Quotulatiousness

June 1, 2024

From Sic semper tyrannis to the “Non-Aggression Principle”

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Government, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On Substack Notes, kulak points out that the beliefs that led to the American colonists taking up arms against King George’s government don’t expire:

A statue idealizing the individual minutemen who would compose the militia of the United States.
Postcard image of French’s Concord Minuteman statue via Wikimedia Commons.

One of the things that drives me nuts about people who claim to subscribe to modern libertarianism (as opposed to the American Revolutionary ideology) is the claim to be “peaceful” and “antiwar”

Libertarianism isn’t antiwar. The American founding values aren’t antiwar. They never have been. It is a permanent declaration of war.

Live Free or Die

Sic Semper Tyrannis.

“Thus always to tyrants”

When does “always” end? NEVER

If those values succeed then 10,000 years from after your descendants have forgotten the name of America itself, they will be killing tyrants and carving their hearts from their chest.

Libertarianism is not “peaceful” it is a declaration that no peace shall ever exist again. That a free people will never have peace with any who’d seek to rule them. Eternal civil war against all would-be tyrants from the pettiest to the most grandiose.

The “non-aggression principle” does not state that the libertarian my never aggress against another … It states only that he may not aggress FIRST, afterwards any and all aggression, even the most disproportionate, is permitted.

“Taxation is Theft” is the claim that a tax collector or government agent paid out of taxes has the same moral status as burglar/home invader caught in your child’s bedroom. It is the claim that that those who benefit and enable the welfare programs paid out of your taxes have the same moral protection from your wrath should you gain the upper hand as a mugger actively threatening you with a gun lest you hand over your wallet.

“Taxation is Theft” necessarily justifies just as revolutionary and total a upset in the political order as “Property is Theft” did … because theft inherently is a violation of your extended person to be resisted without restriction. And just as the Communist claim of “property is theft” justified the most total and brutal wars in human history to destroy the social order (and social classes) who made “property” possible. Libertarianism and “Taxation is Theft” must necessarily justify just as extreme a charnel house to render “Taxation” impossible.

“Live Free or Die” is necessarily, and has always been a declaration of war upon those who would choose not to “live free”, or remain loyal to a tyrant or master.

The founding fathers didn’t make nice with the Loyalists who remained faithful the crown: They ethnically cleansed large portions of them equal to 4% the US population (notably the Loyalist Dutch of New York), confiscated their lands, and drove them into Canada, several mothers with babes nearly starving. Then they invaded them again in 1812. (Read Tigre Dunlop’s interviews with the survivors in Canada in “Recollections on the War of 1812”).

What Loyalists who managed to remain in the US did not regain full rights as citizens until after the war of 1812, almost 40 years after the revolution.

So if you claimed to believe in “Libertarianism” or the American Revolution, ask yourself: “Do I really believe in Liberty and the American Revolution? Or am I a just a flavor of Progressive Democrat who thinks the income tax should be slightly lower?”

Signed,
A Canadian Descended from Loyalists

Guilty!34

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The New York City jury did what the presiding judge told them to do and returned a “guilty” verdict on all charges against former US President Donald Trump. Sentencing is apparently going to take several weeks, because … reasons, I guess. eugyppius provides the German media’s gleeful response to the verdicts:

Der Spiegel‘s characteristically dignified, restrained way to present the news.

Yesterday, a Manhattan jury found former US President Donald J. Trump guilty of 34 felony charges. It is impossible to describe this highly contrived case clearly in a single paragraph, but the upshot is that hush-money paid to the porn star Stormy Daniels violated campaign spending limits, amounted to tax fraud, or constituted an attempt to unlawfully influence the 2016 election – either all of these things at once, or some mixture of them.

The naked political motivations of the prosecution are so obvious that they preempt all possible commentary. In the United States, the establishment have felt it necessary to fortify their free and open democratic elections against unpalatable outcomes by enlisting the help of the judiciary.

Because the German press are complicit in an essentially identical strategy on this side of the pond, they are thrilled – just thrilled – at Trump’s guilty verdict. Their reporting is as voluminous as it is identical, and it’s hard to keep the different think-pieces, op-eds and articles straight. This one from the Süddeutsche Zeitung is useful mainly for hitting all the common themes:

    Guilty. Criminal. From now on, these are the official trademarks of Donald J. Trump, at least for now. He is no longer just the first former US president ever to be criminally charged, and in four different cases at that. He is now the first former US president and current presidential candidate to be convicted in criminal proceedings – unanimously, at least in the first instance. Guilty 34 times over.

    Trump is a criminal! He is guilty! It feels so good to say that! Guilty guilty guilty!

    After such a judgement, a candidate for the most powerful job in the world should be politically finished. Who can imagine a convicted criminal in the White House? What’s more, Trump is theoretically facing three further and far more important trials. Under civil law, he has already had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for sexual abuse, defamation and illegally inflated assets. But this is the USA of the Trump era, so logic hardly matters …

This is a historic case! It’s hugely important! Even though we’re far from confident it will have any meaningful impact on the election which was the whole point of this farce in the first place!

It was always going to be difficult for someone as polarizing as Donald Trump to get anything remotely like a fair trial, just like poor old Senator Bedfellow in Bloom County:

Mark Steyn, who has had his own bitter experiences with the American “justice” system, on the proceedings of the NYC kangaroo court in the Trump prosecution: “[they wouldn’t] have gone to all this trouble for a fine and a suspended sentence. They want him dead.”

As everybody but the New Guinea tribesmen who ate Joe Biden’s uncle knows by now, Donald J Trump has been found “guilty on all counts” – a quintessentially American expression because, of course, the multiple-counts racket is one of the many perversions of judicial norms that have long disgraced the US courthouse.

[…]

Be that as it may, his legal reasoning would be fine if America were a land of laws, but unfortunately it’s a land of men: whether for the forty-fifth president or a “niche Canadian”, we’re in basic “Who? Whom?” territory, as the Leninists would say. After my own experience of both the New York and Washington appellate benches, I would rate the chances of Trump getting this reversed at the state level as way lower than Mr Otis’s five per cent. It’s the same in my own case: all involved know the DC Court of Appeals is merely an interlude in order to get it wafted up to the US Supreme Court. Likewise with Trump. So we’re betting the farm on John Roberts and that rock-ribbed six-three “conservative” majority on which Republicans have expended so much energy to the exclusion of every other societal lever. And, even were they minded to intervene, as I remarked on-air to Tucker a fortnight before the last so-called election, “A judges’ republic is a contradiction in terms“.

So Mr Otis’s legal arguments have very little real-world meaning in terms of November’s exercise in republican self-government. Meanwhile, back in what passes for reality in the courts of New York, the exciting bit having concluded, we are now back to the leisurely proceduralist folderol: The corrupt Judge Méchant has scheduled sentencing for July 11th. So, for viewers of English courtroom dramas on PBS, there’s none of the traditional “Take him down!”, with the guilty party being led down the steps ten minutes after the verdict to be driven away to begin his sentence. Let me see now, July 11th is, oh, a mere six weeks away, which torpor is also very familiar to me: my own verdict came down in February, but the various post-trial motions keep getting kicked down that endless road.

July 11th is also, as it happens, four days before the GOP convention is due to start in Milwaukee. So, at a time when the presidential nominee should be practising his acceptance speech in front of his bedroom mirror, he will be a thousand miles away waiting to hear whether he is to be belatedly taken down.

Thus, Judge Méchant will have once again subordinated the election calendar to the caprices of his filthy courtroom.

In theory, Trump has been convicted of a crime and could be headed to gaol. Also in theory, his term of confinement could be put on hold pending the outcome of his appeal. But they didn’t do that with Peter Navarro, did they? And it seems highly unlikely to me that they would have gone to all this trouble for a fine and a suspended sentence. They want him dead. If you don’t get that, go over to Larry Hogan’s pad and start cooing over your “respect” for “the rule of law”.

May 31, 2024

How To Install a Pipeline Under a Railroad

Filed under: Railways, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Practical Engineering
Published Feb 20, 2024

I’m on location to document the installation of a water transmission line below two railroad tracks.

Huge thanks to our project partners!
Owner: Crystal Clear Special Utility District
General Contractor: ACP
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QotD: Progressives believe you need to be changed to their design

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The problem for the liberal is that most people do not want to be transformed. They want life to be better but not qualitatively different. It is only the liberal, or the “progressive”, as he prefers to be called today, who welcomes revolution and relishes the violent tactics necessary to bring it about. For the progressive, it is an article of faith that the masses will resist change and must be forced to swallow it.

This is a crucial difficulty, and it gives rise to all sorts of persuasion, nudging, compulsion, and outright violence. If the masses don’t know what’s good for them, they must be made to change. Every liberal in history, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Barack Obama, has adopted this course of action. The current liberal lions, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, and their lion cubs – New Jersey’s Sen. Cory Booker and California’s Sen. Kamala Harris – appear to be even more radical.

Booker speaks repeatedly in favor of what he calls “the collective good”. Apparently, he knows what that good is, and others do not. And he seems willing to use uncivil means to achieve that collectivist end, such as lashing out at DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. His humiliation of Nielsen was not just embarrassing. As I saw it, it revealed a cold, vicious, Leninist temperament, a willingness to sacrifice individuals in the service of the collective and of his own political ambition.

Then there is Harris. “Loose regulations and lax enforcement … That’s abandoning the middle class,” she says. What she seeks, apparently, is more government control with herself in charge.

Both of these über-liberals claim to know more than the rest of us, but what is it they know?

In a truth worthy of Wittgenstein, one could say that what they “know” is that they know, and nothing else. And what they oppose is any suggestion that they do not know.

In other words, liberalism is a temper, not a philosophy. It has no fixed content – it can be either communistic or fascistic, racially “progressive” or virulently anti-Semitic, pacifistic or militaristic – but in one respect, it never changes. It exerts control and demands obedience.

Jeffrey Folks, “Leftists versus the People”, American Thinker, 2018-02-24.

May 30, 2024

QotD: Is a “Pickup Artist” just an amateur method actor performing “fake it until you make it” drills?

Filed under: Health, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The underlying principles of Game are sound, because they come from the world of advertising. Heartiste was very good about referring to the marketing background — sociobiology may have provided the theory, but marketing, particularly Robert Cialdini’s seminal Persuasion, provided the practice. Social proof, consistency and commitment, all that jazz, it’s just marketing, and marketing certainly works … as far as it goes. I’m not privy to the numbers (not being a senior exec at a major corporation), but I’m pretty sure that an ad campaign that verifiably produced a 5% increase in sales would be a smashing success. An ad campaign that got 10% would make you Don Draper, a legend in the field who is also complete fiction.

Which forces us to consider a second question: How much of Game’s “success” is just practice? I’d wager very long money that no one, in the history of seduction, has ever said “I hit on fifteen girls a day, but I never seem to get anywhere”. And that of course is the very first thing the Game gurus have you do — just approach girls, dozens of them every day. Practice any skill for an hour a day and you’re bound to get a lot better pretty quickly. If you stink at golf, for instance, go hit a bucket of balls every day after work; in a month you’ll be dramatically better than you were, even if — make that especially if — you were terrible to start with.

Then throw in the marketing-style success rate. A 5% sales increase might not seem that big, but it’s millions of dollars. So, too, “scoring with 5% of your approaches” is a stunning success rate compared to 0%, especially since, you know, it’s sex, which our culture has taught us is the only meaningful standard.

Finally, though I will cheerfully admit to never having been a PUA, or anything close to it, I’ve read a fair amount of their stuff, and it seems to me that what they’re teaching is “how to fake self-confidence”, which is to say, they’re teaching Method acting. The theory is that you “fake it ’til you make it” — that is, by acting self-confident at all times, eventually you’ll really be self-confident. That virtue is as virtue does, and vice versa, goes back at least to Aristotle, so I’m certainly not going to argue with it. I’m simply going to point out that self-confidence, though of course very real, is more than just a set of behaviors, though our culture makes it very difficult to distinguish the two … and, worse, makes both of them very difficult to distinguish from “just being an asshole”.

Severian, “Mental Middlemen II: Sex and the City and Self-Confidence”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-06.

May 29, 2024

A visit to failure pier

Filed under: Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

CDR Salamander has some advice for any US congresscritter with a spine (unfortunately, that probably means none of them):

This old operational planner has one bit of advice to Congress in their role of having oversight of the Executive Branch; subpoena the Decision Brief for the Gaza pier operation.

This was on the lowest of low scale of military operations, Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Response. There is little to nothing classified about any of this rump of a capability. Call in member of the Joint Staff who were involved in this planning — and I would prefer if you could find a few terminal O5/6 to testify as well. You might actually enjoy some candor.

The Commander’s Intent, the Higher Direction and Guidance, the Planning Assumptions, the Constraints and Restraints, the Critical Vulnerability analysis, etc. It is all there. If not, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense should tell the American people to their face.

This is a larger issue than anything happening in that impossible corner of the globe. Over the weekend, we saw yet more indications of an empire in decline deteriorating from bad to pathetic.

From the time the first load came off the pier, the aid barely made it past 300 meters until it disappeared into Hamasistan.

I’ll go ahead and tap the sign;

[…]

Generally this latest act in this other-end-of-the-Med-from-the-Greeks tragedy that has unfolded in front of everyone. As we saw at the top at Ashkelon Beach, first some ancillary bits floated over to Israel as the Eastern Mediterranean reminded everyone it is at the eastern end of a big sea with weather and waves and stuff.

We then found out that three soldiers were injured in a forklift accident. Just to add insult to injury, as the locals laughed, it appears more of the business end decided to try to make it to Haifa on its own.

[…]

I’m not sure how you scatter Army property all over the Eastern Med without a boot getting dry, but maybe I’m wrong. Gaza is lava, and all.

Empires don’t often die in a blaze of glory, no. More often than not they end in simpering apologies and excuses from poor leaders putting the wrong people in positions they have no place being, and when they fail — there is no accountability.

Why Germany Lost the Battle of the Atlantic

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published Feb 2, 2024

In March 1943, German U-boats are on the attack – they sink 108 Allied vessels that month alone. Some Allied officials fear a German victory in the Atlantic is imminent. If the Allies lose the Atlantic, Britain loses its lifeline – and maybe even the war. But by May 1943, it will be the U-boats limping home in defeat. So how, in just two months, did the U-boats go from hunters to hunted?
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May 26, 2024

The Last Battles in Europe – WW2 – Week 300 – May 25, 1945

Filed under: Australia, China, Europe, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 25 May 2024

This week, the fighting in Europe finally comes to an end and the Allies round up more leading Nazis including Heinrich Himmler and Karl Dönitz. In Asia, the fighting continues on Okinawa even as the Japanese start pulling back. The Australians continue fighting on Tarakan, and the Chinese are victorious in western Hunan.

00:00 Intro
01:45 Fighting In Europe Ends
04:30 Notes From Europe
06:57 Japanese Begin To Withdraw On Okinawa
12:41 The Battle Of Tarakan Island
14:35 Chinese Victory In Western Hunan
18:51 Conclusion
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QotD: Ever-expanding government

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

Where government advances — and it advances relentlessly — freedom is imperiled; community impoverished; religion marginalized and civilization itself jeopardized … When did government cease to be a necessary evil and become a goody bag to solve our private problems?

Janice Rogers Brown, “Hyphenasia: the Mercy Killing of the American Dream,” Speech at Claremont-McKenna College (Sept. 16, 1999).

May 25, 2024

“Education” versus “learning”

Filed under: Books, Education, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander discusses some of the ideas from Bryan Caplan’s book The Case Against Education:

Source here. Note deranged horizontal axis.

Education isn’t just about facts. But it’s partly about facts. Facts are easy to measure, and they’re a useful signpost for deeper understanding. If someone has never heard of Chaucer, Dickens, Melville, Twain, or Joyce, they probably haven’t learned to appreciate great literature. If someone can’t identify Washington, Lincoln, or either Roosevelt, they probably don’t understand the ebb and flow of American history. So what facts does the average American know?

In a 1999 poll, only 66% of Americans age 18-29 knew that the US won independence from Britain (as opposed to some other country). About 47% of Americans can name all three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial). 37% know the closest planet to the sun (Mercury). 58% know which gas causes most global warming (carbon dioxide). 44% know Auschwitz was the site of a concentration camp. Fewer than 50% (ie worse than chance) can correctly answer a true-false question about whether electrons are bigger than atoms.

These results are scattered across many polls, which makes them vulnerable to publication bias; I can’t find a good unified general knowledge survey of the whole population. But there’s a great survey of university students. Keeping in mind that this is a highly selected, extra-smart population, here are some data points:

  • 85% know who wrote Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)
  • 56% know the biggest planet (Jupiter)
  • 44% know who rode on horseback in 1775 to warn that the British were coming (Paul Revere)
  • 33% know what organ produces insulin (pancreas)
  • 31% know the capital of Russia (Moscow)
  • 30% know who discovered the Theory of Relativity (Einstein)
  • 19% know what mountain range contains Mt. Everest (Himalayas)
  • 19% know who wrote 1984 (George Orwell)
  • 16% know what word the raven says in Poe’s “The Raven” (“Nevermore!”)
  • 10% know the captain’s name in Moby Dick (Ahab)
  • 7% know who discovered, in 1543, that the Earth orbits the sun (Copernicus)
  • 4% know what Chinese religion was founded by Lao Tse (Taoism)
  • <1% know what city the general Hannibal was from (Carthage)

Remember, these are university students, so the average person’s performance is worse.

Most of these are the kinds of facts that I would expect school to teach people. Some of them (eg the branches of government) are the foundations of whole subjects, facts that I would expect to get reviewed and built upon many times during a student’s career. If most people don’t remember them, there seems to be little hope that they remember basically anything from school. So what’s school even doing?

Maybe school is why at least a majority of people know the very basics – like that the US won independence from Britain, or that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet? I’m not sure this is true. Here are some other questions that got approximately the same level of correct answers as “Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet“:

  • What is the name of the rubber object hit by hockey players? (Puck, 89%)
  • What is the name of the comic strip character who eats spinach to increase his strength? (Popeye, 82% correct)
  • What is the name of Dorothy’s dog in The Wizard of Oz? (Toto, 80% correct)

I don’t think any of these are taught in school. They’re absorbed by cultural osmosis. It seems equally likely that Romeo and Juliet could be absorbed the same way. Wasn’t there an Academy-Award-winning movie about Shakespeare writing Romeo and Juliet just a decade or so before this study came out? Sure, 19% of people know that Orwell wrote 1984 – but how many people know the 1984 Calendar Meme, or the “1984 was not an instruction manual!” joke, or have heard of the reality show Big Brother? Nobody learned those in school, so maybe they learned Orwell’s name the same place they learned about the other 1984-related stuff.

Okay, so school probably doesn’t do a great job teaching facts. But maybe it could still teach skills, right?

According to tests, fewer than 10% of Americans are “proficient” at PIIAC-defined numeracy skills, even though in theory you need to know algebra to graduate from most public schools.

I took a year of Spanish in middle school, and I cannot speak Spanish today to save my life; that year was completely wasted. Sure, I know things like “Hola!” and “Adios!”, but I also know things like “gringo” and “Yo quiero Taco Bell” – this is just cultural osmosis again.

So it seems most people forget almost all of what they learn in school, whether we’re talking about facts or skills. The remaining pro-school argument would be that even if they forget every specific thing, they retain some kind of scaffolding that makes it easier for them to learn and understand new things in the future; ie they keep some sort of overall concept of learning. This is a pretty god-of-the-gaps-ish hypothesis, and counterbalanced by all the kids who said school made them hate learning, or made them unable to learn in a non-fake/rote way, or that they can’t read books now because they’re too traumatized from years of being forced to read books that they hate.

It’s common-but-trite to encounter people who say things like “I love learning, but I hated school” — I’ve undoubtedly said that myself many times. A weird experience was having to study a book in school that I’d already read on my own: it was like an early form of aversion therapy … here’s something you loved once, let’s make you hate it now.

Fathers of Light and Darkness – Rockets and Explosives – Sabaton History 126 [Official]

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Media, Military, Science, Space, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Sabaton History
Published Feb 7, 2024

There are many inventors whose creations have been turned into weapons of war. A couple that really stand out are Alfred Nobel and Wernher von Braun. Today we’ll take a deep dive into their stories and the paradox of using destructive weapons for good, or creative weapons for destruction.
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QotD: “Dirt Theory”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Moving is racist, when white people do it. When a white person chooses to relocate, the consequences are racism. To understand this, you have to understand what Steve Sailer dubs “Dirt Theory”: Any geographical location where black or brown people live is “Tragic Dirt”, afflicted by poverty and violence, and the only solution to their problem is to move them to white-occupied “Magic Dirt”, where everybody is rich and all the kids have high test scores. At least, this is how liberals seem to believe the world works, and have made “Dirt Theory” the basis of their attitude on such issues as immigration. In their disordered minds, people like Harvard Professor Raj Chetty believe that analysis of geographic data about poverty, crime, etc., will yield insights about the causes of these phenomena — places matter more than people.

Robert Stacey McCain, “New Form of Racism Has Been Discovered”, The Other McCain, 2024-02-04.

May 24, 2024

Bernie Sanders finally finds a group of rich people who he thinks shouldn’t have to pay

Filed under: Business, Europe, Government, Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

As Tim Worstall points out, Bernie Sanders’ latest campaign is starkly at odds with his usual “make the rich pay” schtick:

“Bernie Sanders” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

It’s possible to think that Bernie Sanders, Senator that he is, is more than a little confused. Well, he’d not be the first elderly politician to suffer that fate. Nor the first socialist. It is necessary for me to be fair here though — one of his honeymoons he took in the Soviet Union. Which makes perfect sense to me — after all, there was bugger all else to do there other than your own wife.

However, here we’ve got him complaining about the cost of the new miracle drugs:

    Bernie Sanders has urged Denmark to rein in its most valuable company, Novo Nordisk, and force it to slash prices on popular weight loss and diabetes treatments Ozempic and Wegovy, taking his fight to lower “outrageously high” drug prices in the United States to the company’s doorstep as its profits soar amid ongoing struggles to meet booming appetite for the revolutionary drugs.

Hmm, dunno how well that’s going to work with the Danes really. Yes, to some extent they’re milder than when they tried to rape and pillage the entirety of Europe but not wholly. My brother worked out in Afghanistan (feeding the troops) and he had a Danish unit rotate through. So he tells me their senior sergeant type carried a double bladed axe on his backpack — it didn’t come back clean from every patrol either. They’re not all equality and gender rights these days, you know?

So, we can imagine a certain portion at least of the Danish population celebrating this rapine of Medicare’s pockets by the simple expedient of selling a weight loss drug that actually works — which is, when we come to think of it, something of an innovation. Fen-Fen didn’t work after all. Hey, you know, Vinland failed but we’ll get ’em this time? We’re charging high prices because we can?

A second pass at the argument would be that the drugs are in fact incredibly cheap. When it was shown that the same drug — semaglutide — works in stopping (that’s “stopping” as in ceased, stopped, dead, like Bernie’s career would if it were ever proven he had taken part in an act of voluntary capitalism) chronic kidney disease. So much so that the very day they announced the trials on the drug were being stopped a year early, so obvious was the success, the share prices of all the dialysis provision companies dropped 20 and 30%. That is, at near whatever price, this drug is a money saver. Which is, you know, good. J Foreigner turns up with this thing that saves America, Americans, lives and money and yet Bernie whines — so like a socialist, eh? Capitalism with markets makes us the humans who are living highest on the hog, ever, but they really never do stop whining about it, do they?

But Bernie’s real complaint is that Americans are paying more to burn off the cheeseburgers than everyone else has to. But from everything else Bernie says about anything at all this is at it should be — the rich should pay.

Back to our basics. The basic drug development problem is that the development of a drug is a public goods problem. It costs $2 billion to get a drug through the FDA and gain approval to actually sell it. Yes, of course we should slaughter much of the regulation that makes it cost that much (personally, against character type, I only recommend capture and humane release for the actual bureaucrats) but that’s another matter. It does. But if everyone can just copy the drug at that point then no one will spend $2 billion. So, OK, patents, so the developers have a decade (the patent is two decades, it takes a decade to gain approval) to make their $2 billion back then anyone can copy it. The price falls to manufacturing cost plus normal profit level and we’re about as good as we can get. This is not a perfect system but for mass market drugs it’s about as good as we’re going to get.

“[I]t is offensive to say that women should help men reach their potential; but … men must help women reach theirs“

Filed under: Football, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

There has been a lot of online outrage after Kansas City Chiefs placekicker Harrison Butker spoke at the graduation ceremonies at his alma mater:

“Stop giving men microphones,” wrote one of the signers of the petition to have NFL kicker Harrison Butker fired.

“As a woman living in post-Roe America,” declared another, “I’m exhausted from men telling women what to do with their lives.”

“How offensive to imply women are put here on this planet to help a man reach his full potential,” fumed a third. “We should be empowering women to achieve greatness however that looks for them. Having children or being a mother isn’t the currency we must pay to be treated as equal members of this society.”

And on and on they go in predictable, and predictably incoherent, statements. Apparently, it is offensive to say that women should help men reach their potential; but, in the next breath, men must help women reach theirs.

At a time when women encourage one another in “rage rituals” and feminists like Mona Eltahawy call for perpetual anger as the route to liberation, few can be surprised by the hysteria that followed National Football League kicker Harrison Butker’s speech to the graduating students of Benedictine College in Kansas. It is a rage that has led well over 200,000 of the furious, mostly women, to sign a petition demanding he be fired by the Kansas City Chiefs.

Manufacturing outrage is what feminist journalism does best, and its audience is eager for cosplay rebellion and narcissistic posturing even when, as in the case of the speech, the hyperventilating is far in excess of the fact. That even Benedictine nuns have joined the chorus shows how many women in all walks of life find such posturing near-irresistible.

Of course, if Butker had addressed the Benedictine College graduates to say that Catholicism was riddled with misogyny and homophobia, no popular petitions would have been launched. If he had said that abortion was a gift to humanity and that female priests would lead the church to glory, his words would have sparked dissent only in the most marginal of venues.

Let a man praise his wife for her devotion to family, and we witness a stampede of foul-mouthed nasties to their bullhorns.

Grant Hammond .32 ACP Prototype

Filed under: History, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Apr 6, 2015

Grant Hammond is best known (to the extent he is known at all) for a .45 caliber pistol submitted to US military trials in 1917 and 1918. This pistol is a proof of concept prototype embodying some of the concepts that would go into the later .45 caliber pistol, and also showing some concepts that would not see further use. This .32 ACP prototype features a hybrid blow forward / blow back mechanism in which the slide uses a gas trapping system to move forward and the bolt moves backward. It also has a unique system for automatically ejecting the magazine when empty. Truly one of the most mechanically unusual pistols I have ever seen.

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