Sep 19, 2016 | Philosophy
From Do Your Friends Actually Like You? – The New York Times:
…Because time is limited, so, too, is the number of friends you can have, according to the work of the British evolutionary psychologist Robin I.M. Dunbar. He describes layers of friendship, where the topmost layer consists of only one or two people, say a spouse and best friend with whom you are most intimate and interact daily. The next layer can accommodate at most four people for whom you have great affinity, affection and concern and who require weekly attention to maintain. Out from there, the tiers contain more casual friends with whom you invest less time and tend to have a less profound and more tenuous connection. Without consistent contact, they easily fall into the realm of acquaintance. You may be friendly with them but they aren’t friends.
But friendship requires the vulnerability of caring as well as revealing things about yourself that don’t match the polished image in your Facebook profile or Instagram feed, said Mr. Nehamas at Princeton. Trusting that your bond will continue, and might even be strengthened, despite your shortcomings and inevitable misfortunes, he said, is a risk many aren’t willing to take.
[…]
So it’s worth identifying who among the many people you encounter in your life are truly friends. Who makes time for you? Whose company enlivens, enriches and maybe even humbles you? Whom would you miss? Who would miss you? While there is no easy or agreed upon definition, what friendships have in common is that they shape us and create other dimensions through which to see the world. This can be for better or worse depending on whom we choose as friends. As the saying goes, “Show me your friends and I will show you who you are.”
Sep 14, 2016 | Politics
Alexander Hamilton’s Legacy Richard Brookhiser talked about the life and legacy of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. Mr. Brookhiser argued that Hamilton’s economic achievements, including his support for building domestic factories and debt reconciliation, were key components to making the fledgling American democracy self-sufficient and prosperous.
See the whole video here: Alexander Hamilton’s Legacy | Video | C-SPAN.org
h/t Richard Salsman
Sep 14, 2016 | Business, Politics
Absolutely chilling.
From Obama’s opposition to freedom of speech (Citizen’s United, campus speech codes, ); freedom to contract (forcing private businesses to pay for contraception, sterilization and (“morning-after”) abortion against their will and become an unwilling agent of the welfare state); freedom of expression (speech codes); denying the freedom of association and peaceful “free exercise of religion” (from “live and let live” to “bake me a cake, or else.”); assault on due process; restrictions on guns for self-defense; the expansion of executive power by executive order at the expense of individual rights is absolutely chilling.
Recommended Read: The Obama legacy: An assault on the Bill of Rights | Washington Examiner
Sep 14, 2016 | Politics
Are the police racist? Do they disproportionately shoot African-Americans? Are incidents in places like Ferguson and Baltimore evidence of systemic discrimination? Heather Mac Donald, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, explains.
Sep 14, 2016 | Politics
Since summer 2014, America has been convulsed with a protest movement known as Black Lives Matter, which claims that police officers are among the greatest threats—if not the greatest threat—to young black males. Heather Mac Donald challenges that narrative, explaining why proactive policing tactics, from stop-and-frisk to “broken windows,” constitute the greatest public policy success story of the last quarter century and have resulted in a record-breaking decline in crime that no criminologist or police chief foresaw.
Sep 14, 2016 | Education
From the website of the VanDamme Academy:
“The proper goal of education is to foster the conceptual development of the child—to instill in him the knowledge and cognitive powers needed for mature life. It involves taking the whole of human knowledge, selecting that which is essential to the child’s conceptual development, presenting it in a way that allows the student to clearly grasp both the material itself and its value to his life, and thereby supplying him with both crucial knowledge and the rational thinking skills that will enable him to acquire real knowledge ever after. This is a truly progressive education—and parents and students should settle for nothing less.” — Lisa VanDamme
Check out their curriculum. Pretty incredible.
Sep 14, 2016 | Education, Politics
Writes Heather MacDonald on The lies told by the Black Lives Matter movement | New York Post:
The facts are these: Last year, the police shot 990 people, the vast majority armed or violently resisting arrest, according to the Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings. Whites made up 49.9 percent of those victims, blacks 26 percent. That proportion of black victims is lower than what the black violent crime rate would predict. Blacks constituted 62 percent of all robbery defendants in America’s 75 largest counties in 2009, 57 percent of all murder defendants and 45 percent of all assault defendants, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, even though blacks comprise only 15 percent of the population in those counties.
In New York City, where blacks make up 23 percent of the city’s population, blacks commit three-quarters of all shootings and 70 percent of all robberies, according to victims and witnesses in their reports to the NYPD. Whites, by contrast, commit less than 2 percent of all shootings and 4 percent of all robberies, though they are nearly 34 percent of the city’s population. In Chicago, 80 percent of all known murder suspects in 2015 were black, as were 80 percent of all known nonfatal shooting suspects, though they’re a little less than a third of the population. Whites made up 0.9 percent of known murder suspects in Chicago in 2015 and 1.4 percent of known nonfatal shooting suspects, though they are about a third of the city’s residents.
Gang shootings occur almost exclusively in minority areas. Police use of force is most likely in confrontations with violent and resisting criminals, and those confrontations happen disproportionately in minority communities.
So if “Black Lives Matter” really cared about innocent black lives they would call for more policing in high crime minority communities. Instead BLMers do the opposite attacking the police as such, making the police a target.
Gun-related murders of officers are up 52 percent this year through Aug. 30 compared to last year. The cop assassinations are only a more extreme version of the Black Lives Matter-inspired hatred that officers working in urban areas encounter on a daily basis. Officers are routinely surrounded by hostile, jeering crowds when they try to conduct a street investigation or make an arrest. Resistance to arrest is up, officers report.
The result of “Black Lives Matter” making policing more difficult is that they are doing “less of those discretionary activities in high-crime minority communities.” Leading to…
Violent crime is rising in cities with large black populations. Homicides in 2015 rose anywhere from 54 percent in Washington, DC, to 90 percent in Cleveland. In the nation’s 56 largest cities, homicides rose 17 percent in 2015, a nearly unprecedented one-year spike. In the first half of 2016, homicides in 51 large cities were up another 15 percent compared to the same period last year.
The carnage has continued this year. In Chicago alone, at least 15 children under the age of 12 have been shot in the first seven months of 2016, including a 3-year-old boy who is now paralyzed for life following a Father’s Day drive-by shooting. While the world knows Michael Brown, whose fatal police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., spurred Black Lives Matter, few people outside these children’s immediate communities know their names. Black Lives Matter activists have organized no protests to stigmatize their assailants.
This is because the so-called “Black Lives Matter” movement is not concerned about ALL Black lives, but only the less than 1% of Blacks (perhaps) illegitimately killed by the police. Some Black lives apparently are of more importance than others.
Yes, there are bad cops out there — and policing is in need of reform — but on the whole the police are a force for good. To lump all cops together as bad, as the BLM narrative implies, does a great disservice to the heroic individuals who risk their lives every day to keep us safe.
For the past two decades, the country has been talking about phantom police racism in order to avoid talking about a more uncomfortable truth: black crime. But in the era of data-driven law enforcement, policing is simply a function of crime. The best way to lower police-civilian contacts in inner-city neighborhoods would be for children to be raised by their mother and their father in order to radically lower the crime rate there.
If BLMers don’t trust the agents of the state as policeman, why do they trust the agents state as a surrogate parent given the dismal results of the anti-capitalist “progressive” welfare state (and the breaking up of the family unit it promotes)?
Comments philosopher Andrew Bernstein on the matter:
It’s not the cops that pose a danger to innocent black men, women, and children–it’s the thugs.
Why does the Left perpetuate the vicious canard of trigger-happy, racist cops to the detriment of policing and, therefore, of innocent black lives?
Because if we looked closely at the terrifyingly high rate of violent crime in many black urban neighborhoods–vastly higher than it was just 60 years ago–we would be led to recognition of its cause: The welfare state targeting of blacks, leading to astronomic illegitimacy rates, many children raised by a mother on welfare and no father in the home, scads of unsupervised children, despair, drug addiction, drug trafficking, and the off-the-charts rate of violent crime that accompanies drug trafficking.
Blacks are still victimized by racist white Americans–by semi-socialist intellectuals and by Democratic Party leaders, who care not a whit about the carnage in many black communities because it is a step toward fulfilling their “dream” of a paternalistic, semi-socialist America.
Full socialism–National Socialism and Communism–murders tens of millions of innocent victims. Semi-socialism murders only tens of thousands–and to racist U.S. leftists, “only” blacks, whose lives do not matter. In truth, black lives matter because all human lives matter.
But if black lives truly mattered to the Left, it would advocate three political principles:
- A full phase-out of the U.S. welfare state
- End the politcal-legal war on drugs and transform this “war” into a moral-philosophic-educational one
- Definitively abolish all minimum wage laws and permit wage rates to fall to market levels, where all low-skilled teenagers could be hired and productively employed.
In brief, if black lives mattered–if all human lives matter–they would support individual rights and capitalism.
Sep 5, 2016 | Politics
“A Cure for Swelling Drug Prices: Competition” (WSJ) explains how the FDA limits competition by delaying approval for sale of drugs approved as safe in other countries:
If the U.S. allowed the sale of drugs that regulators in other advanced countries have already approved, it would expose would-be monopolists to many more potential competitors.
….High prices should be a magnet for new suppliers. But first, generic manufacturers must prove to the Food and Drug Administration that their drug has the same quality, strength, purity and stability as the branded drug. That can be costly and time-consuming. The FDA has faced a growing volume of applications. More than 3,000 filed before October 2014 still await approval; the typical lag between application and approval is four years, according to the Generic Pharmaceutical Association, a trade group.
….[I]n Europe, EpiPen competes with several devices at a fraction of its U.S. list price of $608.61 per pair. Denmark’s ALK-Abello, which specializes in allergy therapies, sells the Jext pen for $34 to $67 throughout Europe, and is interested in selling it in the U.S. “Our decision will be determined by what it takes to obtain FDA approval,” says a spokesman.
….The FDA has long insisted, for safety reasons, that it approve all drugs regardless of whether they have been approved overseas. […] Ken Kaitin, a professor of medicine at Tufts University who has studied drug regulation around the world, says there is “absolutely no evidence” the U.S. drug supply is safer than in Britain, Canada or Europe.
Related:
Aug 24, 2016 | Politics
Russia Wants Bulgarians to Stop Vandalizing Soviet Monuments
Russia is demanding that Bulgaria try harder to prevent vandalism of Soviet monuments, after yet another monument to Soviet troops in Sofia was spray-painted, ITAR-Tass reported. The Russian Embassy in Bulgaria has issued a note demanding that its former Soviet-era ally clean up the monument in Sofia’s Lozenets district, identify and punish those responsible, and take “exhaustive measures” to prevent similar attacks in the future, the news agency reported Monday. The monument was spray-painted on the eve of the Bulgarian Socialist Party’s celebration of its 123rd anniversary, the Sofia-based Novinite news agency reported.
h/t disinfo
Aug 21, 2016 | Education
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUPFVnoJyds
Yaron Brook from the Ayn Rand Institute says no, and Paul Vaaler from the University of Minnesota says yes in a 2015 debate hosted by the Snider Center for Enterprise and Markets at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.
Aug 10, 2016 | Culture
From EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN: Maria Montessori | KPBS:
“Maria Montessori was a woman of vision. In a remarkable life spanning eight decades, Maria Montessori, challenged convention to pioneer a radical new system of education; one which focused on the child as an independent learner and which spread to all corners of the world, affecting the schooling of millions. Her visionary method of education has helped produce some of the most creative and successful people on the planet including the founders of Amazon.com, Wikipedia and Google. But Montessori’s revolution might never have occurred had she not had the tenacity to confront prejudice head on.”
You can watch the full video of her life here: http://bbcbentomatics.lunchbox.pbs.org/extraordinary-women/
Aug 9, 2016 | Business, Politics
‘No Empirical Evidence’ for Thomas Piketty’s Inequality Theory, IMF Economist Argues – Real Time Economics – WSJ
Mr. Piketty hypothesized that income inequality has risen because returns on capital—such as profits, interest and rent that are more gleanings of the rich than the poor—outpaced economic growth. The evidence modern capitalism foments inequality, the former adviser to French Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal argued, was in capital’s rising share of income at the expense of labor’s contribution over the last four decades.
But Mr. Piketty’s thesis, posed by the French economist in his controversial 2013 tome “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” isn’t proved by historical data, says International Monetary Fund economist Carlos Góes.“There is little more than some apparent correlations the reader can eyeball in charts,” Mr. Góes says in a new paper published by the IMF. “While rich in data, the book provides no formal empirical testing for its theoretical causal chain.” Mr. Góes tested the thesis against three decades of data from 19 advanced economies. “I find no empirical evidence that dynamics move in the way Piketty suggests.”
In fact, for three-quarters of the countries he studied, inequality actually fell when capital returns accelerated faster than output.
Those findings support previous work by Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and political scientist James Robinson, now of the University of Chicago, suggesting Mr. Piketty’s thesis was far too simplistic for the complexities of real-world economies that are affected by politics and technology.
Aug 9, 2016 | Education
From New poll finds 9 in 10 Native Americans aren’t offended by Redskins name – The Washington Post:
Nine in 10 Native Americans say they are not offended by the Washington Redskins name, according to a new Washington Post poll that shows how few ordinary Indians have been persuaded by a national movement to change the football team’s moniker.
[…]
Among the Native Americans reached over a five-month period ending in April, more than 7 in 10 said they did not feel the word “Redskin” was disrespectful to Indians. An even higher number — 8 in 10 — said they would not be offended if a non-native called them that name.
[…]
But for more than a decade, no one has measured what the country’s 5.4 million Native Americans think about the controversy. Their responses to The Post poll were unambiguous: Few objected to the name, and some voiced admiration. “I’m proud of being Native American and of the Redskins,” said Barbara Bruce, a Chippewa teacher who has lived on a North Dakota reservation most of her life. “I’m not ashamed of that at all. I like that name.” Bruce, 70, has for four decades taught her community’s schoolchildren, dozens of whom have gone on to play for the Turtle Mountain Community High School Braves. She and many others surveyed embrace native imagery in sports because it offers them some measure of attention in a society where they are seldom represented. Just 8 percent of those canvassed say such depictions bother them.
Comments Naomi Schaefer Riley in the Atlantic:
As a recent Washington Post survey concluded, most American Indians are not offended by the term “Redskins”—the name of D.C.’s football team. In interviews, I couldn’t find a single native who mentioned sports-team names as an important issue facing American Indians today. While I did read one editorial in a reservation newsletter arguing against the celebration of Columbus Day, I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to discuss the issue further.
While researchers have argued that team names such as this impair Native youths’ self-esteem, many of those young people have grown up in poverty, living with one or no parents, often exposed to adults who have problems with drugs and alcohol. When these young people have few educational options and little hope of employment ahead of them, it seems ignorant, if not offensive, to focus solely on the names of sports teams, if that distracts from addressing more serious problems. [Native Americans in the U.S. and Property Rights: A Comparative Look at Canada’s First Nations Property Ownership Act – The Atlantic]
Or perhaps it is smart of so-called tribal leaders to create distractions so they don’t get blamed for not addressing the real problem.
Why blame the policies that benefit them as tribal leaders, but hurt Indians in general, when the Washington Redskins can serve as a scapegoat. After all look what it has done to empower and enrich “Black Leaders.”
Aug 9, 2016 | Culture
Native Americans in the U.S. and Property Rights: A Comparative Look at Canada’s First Nations Property Ownership Act – The Atlantic:
The 2 million Natives in the U.S. have the highest rate of poverty of any racial group—almost twice the national average. This deprivation seems to contribute not only to higher rates of crime but also to higher rates of suicide, alcoholism, gang membership, and sexual abuse. As of 2011, the suicide rate for Native American men aged 15 to 34 was 1.5 times higher than for the general population. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among Natives aged 10 to 34.
Alcohol-use disorders are more likely among American Indian youths than among any other ethnic group. Involvement in gang activity is more prevalent among Native Americans than it is among Latinos and African Americans. Native American women report being raped two-and-a-half times as often as the national average.
The rate of child abuse among Native Americans is twice as high as the national average. And each of these problems is worse among the half of Natives who live on reservations.
[…]
The economic devastation in American Indian communities is not simply a result of their history as victims of forced assimilation, war, and mass murder; it’s a result of the federal government’s current policies, and particularly its restrictions on Natives’ property rights.
Reservation land is held “in trust” for Indians by the federal government. The goal of this policy was originally to keep Indians contained to certain lands. Now, it has shifted to preserving these lands for indigenous peoples. But the effect is the same. Indians can’t own land, so they can’t build equity. This prevents American Indians from reaping numerous benefits.
[…]
Indian reservations, Terry Anderson and Shawn Regan wrote in Louisiana State University’s Journal of Energy Law and Resources, “contain almost 30 percent of the nation’s coal reserves west of the Mississippi, 50 percent of potential uranium reserves, and 20 percent of known oil and gas reserves”—resources worth nearly $1.5 trillion, or $290,000 per tribal member. Tragically, “86 percent of Indian lands with energy or mineral potential remain undeveloped because of federal control of reservations that keeps Indians from fully capitalizing on their natural resources if they desire.”
[…]
The people I met on reservations were not suffering because others don’t understand their heritage or know their tribal language. What American Indians need are real property rights.
Aug 8, 2016 | Business, Philosophy, Politics, Sci-Tech
Kristiyan loves to teach and has held many tutoring, mentoring and teaching positions. His dream is to one day found his own business & sciences school.
Aug 3, 2016 | Sci-Tech
What a creation, it’s a unhinged flying bike/human blender but unbelievably it gets off the ground and actually flies.
Aug 3, 2016 | Politics
A majority of millennials now reject capitalism, poll shows – The Washington Post:
In an apparent rejection of the basic principles of the U.S. economy, a new poll shows that most young people do not support capitalism. The Harvard University survey, which polled young adults between ages 18 and 29, found that 51 percent of respondents do not support capitalism. Just 42 percent said they support it. It isn’t clear that the young people in the poll would prefer some alternative system, though. Just 33 percent said they supported socialism. The survey had a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points.
The results of the survey are difficult to interpret, pollsters noted. Capitalism can mean different things to different people, and the newest generation of voters is frustrated with the status quo, broadly speaking.
[…]
Yet 48 percent agreed that “basic health insurance is a right for all people.” And 47 percent agreed with the statement that “Basic necessities, such as food and shelter, are a right that the government should provide to those unable to afford them.” “Young people could be saying that there are problems with capitalism, contradictions,” Frank Newport, the editor in chief of Gallup, said when asked about the new data. “I certainly don’t know what’s going through their heads.”
John Della Volpe, the polling director at Harvard, went on to personally interview a small group of young people about their attitudes toward capitalism to try to learn more. They told him that capitalism was unfair and left people out despite their hard work. “They’re not rejecting the concept,” Della Volpe said. “The way in which capitalism is practiced today, in the minds of young people — that’s what they’re rejecting.”
No mention was made in the article if millennials — or the surveyors — could define or actually know what capitalism actually is.
Jul 23, 2016 | Business, Politics
Donald Trump is a unique threat to American democracy – The Washington Post
DONALD J. TRUMP […] is uniquely unqualified to serve as president, in experience and temperament. He is mounting a campaign of snarl and sneer, not substance. To the extent he has views, they are wrong in their diagnosis of America’s problems and dangerous in their proposed solutions. Mr. Trump’s politics of denigration and division could strain the bonds that have held a diverse nation together. His contempt for constitutional norms might reveal the nation’s two-century-old experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew.
[…]
…there is nothing on Mr. Trump’s résumé to suggest he could function successfully in Washington. He was staked in the family business by a well-to-do father and has pursued a career marked by some real estate successes, some failures and repeated episodes of saving his own hide while harming people who trusted him.
[…]
Given his ignorance, it is perhaps not surprising that Mr. Trump offers no coherence when it comes to policy. In years past, he supported immigration reform, gun control and legal abortion; as candidate, he became a hard-line opponent of all three. Even in the course of the campaign, he has flip-flopped on issues such as whether Muslims should be banned from entering the United States and whether women who have abortions should be punished. Worse than the flip-flops is the absence of any substance in his agenda. Existing trade deals are “stupid,” but Mr. Trump does not say how they could be improved. The Islamic State must be destroyed, but the candidate offers no strategy for doing so. Eleven million undocumented immigrants must be deported, but Mr. Trump does not tell us how he would accomplish this legally or practically.
What the candidate does offer is a series of prejudices and gut feelings, most of them erroneous. Allies are taking advantage of the United States. Immigrants are committing crimes and stealing jobs. Muslims hate America. In fact, Japan and South Korea are major contributors to an alliance that has preserved a peace of enormous benefit to Americans. Immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans and take jobs that no one else will. Muslims are the primary victims of Islamist terrorism, and Muslim Americans, including thousands who have served in the military, are as patriotic as anyone else.
[…]
Worse, he doesn’t seem to care about its limitations on executive power. He has threatened that those who criticize him will suffer when he is president. He has vowed to torture suspected terrorists and bomb their innocent relatives, no matter the illegality of either act. He has vowed to constrict the independent press. He went after a judge whose rulings angered him, exacerbating his contempt for the independence of the judiciary by insisting that the judge should be disqualified because of his Mexican heritage. Mr. Trump has encouraged and celebrated violence at his rallies.
[…]
The party’s failure of judgment leaves the nation’s future where it belongs, in the hands of voters. Many Americans do not like either candidate this year . We have criticized the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, in the past and will do so again when warranted. But we do not believe that she (or the Libertarian and Green party candidates, for that matter) represents a threat to the Constitution. Mr. Trump is a unique and present danger.
