In this four part series Dr. Bernstein explains why both the so-called Right and the Left both unite under the collectivist banner of racism in their opposition to capitalism, and why the principle of individualism can reverse this trend.
Link: America’s Coming Race War Capitalism’s Enemies Are Pushing America Toward a Race War (Part 1 of 4)
In this four part series Dr. Bernstein explains why both the so-called Right and the Left both unite under the collectivist banner of racism in their opposition to capitalism, and why the principle of individualism can reverse this trend.
Link: America’s Coming Race War Capitalism’s Enemies Are Pushing America Toward a Race War (Part 1 of 4)
Writes Richard Salsman on the Fallout from the Trade Wars | AIER
“Given the benefits of free trade, the best policy any government can adopt is unilateral free trade (with non-enemy governments), which means free trade regardless of whether other governments also adopt freer trade. Tariffs should only be enacted to secure revenues (e.g., to help fund a navy, the merchant marines, or port infrastructure) and should be low and uniform in rate (applied equally to all imports, wherever sourced, not in discriminatory or targeted ways). Better-motivated (pro-trade) nations pursue bilateral or multilateral trade agreements, and although that’s better than “trade wars,” such approaches, in contrast to unilateralism, waste time and invite costly lobbying and cronyism.”
To learn why read his entire article Fallout from the Trade Wars.
Take a virtual tour of the Moon in all-new 4K resolution, thanks to data provided by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. As the visualization moves around the near side, far side, north and south poles, we highlight interesting features, sites, and information gathered on the lunar terrain.
From Lisa VanDamme:
I am writing to notify you about two big Read With Me announcements.
The first is that the app is now available free of charge, to eliminate the financial barrier in front of anyone who can’t afford it or doesn’t understand its value. If you go to the web app, or download the app for iPhone or Android, you will have immediate access to the full library of works, including Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris and Ninety Three, Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, and more.
The second is that on December 2nd, a week from Sunday, I will begin leading readers through Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. If you’d like to join me and other members on this literary journey, now is the perfect time to download the app.
Dostoevsky said of his faith, “My hosanna has passed through a great crucible of doubt.” I believe it is that crucible – that fathomless depth and merciless rigor of thought, that unyielding determination to leave no psychological stone unturned, that intensity of moral ambition – that makes Dostoevsky required reading for everyone, believers and non-believers alike.
Too often, we adopt our own convictions with unthinking ease, rather than subjecting them to a crucible. My goal in starting Read With Me was to create a community of readers and accompany them on a journey through great works of literature that will challenge, deepen, and expand our outlook on life. Dostoevsky will.
As I said, anyone and everyone can now try Read With Me, because there is no longer a required subscription fee. I am a zealot on a literary mission, determined to show people what they stand to gain when they crack the pages of musty, old, beautiful, timeless books. Those who enjoy, and can afford, and want to support the existence of this program can become voluntary $10/month subscribers through Patreon.
I am not a professional actor. I am not a literary scholar. What I am is a sincere reader and a passionate lover of literature. You can think of the Read With Me app as providing you a book-loving friend in your pocket, always happy to read to you from my heart and to share with you what fascinates me about what we are reading.
Try Read With Me. Share it with the would-be readers in your life. Make literature part of your life.
https://readwithmebookgroup.com
From Lisa VanDamme:
I am writing to notify you about two big Read With Me announcements.
The first is that the app is now available free of charge, to eliminate the financial barrier in front of anyone who can’t afford it or doesn’t understand its value. If you go to the web app, or download the app for iPhone or Android, you will have immediate access to the full library of works, including Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris and Ninety Three, Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, and more.
The second is that on December 2nd, a week from Sunday, I will begin leading readers through Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. If you’d like to join me and other members on this literary journey, now is the perfect time to download the app.
Dostoevsky said of his faith, “My hosanna has passed through a great crucible of doubt.” I believe it is that crucible – that fathomless depth and merciless rigor of thought, that unyielding determination to leave no psychological stone unturned, that intensity of moral ambition – that makes Dostoevsky required reading for everyone, believers and non-believers alike.
Too often, we adopt our own convictions with unthinking ease, rather than subjecting them to a crucible. My goal in starting Read With Me was to create a community of readers and accompany them on a journey through great works of literature that will challenge, deepen, and expand our outlook on life. Dostoevsky will.
As I said, anyone and everyone can now try Read With Me, because there is no longer a required subscription fee. I am a zealot on a literary mission, determined to show people what they stand to gain when they crack the pages of musty, old, beautiful, timeless books. Those who enjoy, and can afford, and want to support the existence of this program can become voluntary $10/month subscribers through Patreon.
I am not a professional actor. I am not a literary scholar. What I am is a sincere reader and a passionate lover of literature. You can think of the Read With Me app as providing you a book-loving friend in your pocket, always happy to read to you from my heart and to share with you what fascinates me about what we are reading.
Try Read With Me. Share it with the would-be readers in your life. Make literature part of your life.
https://readwithmebookgroup.com
The profound Professor Walter E. Williams looks at progress in the black community and the impact of slavery on life today.
The wonderful Richard Feynman lectures at Cornell on The Character of Physical Law – Part 1 The Law of Gravitation
Richard Salsman exposes the falsehoods behind the active vs passive false alternative in The Daily Capitalist.
Writes Salsman in “Buffett Won the Bet – and Missed the Point”:
Mr. Buffett writes, “Investors, on average and over time, will do better with a low-cost index fund than with a group of funds of funds.” Well, that’s surely true for capital whose owners are willing to forgo potentially higher returns in exchange for lower risk and the guaranteed mediocrity of average gains and losses. For all other capital, however, the opposite is true. It takes outsized gains like Mr. Buffett’s to inspire and arm us to make progress. Similarly it can take outsized gains and losses to expose the truth, promote the outperformers, and keep yesterday’s under-performing strategies and managers from interfering with a better tomorrow.
Active-passive is thus a false choice. All investing success depends on active thinking, buying and selling.
Still, Buffett concludes with cynicism:
“Human behavior won’t change. Wealthy individuals, pension funds, endowments and the like will continue to feel they deserve something ‘extra’ in investment advice. Those advisors who cleverly play to this expectation will get very rich. This year the magic potion may be hedge funds, next year something else. The likely result from this parade of promises is predicted in an adage: ‘When a person with money meets a person with experience, the one with experience ends up with the money and the one with money leaves with experience.’”
It’s true that human nature is constant, but our natural capacity for reason and infinite progress is precisely what makes such cynicism naïve. In all cases, better inputs make consistent outperformance possible. Berkshire Hathaway’s track record proves this for stock picking and allocating. Our track record proves this for using price relationships to forecast headwinds, tailwinds and inflection points, and to profitably allocate within one or more of the 5 major asset classes and subclasses.
Read the rest at The Daily Capitalist.
Writes Richard Salsman on why Socialism Worked in Venezuela | AIER:
“…socialists don’t expect their system to work in the sense of creating liberty, prosperity, and peace. First and foremost, they expect it to work to seize the means of production, human capital included. Then they expect it to entail, in their own words, a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” They expect it’ll destroy liberty and prosperity. In this sense, history demonstrates unequivocally that socialism works wonderfully.”
Definitely worth a read.
NHS ‘worse than average in treating eight common causes of death’ | Society | The Guardian:
The research was carried out by the Nuffield Trust, the Health Foundation, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) and the King’s Fund. It determined that, with the NHS free at the point of use, the UK had the lowest proportion of people who avoided healthcare due to cost. Just 2.3% did so in 2016 compared with an average of 7.2% across the 19 countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the US. However, the UK’s health service performed worse than average in the treatment of eight out of the 12 most common causes of death. They included deaths within 30 days of having a heart attack and within five years of being diagnosed with breast cancer, rectal cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer and lung cancer. The NHS was also the third-poorest performer in cases where medical intervention should have prevented death, and had consistently higher death rates for babies at birth or just after (perinatal mortality), and in the month after birth (neonatal mortality).
Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, and ARI’s Yaron Brook and Greg Salmieri discuss the impact of philosophy on a person’s life live at OCON 2018.
Update: Dr. Brook hosted an illuminating follow discussion up with Onkar Ghate and Greg Salmieri on The Yaron Brook Show:
Brian Philips‘ online course on The Principles of Property Rights is now free online at Udemy.
Here is the course description:
Property rights have long been a part of America’s political heritage. Indeed, the Founding Fathers wrote extensively on the importance of protecting property rights. But property rights are under attack in America today. Part of the reason for the success of these attacks is imprecise or fuzzy thinking. Even many advocates of property rights are unable to clearly define the concept, and thus, they are unable to provide a consistent and principled defense. In this course, we will examine the principles that underlie property rights, as well as the principles underlying attacks on property rights. Only by understanding these principles can we clearly defend property rights and refute the claims of their enemies. Who is the target audience? Business owners harmed by regulations Property owners restricted by land-use regulations Organizations involved in defending property rights.
Brian Philips‘ online course on The Principles of Property Rights is now free online at Udemy.
Here is the course description:
Property rights have long been a part of America’s political heritage. Indeed, the Founding Fathers wrote extensively on the importance of protecting property rights. But property rights are under attack in America today. Part of the reason for the success of these attacks is imprecise or fuzzy thinking. Even many advocates of property rights are unable to clearly define the concept, and thus, they are unable to provide a consistent and principled defense. In this course, we will examine the principles that underlie property rights, as well as the principles underlying attacks on property rights. Only by understanding these principles can we clearly defend property rights and refute the claims of their enemies. Who is the target audience? Business owners harmed by regulations Property owners restricted by land-use regulations Organizations involved in defending property rights.
Anthropologist C.R.Hallpike, reviews Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari and finds it wanting:
The biological title Sapiens is intended to give the impression of a work of hard-nosed science in the Darwinian tradition. Human history is presented as ‘the next stage in the continuum of physics to chemistry to biology’, and our ultimate destiny, and not so very ultimate either, is to be replaced by intelligent machines. It is a summary of human cultural and social evolution from stone age foraging bands through the agricultural revolution, writing and the rise of the state and large-scale societies, through the gradual process of global unification through empires, money, and the world religions, to the scientific revolution that began the modern world and its consequences.
[…]
Summing up the book as a whole, one has often had to point out how surprisingly little he seems to have read on quite a number of essential topics. It would be fair to say that whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously. So we should not judge Sapiens as a serious contribution to knowledge but as ‘infotainment’, a publishing event to titillate its readers by a wild intellectual ride across the landscape of history, dotted with sensational displays of speculation, and ending with blood-curdling predictions about human destiny. By these criteria it is a most successful book.
You can read the whole thing here.
Onkar Ghate at New Ideal expertly answers the question: “Does morality require religion? More particularly: Is God the source of good and evil?”
Dr. Ghate explains why morality does not require faith in god, but to follow reason as an absolute.
Read Finding Morality and Happiness Without God by Onkar Ghate.
“Let us imagine ourselves among a race of giants who differ from us in proportion as we differ from the child and we ourselves are forced to use the giant’s furniture, dishes and possessions. If we want to sit down, we have to climb on to a chair with our hands and feet. If we want to move the chair, we have to climb down the same way and move this great weight. We want to wash our hands but the [sink] is like a big bath tub. … It takes two hands to use a hairbrush. Everything is so high that we cannot use anything (without asking for help), doors to open, hooks on which to hang our clothes and other things. We are unable to do things we need to do and we feel the humiliation resulting from our failure to act. We certainly would disdain these giant people and not wish to live with them, if we knew they had prepared nothing so we might act. — Maria Montessori
“A century ago, Dr. Maria Montessori introduced the world to a new type of classroom — the “prepared environment” — which did away with the traditional teacher-as-master model in exchange for a wholly new method that encourages each child to happily develop mastery over himself. But what happens when a teacher or parent is no longer the “giant” ruler of the classroom or home, when children are allowed to direct their own development — won’t they then just go wild? No. In fact, in the right environment, the opposite occurs. As countless teachers and parents have experienced firsthand since 1907 (the year Dr. Montessori opened her original school in Rome), children truly transform themselves in Montessori classrooms and in Montessori homes. With adult guidance, they develop into independent individuals who are competent in the world, confident in themselves, and capable of connecting peacefully with others.” — Jesse McCarthy
To help introduce the Montessori Method to parents and teachers in the 21st century Jesse McCarthy of montessorieducation.com has launched a new podcast — now three episodes in. “Interviews range from What is Montessori?, to the challenges and fun of working with infants & toddlers, to becoming a Montessori parent. And there will be many more episodes and topics to come! … Current episodes range from about 20 to 30 minutes and offer listeners a chance to delve a little deeper into the world of thoughtful, down-to-earth parenting & teaching, with an emphasis on us adults growing right alongside children.”
You can listen in here: https://www.montessorieducation.com/podcast.
“Let us imagine ourselves among a race of giants who differ from us in proportion as we differ from the child and we ourselves are forced to use the giant’s furniture, dishes and possessions. If we want to sit down, we have to climb on to a chair with our hands and feet. If we want to move the chair, we have to climb down the same way and move this great weight. We want to wash our hands but the [sink] is like a big bath tub. … It takes two hands to use a hairbrush. Everything is so high that we cannot use anything (without asking for help), doors to open, hooks on which to hang our clothes and other things. We are unable to do things we need to do and we feel the humiliation resulting from our failure to act. We certainly would disdain these giant people and not wish to live with them, if we knew they had prepared nothing so we might act. — Maria Montessori
“A century ago, Dr. Maria Montessori introduced the world to a new type of classroom — the “prepared environment” — which did away with the traditional teacher-as-master model in exchange for a wholly new method that encourages each child to happily develop mastery over himself. But what happens when a teacher or parent is no longer the “giant” ruler of the classroom or home, when children are allowed to direct their own development — won’t they then just go wild? No. In fact, in the right environment, the opposite occurs. As countless teachers and parents have experienced firsthand since 1907 (the year Dr. Montessori opened her original school in Rome), children truly transform themselves in Montessori classrooms and in Montessori homes. With adult guidance, they develop into independent individuals who are competent in the world, confident in themselves, and capable of connecting peacefully with others.” — Jesse McCarthy
To help introduce the Montessori Method to parents and teachers in the 21st century Jesse McCarthy of montessorieducation.com has launched a new podcast — now three episodes in. “Interviews range from What is Montessori?, to the challenges and fun of working with infants & toddlers, to becoming a Montessori parent. And there will be many more episodes and topics to come! … Current episodes range from about 20 to 30 minutes and offer listeners a chance to delve a little deeper into the world of thoughtful, down-to-earth parenting & teaching, with an emphasis on us adults growing right alongside children.”
You can listen in here: https://www.montessorieducation.com/podcast.