high-status moral entrepreneurs declare the right position to take on a given issue and then, within minutes, hordes of epigones scramble to adopt and enforce the new orthodoxy. If you’re a good enough enforcer, you might soon find yourself in a position to dictate the new party line.

I think we need more activism, to raise awareness about the high costs of social media, divorce, and late marriage among educated women.
 

This attracted quite a bit of controversy over at my own site. I’d like to start fresh here. In another spot the point was raised that Christine Blasey Ford should know about the research in cognitive science about the unreliability of memory and been more cautious. I was not surprised in the least, because it is psychologists who are the leaders in believing that memories can be “organised,” “associated,” and even “recovered” in therapy. It is a field in which the left hand usually does not know what the right hand, or the ears, or the chin, or the shinbone is doing.

There is some discussion of the notion of credibility in the comment section at AVI, if you are interested in that subcategory.

******

The reliability of memory came up a lot recently, and it is worth noting that we do not remember past events anywhere near as well as we think we do. Even flashbulb memories, which we feel very certain about, deteriorate and even change over time.  If this puts you in mind of Dr. Ford’s testimony, remember that forgetting could apply equally to Justice Kavanaugh. I am noted for exceptional memory of past events, and am in my element at reunions, where people are gratified that I remember that they took a third on balance beam in 1969, or played the flute in 1963.  Yet I have found many places where I was certainly wrong, because some photograph or document shows up that contradicts my memory.  People of long memory are more likely to go to reunions, I would guess, and I also think I was likely to befriend those who had some similarity of mind. I thus have a store of memories rendered uncertain, because in comparing notes with these people, we don’t entirely agree.  Sometimes I will realize in a flash that Ted Kontos’s or Gary Hicks’s memory of our first night at Manville dormitory includes an important detail I had entirely forgotten, and theirs is the better account.  Other times I remain convinced the other person has it wrong, and is conflating two events.

There will be a terrible irony about all this going forward in the Kavanaugh confirmation controversy. This will be an event which people will claim to remember and will hold those memories as important parts of their political story in the future. Yet we are already getting it wrong, each of us laying down the memory according to our previously held beliefs, and this will get worse. Things that we read as theories about Ford’s motivations we will regard as something that someone somewhere proved. Ambiguous statements which Kavanaugh explained will come to be regarded as things he avoided answering. People who thought Ford’s delivery was calculated will believe it was all an act.  People who thought Kavanaugh’s verbal defense of himself was partisan will remember it as louder and angrier than it was, and will ascribe to him statements he didn’t make.

It has already happened to me.  I had associated Senator Murkowski’s statement with Senator Collins’ statement on the basis of a few sentences of each and was disparaging of the latter.  A friend corrected me that I had misjudged Collins badly, and when I went back to look at it, that was abundantly so.  I had associated them in mind before.  I therefore assumed they would have similar takes.  I had already started remembering that they had similar takes, even though this is not so.

I have neglected you over here, part of that being because of eye surgery. I had a macular hole, and after having it stitched up had to be face down for a week. I won’t be able to see out of that eye for 3-5 more weeks, but I plug along.

This is the main post about Gladwell’s series, but I had related posts Malcolm Gladwell Gets It Right and Gladwell Addition

Mr. Gladwell has a series of 30+ podcasts entitled “Revisionist History.” I’ve listened to about half of them and they are fun and somewhat informative, a welcome distraction for someone who has to be face-down listening to podcasts for most of a week. He brings to light some interesting research.

Unfortunately, he overclaims beyond what his research can support, and he does this repeatedly. One comes away believing explanations for historical events not much better than the conventional wisdom.

Imagine a plain typewritten document – a company report, a term paper, text-rich. Now in your mind pick up a red marker and draw a line with an arrow at the end from lower-left to upper right. Write NO!! over it and circle a single word at the end of the arrow point. This is Gladwell’s style. He then goes into detail about that word, showing how it is the key to understanding the entire topic, but we, popular culture, have neglected or buried this information and don’t know the Real Story. Read the rest of this entry »

Stuart Schneiderman linked an article by Robert Samuelson on the 1846 British repeal of the tariffs on food imports, which further linked an Economist article arguing that:

With the repeal of the tariffs, instituted to protect British corn farmers, liberal economic policies ascended. Free trade, free enterprise, free markets and limited government became the rule. And the world has not been the same since.  (Schneiderman’s summary)

To me, it is highly questionable how much the elimination of tariffs had to do with limited government and internal free enterprise. The view that the British 1846 action was economically a very good thing for almost everybody is, however, generally accepted.  From the Economist article:

The case for getting rid of British tariffs on imported grain was not a dry argument about economic efficiency. It was a mass movement, one in which well-to-do liberal thinkers and progressive businessmen fought alongside the poor against the landowners who, by supporting tariffs on imports, kept up the price of grain…When liberals set up the Anti-Corn Law League to organise protests, petitions and public lectures they did so in the spirit of the Anti-Slavery League, and in the same noble name: freedom. The barriers the league sought to remove did not merely keep people from their cake—bad though such barriers were, and strongly though they were resented. They were barriers that held them back, and which set people against each other. Tearing them down would not just increase the wealth of all. It would bring to an end, James Wilson believed, the “jealousies, animosities and heartburnings between individuals and classes…and…between this country and all others.”

Again, this is all mostly generally-accepted thinking.  But Stuart’s post and the links reminded me of something I read–oddly enough, in a 1910 book on railroad history.  The author (Angus Sinclair) describes the transition to steel rails (from cast iron) and the heavier trains they enabled, and then discusses the political-economic impact of this transition:

The invention of cheap methods of making steel rails has exerted a tremendous effect upon railroad transportation, and has created social revolutions in certain part of the world…It threw many farms in New England and along the Atlantic seaboard out of cultivation; it caused a semi-revolution in farming business in the British Isles, and strongly affected the condition and fortunes of millions of people in other countries.  Irish peasants used to go in thousands to England and Scotland to work in the harvesting of grain crops and thereby earned enough money to pay the rent of their small holdings.  Steel rails and Consolidation locomotives stopped the cultivation of so many wheat fields in the British Isles that the help of the Irish worker was no longer needed…

The woes of Ireland were merely the preliminary manifestations of hardships inflicted through the grim ordeal of competition worked out by our cheapened  methods of land transportation.  (The heavier locomotive enabled by steel rails) is steadily forcing more grain raising farms of Europe out of cultivation and is raising a demand for protection against cheap land, just as our politicians have so long urged the necessity for protection against the cheap labor of Europe.

About 60 years ago Great Britain abolished all duties on grain…By curious reasoning the statesmen believed that this policy would not only make the British Isles the manufacturers of the world, but that it would increase the prosperity of the agricultural communities as well.  The first thirty years’ experience of free corn did not seriously  challenge the correctness of the free trade theory, for more of the American wheat lands were yet unbroken prairie or virgin forests, and our steel rail makers and locomotive builders were merely getting ready…In 1858 the rate per bushel of wheat from Chicago to New York was 38.61 cents.  The rate today is 11.4 cents…

The effect of that cheapening of transportation in the United States has been very disastrous to Great Britain, for during the last thirty years there had been a shrinkage of 3,000,000 acres in wheat and another of 750,000 acres in green crops; an enormous amount of land had reverted to pasturage…and the number of cultivators of the soil  had declined 600,000 in thirty years–1,000,000 in fifty years.

That is a high price to pay for the devotion to a theory which fails to work out as expected.

Read the rest of this entry »

“Hi, this is Bridget. . .”
The phony recorded voice
Cues you to hang up.

—-

New Android update!
Now the apps run much slower,
Battery dies fast.

—-

The people next door
Are into Santeria.
Better hide your cat.

—-

Your middle-class friends
Are sometimes rude to smokers.
Time to get new friends?

—-

Morning home-leaving.
Your dog thinks it’s betrayal.
Perhaps he’s correct.

—-

Fat girl riding bike.
She looks angry, I say Hi.
She doesn’t respond.

—-

Feel free to add your contributions in the comments.
 

Read the rest of this entry »

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UPDATE: Richard Fernandez has has a new column that bears on this issue.

He describes a new article about what was called “The Third Way,” a political movement that was to replace the Democrats after 1988.

The Third Way, the political movement that crested at the end of the 20thcentury and the beginning of the 21st, represented the most recent effort to reimagine the centre-left in the face of massive economic and social changes.

At its apogee, when it dominated the politics of United States, the UK, and Germany, it was thought to provide a stable template for governance well into the new century. Confidence ran high that the business cycle had been tamed and that the forces of globalisation and technology could be managed for the good of average citizens as well as meritocratic elites.

You could almost call it “The Deep State” and it has lost its way.

China, in the meantime, has moved into a lead.

As events proved, the unipolar world did not remain the only game in town. “Russia regressed to autocracy; radical Islamism went to war against the West; China became far more prosperous without becoming a whit more democratic, confuting decades of modernization theories,” Galston wrote. Entrepreneurship declined, middle class incomes stagnated and a revolt against unlimited immigration began. Most of all new decentralized technological possibilities arose within the West. In a word, the power of the elites at the center was challenged as never before. All this came to an unexpected head in 2016.

Now all enemies are near enemies, as the supply chain problem and the “collusion” allegations in every Western country illustrate. We are engulfed in a civil war because in a globalized world that’s the only kind there is. Yet in retrospect Brexit and the election of Donald Trump should not have been the shocks they were. They were only surprises because the media refused to see the growing storm.

There has been quite a bit lately about the China trade deficit. Trump has proposed tariffs on Chinese imports until China treats US products fairly. The recent trade talks with Mexico and Canada are based on the knowledge that much of this NAFTA trade is really with China that send products like steel to Mexico and Canada, which is then incorporated into products imported by the US as north American manufactures.

Now we have evidence that China is more than a trade rival.

But that’s just what U.S. investigators found: The chips had been inserted during the manufacturing process, two officials say, by operatives from a unit of the People’s Liberation Army. In Supermicro, China’s spies appear to have found a perfect conduit for what U.S. officials now describe as the most significant supply chain attack known to have been carried out against American companies.
One official says investigators found that it eventually affected almost 30 companies, including a major bank, government contractors, and the world’s most valuable company, Apple Inc. Apple was an important Supermicro customer and had planned to order more than 30,000 of its servers in two years for a new global network of data centers. Three senior insiders at Apple say that in the summer of 2015, it, too, found malicious chips on Supermicro motherboards.

This was an espionage act that infiltrated US Defense computer systems.

I have been convinced for some time that Russia is a stalking horse form Democrat politicians, like the Clintons, who have been bought and paid for by China.

One government official says China’s goal was long-term access to high-value corporate secrets and sensitive government networks. No consumer data is known to have been stolen.
The ramifications of the attack continue to play out. The Trump administration has made computer and networking hardware, including motherboards, a focus of its latest round of trade sanctions against China, and White House officials have made it clear they think companies will begin shifting their supply chains to other countries as a result. Such a shift might assuage officials who have been warning for years about the security of the supply chain—even though they’ve never disclosed a major reason for their concerns.

I do sometimes wonder at the violent opposition to the Trump China initiatives.

America’s leading business lobbies, which represent every sector of our economy, have declared all out war against President Trump’s trade tariffs.
Manufacturers, corporations of every size and shape, retail businesses, agricultural industries, and consumer groups — 45 associations in all — have joined forces to defeat the president’s plans to impose higher trade taxes on our long-standing trading partners and most loyal allies.
The largest of these organizations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents more than 3 million businesses nationwide, is launching an unprecedented campaign against the tariffs.

Is this ignorance or what ?

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Amazon is raising the minimum hourly wage for its workers to $15…this includes Whole Foods, it’s not totally clear whether or not it includes contract employees, though I’d assume it does.  Jeff Bezos has also encouraged his competitors to do the same, and indicated that Amazon will lobby for an increase in the Federal minimum wage.

For discussion:  What will be the impact of this Amazon decision on the retail industry, on American business generally, and on American consumers?

I am done with officially-sanctioned, automatically-expected-full-throated solidarity with other women no matter what the issue or complaint. I am done with the whole reproductive-health-motte-and-bailey-abortion-sacrament. I am more than done with women who think that the crusade for political, legal, and educational equality is merely an excuse to be viciously-manipulative bitches to those men unfortunate enough to be involved with them personally. I am also so done with women who are of an inter-connected social class sufficiently well-to-do to have had damn-near everything handed to them on a silver platter, complaining at an ear-splitting level about being downtrodden and oppressed; this when women in the Middle East must wear burkas out in public, have to be escorted when out in public by a male relative … and oh, yes – sold as sex slaves in Daesh/ISIL markets, or routinely have their clitorises excised. I am also done, by the way, with female protesters done up in cheap red-cloak and white bonnet costumes drawn from a bad dystrophic novel by a Canadian who knows f**k-all about the American Protestant tradition. (I’d respect Margaret Atwood ever so much more if she had done her Handmaids’ Tale schtick in an Islamic setting, but I guess she isn’t all that brave about having a fatwah declared on her. Pity.)

Read the rest of this entry »

I always like to get my wife’s take on things, as she is smart, good looking and, frankly, I way outkicked my coverage, so to say, in my choice of spouses.

In watching some of the Kavanaugh hearings yesterday I asked her opinion on the whole deal. She says that pretty much every female she knows (herself included) got groped at some time in their lives but all have moved on from things that happened oh so long ago. She also says that this circus will severely damage any claims by, well, pretty much any female that may have been actually sexually abused in the past. “What happened to strong women? Are we all precious flowers now that must be so delicately handled?”

My wife also doesn’t think that Kavanaugh actually did said groping – but that even if he did, it was in high school some 3.5 decades ago so, well, bfd.

Her social media feeds have exploded with vitriol. I am glad I deleted my facebook account some time ago. I am sure it is awful.

That is one strong woman’s viewpoint – I would love to hear from some of our other what I would consider strong women contributors here on their take of the situation.

https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2018/09/peak-conlawprof-i-and-ii.html

Too short to quote; worth clicking.

Here’s a “lifeboat” exercise for students at an Ohio middle school.  The scenario is that Earth is doomed–a spaceship is escaping, but there is only room for 8 passengers out of the original 12 who were selected.  Students were required to choose who should go and who should stay, based on such descriptive criteria as:

–“an accountant with a substance abuse problem”
–“a militant Afro-American medical student”
–“a female movie star who was recently the victim of a sexual assault”
–“an Asian, orphaned 12-year-old boy”

etc etc

Note that these descriptions are mainly about demographics categories and sexual preferences/behavior/experiences, and about attitudes toward these things.  There’s a little about occupations, not much about skills, and very little indeed about personality and behavior.  We are a long way here from Martin Luther King’s dictum about judging people by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin.

The above may be a particularly egregious example, but this kind of thinking has become quite common in American universities.  Administrators, along with substantial parts of the faculties and now also the student populations, tend to view people through exactly this kind of lenses.  I’m reminded of the University of Delaware indoctrinator who became rather disturbed when one of his indoctrinees responsed to the question “When were you first made aware of your race?” with  “That is irrelevant to everything. My race is human being” and  “When did you discover your sexual identity?” with “That is none of your damn business”…and, most significantly, responded to  “When was a time you felt oppressed? Who was oppressing you? How did you feel? with this:

The Waiting Room DJ was not kind to me – songs on PA while I waited:

Sharp Dressed Man – ZZ Top
Love Rollercoaster – Ohio Players
Waterloo – ABBA
Hold Me – Fleetwood Mac
Baby Blue – Badfinger
Conga – Miami Sound Machine

Mercifully, I only made it halfway through “Conga” and it was my turn.

There have been some articles lately, in Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal for example, concerning efforts to give Artificial Intelligence systems something resembling a simulated sense of humor.

Interesting research, perhaps, but at this juncture I’m less concerned above providing a sense of humor for AI systems than maintaining a sense of humor for human beings.  Several professional comedians have commented about the increasing difficulty of doing comedy in an environment of hysterical political correctness.  But even more important is the degree to which fear of denunciation and mobbing seems to be affecting personal life and workplace behavior.

Effective organizations, at least in this country, have tended to involve a certain level of easy interaction–including kidding around–among people.  What happens when we lose this?

I suspect that the productivity impact, although hard to measure directly, will be quite significant.  As will the impact on the happiness and mental health of individual humans.

The Kavanaugh-Ford-Feinstein kerfuffle appears to be this week’s progressive-tantrum du-jour, just as the Kavanaugh hearing itself was of last week, and John McCain’s funeral and epic post-mortem diss of his former running mate was that of the week before. The whole thing – a hazily recalled teenage memory of a clumsy grope at a booze-fueled suburban bacchanal – reminds me nothing so much as Great Aunt Ada Doom in Cold Comfort Farm and her incessant insistence on having “seen something nasty in the woodshed” which sight so traumatized her that she was able to ride roughshod over the rest of the clan at Cold Comfort for decades. What the ‘something nasty in the woodshed’ was is never actually described in the story – but Great Aunt Ada wields her hysterical claim of having suffered from it with the expertise of a master in conducting guided guilt trips through most of the book, until she is talked down from her room by the clever heroine.
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