Friedman FIred From Google

Tom Friedman Has a Stopped Clock Moment | Power Line:

I'm thinking Tom is on vacation and mailed this one in after a bit too much fine wine. He AGREES with Trump on four major points and thinks that Democrats should too!

Yes, yes, Fiedman works at the NY Times, and it was a nerd at Google that got fired for saying that women might have needs for different things if we want to be successful in tech -- if you read this blog, you must be smart enough so I just insulted your intelligence.

It's short, just read it.

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Google "Diversity"

Google Fires Author Of "Outrageous" Memo Slamming Company's Anti-Conservative Culture | Zero Hedge:

Why do cultures die? Because "diversity" of race, gender, ??? gender uncertainty ???, and sexual preferance become mandatory "values", and diversity of thought is prohibited!!!

Man can neither live by bread alone, nor by his gonads alone. The essence of humanity is somewhere in the region of the soul, consciousness and intellect, not between the legs or painted on the skin. Is it really important if there are 58 "genders", or 5800? There are really only two and we all actually know it. If one has to swear fealty to some other nunber in order to work, the shallow basis for a grasp of reality slips even more. People forced to ascribe to nonsense become more and more able to live with nonsense rather than reality. (a potential degree change in temprature in 100 years is a greater crisis than $20 T debt, $ 150T unfunded liabilites TODAY!)

I'll go read what the guy wrote eventually, but seriously, if he can do his job well, is it not remotely possible that he could be allowed to believe that other people as well would be better served in doing their jobs rather than being "stylish"?

Have we come to the point where saying "women better suited for conceiving and bearing children than men" is "inappropriate? Note, I DID NOT say ONLY having children!

BOistan is certainly not a very factually oriented place.

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Seven Million Prime Working Age Men Home Watching TV

America’s Ghost Legions of Idle Men | Intellectual Takeout:

According to a recent paper by Princeton economist Alan Krueger nearly half of the men who are not looking for work are on painkillers and many are disabled. They "experience notably low levels of emotional well-being throughout their days and ... they derive relatively little meaning from their daily activities," Krueger found. And there are 7 million of them.

When did this trend start?

If there is a Year Zero for Male Infantilization it is 1965, the year President Johnson launched the American welfare state by rolling out the “Great Society”. Eberstadt also identifies it as the year when the Great Incarceration began. A crime wave started which was handled by jailing more and more criminals. Nowadays the US has the highest incarceration rates in the world.

 Strangely, the author of the column can't figure out any really good ideas to fix this.



I have a couple:

1. Stop rewarding sloth with free stuff. 
2. Stop penalizing work -- maybe even SUBSIDIZE IT a bit, IMMEDIATELY ... that is the kind of gratification that we have trained our youth to expect. 
3. Start penalizing sloth -- you go to a work camp if you "need assistance". That is the BEST assistance that could be provided! 

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32K Is "Small"?

Rural towns in the eclipse’s path are bracing for a flood of smartphone-toting visitors - The Washington Post:



I grew up on a dairy farm 8 miles from Barron WI ... at that time, population < 2K. Poskin was the closest town -- population "40". Rice Lake was the BIG town, population 7K, Eau Claire, population 45K was the BIG CITY ... Minneapolis and St Paul were just too big to contemplate. Chicago? Beyond anything but being "named", comprehension impossible.



I'm headed for York Nebraska, population 7.7K right on I-80 in Nebraska for the big eclipse. 7.7K still seems like a decent sized town to me. Our lake place is near Emmetsburg IA, 3.9K people -- hey, it's bigger then where I grew up, it seems pretty urban to me!



Perspective makes a lot of difference -- While I have lived in the area, Rochester has grown from being the size of Eau Claire when I moved in to a 100K behemoth today. My God, I drive around Minneapolis and St Paul as if THEY were the Eau Claire of my youth, and have driven in New York City, Boston, Miami, Dallas, LA, San Fransisco, Chicago and many others. I may be jaded, but 32K is STILL a decent sized city in my mind!







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How To Not Be Secular; Reading Charles Taylor, by James K A Smith

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JJ1RIO2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

I often describe my pilgrimage as from a 1974 tiny rural HS, 1978 no name university BS graduate, culturally flat technical hick; to autodidact idiot savant pseudo-intellectual student of Western civilization, Christianity, Philosophy, Literature and Science hick, as a series of pitches going up a mountain on which I often THINK that I have seen the peak, but realize at various junctures that all I have seen are outcroppings, many of which involve yet another LONG pitch I must traverse to gain a glimpse of the next dizzying (to me) height. I've ceased to imagine it will be the peak -- that will be in the life to come. 

This is a review of  Smith's sort of of extended cliff note narrative summary of Charles Taylor's 874 page mountain of a book, "The Secular Age" which I now have on order (don't expect the review blog anytime soon)! Here is a review of The Secular Age"  if you want a different / more extensive take on the larger work. 

Smith says that Taylor "gives us an account of our cross-pressured situation -- suspended between the malaise of immanence and the memory of transcendence". Immanence meaning "matter and the physical is everything" and transcendence meaning this is not all there is -- there is a higher Platonic /  spiritual / metaphysical reality that is more real than what our imperfect senses can apprehend. 

Taylor perceives and makes plain to us "that transcendence and immanence bleed into one another; that faith is pretty much unthinkable, but abandonment to the abyss is even more so;" ... 

"Employing a kid of intellectual colonialism, new atheist cartographers rename entire regions of our experience and annex them to natural science and empirical explanation, flattening by disenchantment. ("Graveyards of the gods" are always highlights of this tour)."

My favorite diagram from the book is this one -- I apologize for having to resort to taking a picture of it. 

I think a reasonable attempt at tiny summary of the Smith book is that Taylor tells the story, AS A STORY, of how it became possible to exist in a disenchanted immanent world where the most important thing is the Buffered Self -- meaning the self devoid of attachment to culture, history, religion, or even family. A detached self that is never the less haunted by being "pushed by the immanence of disenchantment on one side, but also pushed by a sense of significance and transcendence on another side, even if it might just be an echo of lost transcendence". 

We all live by a narrative -- the pure humanist narrative of "progress" is that we once lacked physical vs metaphysical explanations for what we saw around us, so we imagined "enchantment". Spirits and  gods were all around, but we were only children. The definition of "progress" or "maturity" is NO ILLUSIONS ... we live in a cold meaningless universe that is ONLY matter. Meaning is only about matter ... man is the measuring creature, measurement is meaning. If it can't be measured, it is an illusion, and therefore does not exist! 

"If one were to preserve God's sovereignty, one would have to do away with "essences", and with independent "natures". And the result is a metaphysical picture called "nominalism" where things are ONLY what they are named." 

If you can name it and measure it, it exists. If not, it doesn't. So, with the Nietzschean "demise of God, we are the only authorizing agency left" ... these two paragraphs give the barest thumbnail of the "CWS", Closed World View -- it's matter and us, that is all the material available to try to construct meaning.

And so, the disenchanted immanent "meaning" constructed is the "Modern Moral Order" (MMO) -- it is pure humanism, bootstrapped from matter and human thought and ruthlessly applied to all as a dogmatic religion,  with much more restrictive dogmas, pervasive in all areas of society, especially schools, media, and law ( like gay "marriage", transgender grooming for kids, etc).  

"Because of an inadequate appreciation for moral sources, modernity fixates or moral articulation -- a fixation on more and more scrupulous codes of behavior .... we don't know how to make people moral, but we do know how to specify rules, articulate expectation, lay down the law. This happens in policy, but also informally in cultural codes of political correctness ..."

What is lacking is any sense of inner motivation -- it is all external, we will yell at you if you fail to meet the ever growing MMO -- or maybe worse, we will pass more and more laws, you MUST NOT use plastic grocery bags, you MUST recycle. you MUST drive an electric car"! Thus saith the MMO. 

It becomes clear that the CWS / MMO / Buffered Self, etc ARE a form of metaphysic, and thus effectively a "religion" -- the self is not actually "buffered", unless they can exist as an effective modern hermit of constant distraction, escape, and self-delusion.  The Buffered Self must BELIEVE that all of this is "the good", but part of the CWS itself is that it is a "good" completely made up of whole cloth.

Man STILL cannot live by bread alone, but must have a some sort of "social imaginary" (Taylor term), metaphysical dream, or every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

So what exactly is the advantage of the certified manufactured illusion with ZERO parts transcendent content of the MMO, over thousands of years old moral order that at the minimum leave the thought of transcendence open to the psyche? 

Well, in an immanent sense, of course NOTHING -- since there can't be anything that isn't made up by randomly developed creatures out of nothing except "stuff" (matter). Taylor -- and Smith believe that there actually aren't any honest humans that fail to sense the haunting of the transcendent. Is it real, or is it just side effect of some old caveman brain circuits that would be best excised in our modern world to allow us to be completely "grown up" as a Nietzschean disenchanted, immanent buffered self that deserves to be tamped down and unacknowledged -- even if it means they must lie about it to make it seem that the fiction of pure rational atheism exists (which it doesn't, at least since Quantum Mechanics). 

Unsurprisingly, no answers are given. The task of the book is to make Christian faith POSSIBLE in our flattened, disenchanted meaningless world, essentially by just making it clear that EVERYONE has "faith", it is only a question of "faith in what". The intellectual playing field of the world today is purely secular. Taylor sees us at the possible cusp of faith no longer being "allowable", although he does not predict that will be the actual outcome ... he believes that even the merest ghost of the transcendent cannot be ignored because "this heavy concentration of the atmosphere of immanence will intensify a sense of living in a wasteland for subsequent generations, and young people will begin to explore beyond the boundaries ..." 

Even for the subject Smith book of a mere 139 pages, I have but scratched the surface lightly. Yet again, I find myself regularly running to the Internet to bone up on my definitions in order to begin to understand what I am looking at. I feel as a non-english native speaker, who after a couple semesters of English is thrust into reading Shakespeare and asked to provide commentary. And this AFTER 100's of books over decades of my attempted intellectual improvement.

In the 500 years since the Reformation, science, philosophy and religion have sold us the chimera of "reform / progress" with no concept of "to where"? It seems that in some circles the thought was "to a mature human vision of a morality built on "facts" rather than "superstition" -- however, morality is more than a set of rules, and mature human vision is perpetual change toward an unknown objective rather than a "goal" ... and it likely is merely going in circles chasing its tail.

We remain lost so tragically we often fail to even detect our lostness. Does my quest for knowledge lead me forward, or into the abyss? My prayer is that with Christ holding my hand, there can be no truly uncharted abyss (Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me). I know the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Can this mountain of human knowledge be somehow be translated into a form that allows modern man to see the truth of transcendence in Christ? or is my quest just an old guy attacking the Everest of knowledge alone without oxygen? 

Better to die on a quest than in disenchantment? 

Catholic Wisdom, Truth; Perspective For Our Time And God's

What’s next: Catholics, America and a world made new – Catholic Philly:

If you have ANY time and inclination, BYPASS ME and just GO READ THIS! It may well be the best reading of this length that I've read this year, and as you know, I read a lot. 

I grew up in a church that thought Catholics were devil worshipers -- joined with the Harlot. I've come to believe that they are "THE Church". As a Lutheran, I'm still staking my faith that they are not the ONLY church.

What I love about the Catholic Church is HISTORY and PERSPECTIVE -- and the linked article is a great example of both. A huge failing of Protestants is that our churches are all certain that Christ is returning "soon", which is certainly true in God's time. After over two thousand years however, the Catholic Church well understands that God's time is not our time (which is also true). One would hope that in this 500th year anniversay of the Reformation, perhaps Protestants could begin to fathom this other important truth. 

The Protestant failing that is destroying Western civilization is the idea that everyone deserves and can fashion their own god. Sure, they may often do it in a myriad of sects, splits and schizms, but at base it comes down to what I see as a heresy -- although Jesus saves each of us personally, God the Father is ONE GOD, eternal and unchanging -- we do not get to make him, and futhermore, fear of him as the **I AM** is the beginning of wisdom.

Thus ends my short paen to the Cathoic Church. The linked column is WAY too deep and rich for me to summarize. I see it as nothing short of basic blueprint of what is required for Christians to save the remnant of a tattered and bleeding Western civilization, as well as the realization that it is ONLY Christ and his followers that can save it if that is Gods plan. If we want to recover, have to find a foundation of meaning to build on, and it is not "information" or even knowledge.

Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom, not knowledge, is the framework of a fully human life; the architecture of interior peace. Scripture is the Word of God, and Ecclesiastes tells us that “the words of the wise in quiet are better than the shouting of a ruler among fools.” Wisdom is more powerful than might and better than the weapons of war (Eccles. 9:16-18). Wisdom is more precious than jewels, and once we have it, then knowledge becomes pleasant to the soul (Prov. 8:11; 2:10).

I VERY grudgingly select this 7th point to share -- I want you to READ IT ALL, because this point is in no way a summary.

Here’s a seventh point: Democracy advances equality by flattening out injustices and social inequities. But it goes much further than that. It also tends to flatten out distinctions and hierarchies of every kind. Unguided by religious faith, democracy flattens out even the human spirit because any kind of divine transcendence or human excellence also implies a kind of inequality. This is why Alexis de Tocqueville said that democracy creates not just a new and different kind of political order, but a new and different kind of humanity.

Much of our people and culture are like a cartoon person flattened by a cartoon steamroller. God's universe is infinitely dimensional, hierarchical, celebratory of TRUE diversity -- diversity of spirit, gifts, thought, experience, blessing. Spirit can't be manifest in a flattened cartoon projection of being human, and so very many of the people in our age have been totally and tragically flattened.

I can't resist one last quote, however, please realize that overall, the column is POSITIVE, unlike what my quotes might lead you to believe.

If you want to see the face of Europe in 100 years, barring a miracle, look to the faces of young Muslim immigrants. Islam has a future because Islam believes in children. Without a transcendent faith that makes life worth living, there’s no reason to bear children. And where there are no children, there’s no imagination, no reason to sacrifice, and no future.

Read the linked and ponder the richness of Grace and possibility that God wants us to live!

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Teen Suicides, Depression, Anxiety, Religion

Teen Suicides, Depression, Anxiety Rising: Religion Can Help | National Review

The idea that a life without meaning is not likely to be worth living is nothing new to a reader of this blog. It is also no surprise that depression, anxiety, addiction and suicide are at epidemic levels, especially in the young. A worthy read.

:A far stronger case can be made for our society’s decline in religious faith as the cause of these mental pathologies in the young. The decline in religion that began in the ’60s has accelerated in the past 15 years and is especially great among young people. A recent Pew report noted that over a third of its young respondents described themselves as “believers in nothing in particular.” Schrobsdorff’s omission of religious decline is one indication of how great the decline in religion has been — and how much our secular culture is in denial on the issue. The media just doesn’t “get” religion.

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Orange Is The New Black

Michelle Obama discusses emotional scars from critics | WUSA9.com:



I'm sure that Michelle's pain is real, and it is too bad that she has pain and apparently doesn't understand that it comes with public life, especially political public life. Everyone is never going to be fully on any of our sides, black, white or orange.



I'm guessing that the market for Trump or Melania's sharing of their pain is going to be limited -- especially in Denver.



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Name The Six BOcare Weasels

Sen. Ben Sasse rebukes Republican colleagues who voted against health care repeal legislation | Health | omaha.com:

When you vote for a bill to make the fake claim that you would repeal when you know it will be vetoed and then vote against it when it will be signed, you are a WEASEL! I don't care what you may have done in the past, or how "great a person" you are, you have no character and can't be trusted. Those people are.

• Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.;
• Susan Collins, R-Maine; 
• Dean Heller, R-Nev.; 
• John McCain, R-Ariz.; 
• Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska;
• Rob Portman, R-Ohio

As Sasse puts it in the linked column: 

“How can you possibly explain that to people with any intellectual integrity?” Sasse said in an interview with The World-Herald.

Obviously, you can't! Which is why the media loves John McCain. Yes, it is too bad he has cancer, but weasels die too. He may well have once been a standup guy and a war hero, but it has been clear for a long time that today he is a weasel -- he sells out when he thinks it is going to benefit him.

These 6 people are why the Republican Party has ZERO integrety! Republicans promisted that they would repeal BOcare in 2010 and on, and they won elections on that promise! When it came time to fullfill that promise, these 6 that voted for repeal in 2015 when they knew BO would veto it, proved that Republicans can't govern.

Here is McCain, the "Weasel In Chief" running on a promise to repeal BOcare

THIS is why we desperately needed Trump -- at it's core, the Republican party is too full of weasels!
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First Cultural Wartime President

He Fights - Evan Sayet:

This is one that is worth just going out and reading top to bottom. If you need background, I cover that here. Just go and read it -- a teaser.

With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end. Donald Trump is America’s first wartime president in the Culture War.

During wartime, things like “dignity” and “collegiality” simply aren’t the most essential qualities one looks for in their warriors. Ulysses Grant was a drunk whose behavior in peacetime might well have seen him drummed out of the Army for conduct unbecoming. Had Abraham Lincoln applied the peacetime rules of propriety and booted Grant, the Democrats might well still be holding their slaves today. Lincoln rightly recognized that, “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”

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Judgement On Sources, Fake News, MPR

http://www.npr.org/podcasts/414687786/m-p-r-news-with-kerri-miller

If you go out to that link and search for "anonymous sources" you can find the hour long show. I only listened to part of it, I believe I got the "important points", and I don't really have the stomach for more. 

The best description of NPR is that of covering the left and the far left -- this little segment included all lefty participants agreeing wholeheartedly that what the "good news people" (NPR, WaPO, NY Times, etc) use are "confidential sources", why, their EDITORS approve them! There you go -- it is the classic 4 wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner -- only in this case they didn't even invite a sheep to add another perspective to the discussion before they dealt with the flock! Naturally, Trump claiming people should take such things with a grain of salt was DANGEROUS! (an "attack" on the "legitimate" media)

For example, NPR says "Trump's Travel Ban" multiple times a day, and persists in calling BOcare "The AFFORDABLE Care Act".

Trump has gotten temporary restrictions on travel from 7 countries, most of which also had travel restrictions under at least part of the BO administaration. "Travel Ban" is completely Fake News -- yet they repeat it like a mantra, since they know their audience likes that designation ... and realize that with enough repetition, everyone will just accept it.

Certainly they have the fig leaf of saying that the ACA is what it is named! However, they have no problem at all using "so called" or simply leaving the name off it comes to a program from the other poltical side. At this point we have not just the fact that ACA never did ANYTHING to reduce costs and make care "affordable" beyond assigning ten years of revenue to 7 years of program and claiming it "saved" money for the government!

 ACA added a whole host of new benefits -- kids under parents plan until age 26, pre-existing conditions, substance abuse treatment, birth control, abortion, etc, etc which made plans for people that pay for them HUGELY more expensive -- like from $8K per year per couple for a BETTER PLAN (lower deductables, lower co-pays) to being $20 or $30K now PLUS big co-pays and deductables!

"Affordable" my ass.

MPR / NPR is a great source for news of the left and far left. Listen to it regularly and you know what one side thinks pretty well, and you get to hear a lot of abuse of the other side. The typical NPR listener can be very smug in that their position is the ONLY "reasonable, smart, caring, educated, etc" position to hold.

The nice thing about NPR is that as a taxpayer, especially for MPR in MN, you get to PAY to hear the sound of one left hand clapping every day! ,,,, and the Buddhists thought it was a koan.

Wayback To 2009 -- Why We Have Trump

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/227836/i-still-hate-you-sarah-palin-david-kahane

It seems insane to me that there are still people out there that don't understand why Trump is in the White House. So lets make it completely simple:



1). Democrats abandoned rules / cilvility / decorum / decency / etc at essentially Watergate. The "Rules for Radicals" took over.



2). Republicans have been and remain pretty much "The Stupid Party" -- Yes, Reagan was brilliant and made it seem that "decency could win", and yes, W was an extremely decent guy that BARELY squeaked out 2 victories, but those are the exceptions rather than the rule.



The linked article is well worth a read. It documents the destruction of Palin and McCain's surprise that his "friends" in the media were NOT his friends.

In Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, “the fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” This is the book that “Reset” Rodham (what ever happened to her?) and BHO II grew up reading and continue to live by. If you don’t understand that that’s the way we see you — as the enemy — then you’re too dumb to survive. Remember that for us politics is not just an avocation, or even just a job, but our life. We literally stay awake nights thinking up ways to screw you. And one of the ways we do that is by religiously observing Alinsky’s Rule No. 4.

Sure it is ancient news -- hell, back then BOTH BO and Hildebeast were totally on record as AGAINST gay "marriage". (wink wink, nod, nod), but amazingly, some "Republicans" still don't get it.



For Example  little Jebbie Bush has been "calling out" Republicans for not piling on Trump over "Russia"!

"If your opponent does things that you, your head explodes on, if Barack Obama did something as it's related to Russia, you say 'this is outrageous,' all this stuff, then when your guy does the same thing, have the same passion to be critical," Bush said.

It's hard to imagine Jebbie "calling out" anyone except maybe the "bad girls" from the glee club, but let's humor him. Back in 1776, our side took some real abuse from the Brits for not lining up in bright colored uniforms and getting mowed down in ranks. Our guys (THE HORROR!) hid behind trees and shot their officers -- bummer.

**IF** all sides -- media, "The Party" (TP-D) but I repeat myself, are playing by the SAME rules of engagement, then Bushy the younger's advice should be considered. As it is, he is cheering for R's to attack TP's Panzers with horse and lance -- heroic, sure, but effective?  well, no. (see McCain and Mittens Romney).



As I've said before, since certainly the Slick Willie era (and well before in my book), we have been operating in a political system with NO RULES.



Is this a very dangerous state to be in? ABSOLUTLEY. However it is WAY more dangerous when you don't realize where you are and mount up your charger, brandish your lance, and attack the tank!









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The Kids Are Alt-Right

Angela Nagle’s “Kill All Normies” Explores Alt-Right’s Roots & Rise | National Review:

I assume the title (which I love) is a play off of this.

Although nobody was planning it, the messages extant in the culture said that you had to be a rebel to be truly authentic, while to be good you had to conform to ever-more elaborate norms defined by a new class of campus deans and human-resource administrators. Every culture has its contradictions, but this was bound to bewilder people; unsurprisingly, many of them decided it was better to be real and bad than tame and good.

 From Satan on, "the rebel cause" is ALWAYS alive. even if it needs to be "Rebel Without a Cause" as in the famous James Dean movie. Humans are rebels at heart -- what they are being a "rebel" against has never mattered much. You DID however have to REBEL to be "authentic" ... I mean how could a brand new human being conform to the old values of parents / school / church / etc?

So, unsurprisingly, as parents became far left wing haters of Western civilization, white people, religion, America, etc, what better way to rebel than Alt-Right? When any concept of timeless morality is abandoned

Nagle quotes Marxist critic Mark Fischer’s observation that the online Left is “driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd.” She then adds that the witch-hunting tactics that shame people into silence have the effect of creating social and economic “scarcity” in an online world where virtue is treated as currency. If everyone has value in this medium of exchange, then the only way to accrue more yourself is to burn a few friends.

Part of the human condition is that the heart of our world views are based on emotion -- how does something make us FEEL. Oh certainly, many of us have suitable intellectual, possibly even reasonable and somewhat "factual" defenses of our views, but none of those give us that special feeling in the gut when we are attacked by "the other side". A failure of our world  view has eternal consequences -- for those of us that believe in eternal life, it could call it into question, and for those that don't, it might make them wonder if they TRUELY have "facts" to support what they believe to be a perfectly rational lack of belief. (one doesn't have to read that too carefully to see a problem).

At the base, we are all about BELIEF! That is what ALL our worldviews are founded on.

I find the view quoted from the left to be a remarkably accurate view of human nature; "A priests desire to condemn, an academics passion to point out errors, and a hipsters desire to be "in"" ... when all three can be combined, it is simply grand for human emotion.

Thus, Christ preaches the opposite. As Chritians, we are not allowed to judge and condemn, we are to be humble servants of others, and we are to expect to be hated and detested by the world.

It is never clear where a breakdown of tradition and culture will take tribes of people -- however human nature is a constant. Judgement, finger pointing and shallow / fragile "popularity" are a given.

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The Youth Are Anti Capitalist

Are You Ready To Consider That Capitalism Is The Real Problem?:

In February, college sophomore Trevor Hill stood up during a televised town hall meeting in New York and posed a simple question to Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. He cited a study by Harvard University showing that 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 no longer support the system of capitalism, and asked whether the Democrats could embrace this fast-changing reality and stake out a clearer contrast to right-wing economics.

I can only guess that Trevor and even the author of the column do the "breathing thing", and I further assume that their feet were on the ground .... however it seems questionable if their "heads are there to move them around" -- although I'm sure Trevor has a higher IQ than me, "measures vary".

So what does Trevor conclude?

What might a better world look like? There are a million ideas out there. We can start by changing how we understand and measure progress. As Robert Kennedy famously said, GDP “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play . . . it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

"Understanding and measuring progress" begs many ancient metaphysical questions of "the good". For large majorities up to say "1950", "the good" was "God, Family, Vocation, Community, National Identity / Culture ..." or similar in some sort of similar order. "Vocation / money" were there, but "vocation" did not equal pure income/consumption ... it included elements of service/purpose/meaning. Books like "The Sane Society" at least give some insight into how difficult that might be.


Assuming this, they are also subject to the effects of markets -- and government, which they conveniently fail to talk about. The US economy was definitely "mixed", the BOistan economy is about as "capitalist" as a casino in Vegas. It is rigged to allow DC which our founders would have thought would be full of "servants" to be the wealthiest area in the country to win, just like "the house" in Vegas. It can't be otherwise -- if you don't MAKE, you have to TAKE -- in Vegas from your gambling patrons, in the case of government from the citizens and future citizens.

There are a set of things in the universe that "just are" -- they aren't "good or bad", they ARE! Accepting the reality of what IS can be hugely helpful, both personally and societally -- it is like having basic clue on reality. (a REALLY high bar for 18-29 year olds!)

Therefore, "Government" is IN the market system as well, as everything/everyone is, and obviously has to be. The government takes resources from some parts of the economy, takes a portion for themselves,  and gives to others to protect and expand their interests through buying/selling goods, votes, benefits, taxes, just as all of us do. The big difference between government and the rest of the market is that it never produces anything -- it only moves resources around. It is a bit like the financial sector with no profit motive.

Before BOistan, there was a nation called the United Sates. That nation had a magical thing called LIMITED government. There were checks and balances as well as Constitutional restrictions  (that nation actually followed a written constitution) on how powerful the government could become.

These restrictions were modelled after markets. When there is a huge need for a product, the price goes up and more providers start to provide that product causing the price to go down until there is a "balance" where price provides a constant indicator to the market as to how much to provide. If there were really big needs, the government could get things like "2/3 majorities" or "Constitutional Amendments", but otherwise it had to live with it's limits.

Government got rid of the limits, so it is now like the Mob entering a market. The market is  STILL "a market", it is just "black / corrupt / criminal" -- like the market for drugs in prison. Let's take healthcare as an example -- first The Mob (government) decides who can play in the market through licensing, regulation, fees, taxes, etc. Then they execute "pay-offs" -- certain groups, say unions, elderly people, the poor, doctors, etc are "paid off" ... provided "protection", or "deals", with at least the tacit assumption that they will support the Mob (government). Some are provided lucrative deals -- like the Doctors. Think of them as highly paid hit men.

Sometimes other "protection rackets" rise up -- to provide "insurance" for a price. In the medical crime area we call it "insurance" (wink, wink). There is usually an uneasy peace with the various insurance providers -- the Mob (gov) would like to have ALL the action, but given proper kick-backs, cover, etc, they see it as beneficial for the "insurers" to have a piece of the action.

Mobs (gov) tend to be greedy. Where individuals formerly went to a doctor who dealt with their problem one on one with minimal mob/gov oversight, good doctors that provided good service at a good price were successful, and bad doctors found other employment.

As gov/mob increasingly entered the picture, certifications, costs of entering the profession, limits on how many doctors there could be, regulations, taxes, fees, records, kickbacks, requirements for increasingly expensive "insurance" (mobs breed mobs), etc grew without bound -- more and more players desire a piece of the action, and since the gov/mob is getting pay-offs from all of them, they encourage that generally non-productive "growth".

"The Real Problem" always comes down to human nature -- we tend to fall into believing that "someone else will solve our problems" -- and the "someone else" always becomes corrupt and creates greater problems than what they were supposedly solving. Eventually economic collapse, violence, poverty, hopelessness, etc result because the "Real Problem" is **US**!!!!!

If that wasn't bad enough, look at the people who the article is listening to -- Americans 18-29! The eternal fount of a lot of things -- wisdom definitely not being one of them!!

You will always see the "mob/government" trying to increase the set of people who support them, which will always mean things like surveying younger people, lowering voting ages and reducing any sort of restriction on voting (citizenship, ID, etc), because while there is indeed a "sucker born every day", as the suckers age, some of them learn by experience and become aware adults -- no matter how much the gov/mob works to prevent that!

Dayton Makes Case for Unitary Rule

Minnesota cage match, 2017 edition (3) | Power Line:

One might think that even far lefties like the Red Star Trib would be against the prospects of unitary rule by having the excutive just zero out funding for the other branches of government. One might think that -- especially with Trump as POTUS, but one would be wrong.

So the SCOTUS of MN will decide if our state is ready for any king that decides to follow Gov Goofy's lead and just zero out both the legislative and judical branches.

You wonder how anyone that would support such a move has any credibility? No need to ask "left is RIGHT (as in correct, just, etc)" ... it is just a pure statement of faith if you are on the left. It's like the Resurrection for Christians ... only without any forgiveness, morals, love, and any of that sort of trash.

The left just cares about absolute power -- "justice" to them means absolute state power, because to them The State is god.