Broken Money

The subtitle is Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better, and the author is Lyn Alden (2023).

I feel like I have read books like this one before, which deconstruct the problems with a fiat monetary system and the issues of inflation / rampant money creation.  That said, the author does a nice job of supplementing the traditional view.

-The story over history is that hard money eventually wins out over weaker money.  Until now.  And the reason that fiat currencies won out in the recent era is because telecommunication systems introduced speed as a variable to the competition.  Gold/commodities inherently take longer to transport and authenticate, an inconvenience in the digital age.

-The short-term view that every politician has to take means that the problems of perpetual debt growth can never really be addressed.  It is not a problem that can be attributed to one politician or party.

-The reason that 2008 did not cause inflation was because the bailouts went to the banks and the average person did not have more money.  But the expansion of broad money during the pandemic did end up in the hands of average people, which meant that more money was chasing the same amount of goods and services.

-Bitcoin represents a solution to the speed gap between transactions and settlement.  And it has the added virtue of maintaining characteristics which resemble hard money (decentralized, no one else’s liability, high stock-to-flow ratio).

Layered Money

The subtitle is From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies and the author is Nik Bhatia (2021).

And further down the bitcoin rabbit hole we go.  This one was a short and easy read that looks at the history of money and how bitcoin can/does represent what gold used to be.  In particular, the author thinks about money in terms of layers.  The first layer, which is the primary asset without counterparty risk, used to be gold (as an example).  And each layer removed (gold certificates being next) carries slightly more risk, as it represents someone else's liability.  When we moved past the gold standard period, and into the era of dollar dominance, the first layer has been US Treasuries (even though they are actually liabilities of the US government), from which the Fed issues reserves to private banks as a second layer, who then make loans to retail customers as a third layer.

While less explicit in taking an Austrian view of things, the author definitely believes that the Fed has gone off the rails with its dollar creation (particularly since 2007), and that the world is primed for a new reserve currency asset -- of which bitcoin is a clear and obvious choice.  No one controls it, it is government-free, and also universally accessible with a computer.  Also, as compared to M. Ammous, he notes that the evolution of the Lightning Network has created greater efficiencies for bitcoin to be used in retail transactions.

And we learn a little more...

The Bitcoin Standard

The subtitle is The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking and the author is Saifedean Ammous (2018).

When I looked around for a book that makes the investment case for bitcoin, this title kept coming up.  The author is an economist who subscribes to the Austrian school in his thinking.  You could expand that to say, substitute bitcoin with gold and you might have heard this story before.

The prevailing argument in favor of owning bitcoin is that it represents a hard currency that removes the need for any third party intermediary or trust between counterparties.  In a world of credit cards and wire transfers, coupled with endless bureaucratic overreach that invades your privacy, bitcoin is a currency that is peer-to-peer without any bank or other entity in the middle.  It only requires processing power to verify transactions amongst a network of nodes around the world that are totally decentralized.  Moreover, bitcoin's protocols ensure that there will never be more than 21 million coins created -- removing the ability for any government or centralized body to print it and inflate it away -- and so it goes that it represents a store of value, in the same vein as a precious metal with a high stock-to-flow ratio.  To put more of a fine point on it, as bitcoin's value rises, there is a difficulty adjustment that leads to even more processing power being required to commit transactions to the network, which is what leads to the creation of new bitcoin.

Much of this book is spent making the case for free markets without central planning and government intervention.  The author does a perfectly fine job of making that argument, but it's not the reason to read this book.  Notwithstanding that, he does draw an interesting connection between unsound money and war -- in particular, unsound money adds complexity to trade flows, due to the multiple currencies untethered to any standard involved, which creates animus; the ability to print money means that governments can continue fighting endlessly, where they used to be limited by the tax dollars that could be raised to fund such excursions; and sound money leads people to have a lower time preference, which generally leads to more cooperation.

The other interesting takeaway is how the author dismisses the notion that blockchain technology has so many important uses outside of a digital cash system.  To his mind, the technology is not a particularly efficient, cheap, or fast way to transact online.  It was created to operate as a sound, digital money, without any form of intermediation in the middle, and to promote individual sovereignty.  And in that endeavor, it has succeeded.

The Authoritarian Moment

The subtitle is How the Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent and the author is Ben Shapiro (2021).

The story is one that I have dwelled on before – the lunatic left, while a minority in numbers, has somehow managed to hijack and coopt the message and views of corporate boardrooms, universities, the media, and the Democratic party.  And, in doing so, has used that position to silence its opposition in ways that are authoritarian and draconian, all with a view to gain leverage and power.  Theirs is a message that decries individualism and meritocracy, and harbors on disparate outcomes as if they are at all times and in all places the result of something evil, leading to policy and ideas that are bereft of logic and which fail to serve the greater good.

To wit, the pandemic offers an example of what I mean.  When it came to the vaccine roll-out, with the explicit understanding that the elderly were always the most at-risk, CDC officials pushed for a plan where essential workers were treated first, acknowledging that it would likely lead to more deaths by up to 6.5%, because “racial and ethnic minority groups are underrepresented among adults over 65”.  This view was endorsed by other public health officials, including an expert from Penn who actually said: “Older populations are whiter.  Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer.  Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”  Because we live in a world where systemic racism allegedly is the biggest problem going, these are the ideas that get oxygen.

The foregoing anecdote represents the corruption of science to serve a political end, but the impact of the Authoritarian Left is felt across industry.  I have seen it in my professional life where diversity training, which is effectively racism by another name, is mandated.  Institutions of higher learning largely have no faculty members these days who represent anything other than the Leftist view.  And there are only too many stories of corporations and media companies who fire corporate leaders and others for suggesting that America is not just some systemically racist place.

I don’t have any clever rhetorical flourish or deep takeaway to close today.  I will simply say the book is an eye-opener (if you need one) and worth the read.

Quote of the day

 Courtesy of Tyler Cowen:

"One thing the contemporary world definitely has not come to terms with is how much a highly feminised culture will be (rather strongly) enforcing new forms of discrimination, albeit cloaked under different and rhetorically emancipatory principles."

An Interesting Aside...

In writing this blog, I clearly made the decision to remain anonymous.  So, when I relate stories from my real life, my sharing will be always be limited by the first sentence.

With that said, I will soon be forced to participate in racial sensitivity training sessions.  Not because of anything I've done, but because of a professional association with a company that has totally bought in on the idea of systemic racism.  No doubt, I know to keep my thoughts to myself on this topic.  The interesting factoid is that we were provided with some reading materials to review in advance.  And my main takeaway is the following...

There is plenty of evidence if one looks at this country's history of grave injustices and governmental action that is clearly reprehensible.  Those periods in time, those laws, those court cases, those policies, need no further explanation to see what they are and the motivations behind them.  But, there is also plenty of history of our country recognizing these wrongs and then doing something to correct them, such that it is much better to be a minority, women, etc. today than at any other point in time.

But, what the advance readings seem to be doing, one and all, is referencing these histories, and then offering a data point about today, as if one is clearly caused by the other, but not doing any of the work to show you how.  These works clearly choose to ignore the possibility that something else may be going on (h/t Thomas Sowell).  For example, there was slavery in this country and the founding fathers owned slaves.  You know what else, today black families have lower median incomes than white families.  Two facts, not sure that they are necessarily related.

Over and over, the practice seems to be, here's the belief and conclusion that we want to draw, here's some data that could be interpreted in any number of ways, we offer no additional context other than what happened 150/100/50 years ago, go draw some conclusions.  I guess that I would expect more from a theory that seems to be taking hold of our government, corporate boardrooms, and every single school and university.

But maybe I am asking too much.

Discrimination and Disparities

The author is Thomas Sowell (2019).

I like folks who formulate their views of the world based on facts rather than groupthink and emotion – and, better yet, understand that there is commonly more than one reason for why something has happened.  Sowell fits that bill.  And this book makes that point.

It is very much written to be a retort to the politics and prevailing views of today.  His premise: “…we should not expect success to be evenly or randomly distributed among individuals, groups, institutions or nations in endeavors with multiple prerequisites – which is to say, most meaningful endeavors.”  In other words, we should not ever expect equality of outcomes, and always trying to explain such reality in the form of an -ism or malevolent action is incredibly naïve.

He does a good job of explaining, so I plan to quote generously:

“People from different social backgrounds may also have different goals and priorities – a possibility paid little or no attention in many studies that measure how much opportunity there is by how much upward movement takes place, as if everyone is equally striving to move up, and only society’s barriers produce different outcomes.”

And:

“Social mobility is the extent to which a society permits upward and downward movement.  How much movement actually takes place depends also on the extent to which individuals and families avail themselves of the opportunities.  Measuring social mobility by how much movement takes place proceeds as if nothing depends on how individuals and families behave.  That certainly avoids complications for those promoting the prevailing social vision.  But it also avoids empirically testing that vision.”

To wit:

“Deliberate, biased suppressions of other people’s opportunities are just one of the various other impediments to equal outcomes.  But those things which offend our moral sense do not automatically have more causal weight than morally neutral factors such as demography, geography or language differences.”

His book reminds me of what Douglas Murray had to say – the utopia against which our racist and sexist society is compared simply has never existed.  We have never seen equal outcome, distributions, or proportional representation.  And complaining in advocacy of something which is unrealistic strikes me as a waste of time and resources.

Loserthink

The subtitle is How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America and the author is Scott Adams (2019).

This is the second book by the author that I have digested.  Loserthink represents the mental traps that we fall into, whether it be cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, or believing that we can read other people’s minds, which can lead to confidence in bad ideas.  Adams is focused on achieving clarity of thought and self-awareness and avoiding the mental mistakes that can hinder both.  He just seems to get it.  Recommended.

Quote of the Day

In the Douglas Murray book that I just read, this quote gets to the heart of the matter:

"But most often the question 'Compared to what?' will elicit only the fact that the utopia with which our society is being compared has not yet come about.  If this is the case, and the monstrous claims about our societies are being made in comparison to a society which has not yet been created, then a certain amount of humility and a great deal of further questioning might be needed.  Those who claim that our society is typified by bigotry but believe that they know how to fix any and all societal ills better make sure that their route maps are well plotted.  If they are not then there is reason for everyone else to be suspicious about a project whose earliest stages are being presented as rigorous science when they more closely resemble an advocacy of magic."

The Madness of Crowds

The subtitle is Gender, Race and Identity and the author is Douglas Murray (2019).

“After slaying the dragon the brave warrior finds himself stalking the land looking for still more glorious fights.  He needs his dragons.  Eventually, after tiring himself out in the pursuit of ever-smaller dragons he may eventually even be found swinging his sword at thin air, imagining it to contain dragons.”

Regardless of your politics, I think the author does a remarkable job of making sense of where we are.  The identity politics of today are not about equality, as MLK fought for in his time, but about a redistribution of power.  And when you recognize that, you realize just how disingenuous the loudest voices are.

To summarize it, I relate a dictum of Daniel Patrick Moynihan – claims of human rights violations happen in exactly inverse proportion to the numbers of human rights violations in a country.  If this country really is as fascist, racist, homophobic and sexist as those waiving their fingers allege, the luxury of being so foolish so often and so loud would not exist.

Obsession

The subtitle is Inside the Washington Establishment’s Never-Ending War on Trump and the author is Byron York (2020).

Depending on how you voted, you probably read the title and made up your mind about whether the book holds any value.  That would be a mistake.  To be clear, it is definitively a tome that is supportive of the President with respect to his impeachment ordeals.  But, in reporting the first-hand accounts and reading the transcripts, the author’s narrative is definitely not some sort of revisionist history.

I admittedly ignored the news for the past 4 years, and so did not track the impeachment scandals nor have a strong view on what did or did not happen (I was generally skeptical because I did not think the media wanted to report fairly on Trump).  And, after reading Mr. York’s rendition (he is a reporter for the Washington Examiner), I feel comfortable in taking the view that the accusations against the President were a whole lot of nothing.

In looking back, you had calls for impeachment before Trump was even sworn in.  In addition, given recent events, I would remind everyone that 10 Democratic House members stood up to contest the electoral college certification in 2017.  And within months, Representative Al Green (a Democrat from Texas) started making the call for impeachment on the floor of House.  And, by October of 2017, he submitted his first resolution for impeachment – a House Resolution which got the support of 58 Democrats – and, included, I shit you not, Trump’s criticism of the NFL amongst the impeachable offenses.  The moral of the story is, throughout his term, the Democrats were out to get him.

The crux of this story, of course, was supposed collusion with Russia.  It started with a very sloppy and politicized investigation by James Comey – who was eventually fired because he lied to folks in the Justice Department and the Senate about what he was up to, and then leaked information to force a Special Counsel to be convened – and then came the Mueller investigation, which Democrats breathlessly hoped would be Trump’s final undoing.  Lest we forget, all of this started with the Steele dossier, which we now know was funded indirectly by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, and ultimately was debunked by the CIA as internet garbage fairly quickly (and, yet, Comey, knowing this, still kept pushing it forward and leaked it to the media).

Here’s where I think the book does a wonderful job of telling the story.  It has interviews with a number of the lawyers involved, brings up first-hand accounts of interactions and transcripts, and so by the end you can feel pretty confident that the right result was met – even if Mueller’s team tried to spin their report to suggest that the lack of evidence of criminal behavior was not enough to throw these allegations into the waste bin of history (rather than innocent until proven guilty, the new standard that they create is “not exonerated”).

The Mueller probe focused on 5 supposed instances of collusion:

-Carter Page supposedly went to Russia for the Trump campaign and was offered bribes to have Trump rescind US sanctions on Russia.  After repeated interviews and Grand Jury testimony, no evidence suggested that was the case (including any evidence that might have come from the illegal wiretap).

-An allegation that the GOP platform on Russia vis-à-vis Ukraine was watered down to benefit Russia at Trump’s request.  In fact, the exact opposite was true, both in terms of the content introduced at the GOP convention, and in practice as Trump supplied lethal and financial aid to Ukraine during his term.

-Michael Flynn.  The story here is again a non-story.  Obama imposes sanctions against Russia before the end of his term.  Flynn, as the incoming National Security Advisor, tells the Russian ambassador not to overreact and wait for the new President to be sworn in.  Comey, before being fired, suggested that no charges would be brought against Flynn.  Mueller went after it again and also did not find any evidence of conspiracy.

-George Papadopoulos.  A member of the Trump campaign who had allegedly told people that he knew about the Russian DNC hack ahead of time.  First the FBI (under Comey) investigated it and came up dry, then Mueller’s team went through the motions and also found nothing about Russia and collusion.

-The most provocative element was the Trump Tower meeting where Don Jr., Manafort and Kushner met with a Russian lawyer who promised damaging intel on Hillary Clinton.  In fact, when investigated, it turned out a music producer who knew the Trumps used that tease to get a meeting set up, only to have the lawyer show up and appeal to the Trumps that they should repeal the Magnitsky Act if elected.  In real time, based on text messages and the like, it became clear the Trump side felt the meeting was a waste of time and ended it after 20 minutes.

There you have it, all five parts of the supposed Russian collusion story.  And the Mueller team came to understand the lack of any there there pretty quickly as well.  But, rather than shutting it down, they changed courses and pushed to figure out if there was an obstruction angle.  Here’s where I point out the obvious conflicts – Mueller is a good friend to Comey (who was fired by Trump and leaked documents to force a Special Counsel investigation), and Mueller’s team was comprised not just of Democrats, but Democrats who contributed to campaigns, including Hillary Clinton in 2016.

In any event, the next saga included a push by the Mueller team to interview the President.  The logic being that they needed to understand Trump’s frame of mind to determine whether he was trying to obstruct any investigations.  Except there was no crime to obstruct an investigation for.  And the Trump legal team had already made the concerted decision up front to provide access without claiming any Executive Privilege, thereby allowing them to say that there was nothing further that an interview with Trump could offer.  In reality, the Mueller side wanted to meet with the President to set him up for a perjury trap, which the historical notes reveal was what they intended and did with Michael Flynn.

You don’t have to take my word for it.  Bottom line, the Mueller special investigation brought charges against 7 Americans, and none of those charges made any reference to collusion or efforts to fix the 2016 election.

As for the actual impeachment that took place in 2019, it came after the Democrats won back the House and was a story of trying to reach a desired result by skirting transparency and due process.  A conversation between Trump and the newly-elected Ukrainian leader, an overreaction by someone inside the DNI, who reports the information to someone else that runs to Adam Schiff, who advises that person on how to file a complaint, and then Schiff runs the investigation.  The transcript of the call was released, and it doesn’t read like high crimes or bribery or any other criminal act.  And the process under Schiff did not give the defendant any opportunity to question witnesses.  The final charges consisted of “abuse of power” – which is not actually a crime or a specific violation of law, certainly not “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” – and “obstruction of congress”, which is funny since Trump released the transcript, but then in invoking certain constitutional privileges with respect to other information, the Democrats decide that they couldn’t wait for the actual court system to settle it.

We know how it ends.  He is acquitted.  And then Joe Biden wins the election.  That was always the way to get rid of Trump.  But reason and logic went out the window.  We will see if they ever return.

Critical Race Theory

This is the third edition of one of the core introductory texts for Critical Race Theory written by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (2017).

Nothing that I read here leads me to think that the Pluckrose & Lindsay book is overstating the illogic of social justice theory, especially with respect to race.  It is ant-liberalism:

“Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equity theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

Unpack that a bit.  Equality under the law, scientific method, and the like are considered problematic.  The achievements of the civil rights movement are dismissed as too incremental.  The system that enables change and progress is somehow a propagator of racism.

And the issue to be confronted and challenged is effectively unempirical by any measure: “…the unseen, largely invisible collection of patterns and habits that make up patriarchy and other types of domination”.  It is a problem framed so abstractly and imprecisely as to describe nothing.

And everything is racist: “…racism is ordinary, not aberrational – ‘normal science’, the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country.”

And the only people able to assess such a statement are the oppressed: “Minority status, in other words, brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism.”

And, by the way, every white person is racist or complicit: “…no white member of society seems quite so innocent.”

And we should strive for socialist ideals: “…system applauds affording everyone equality of opportunity but resists programs that assure equality of results.”

In general, rather than taking any empirical approach to this issue, the authors frame the questions of race with comically exaggerated and blatantly racist scenarios, as if they represent the standard interaction (I thought it was “largely invisible”).  And they excerpt various court decisions, recommending those that take an unscientific approach to race and criticizing those decisions that insist on more than just anecdotes to confirm a systemic bias.

I would comfortably say that this a theory without real value if the goal is to address issues of race in this country.  And because it lacks any empathy for other groups in its discourse, I suspect it will struggle to get the cooperation of the many that is needed for real change to happen.

Cynical Theories

The subtitle is How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody and the authors are Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay (2020).

I am on a bit of a mission lately, to take what is deemed liturgy and demonstrate how it is really sophistry.  In part, it is about showing how Trump was actually deeply effective in the White House in ways that were good for the country but never got a fair shake, and, as a corollary, about how certain ideas and theories have been given way more oxygen than they deserve.  With respect to the latter, such is the case with this book in contemplating critical race theory and the like.  I am doing this a bit in reverse, as my next read is one of the core texts of critical race theory, but this book gets the point across without any of that background material.

The “Social Justice” theory that we hear about today, which posits the constant and omnipresent existence of racism, sexism and bias in every facet of society and every interaction, finds its roots in postmodern theory.  It is a theory whose hallmarks are radical skepticism (to the point that there is no longer any objective fact, the correspondent theory of truth is rejected, and science and empirical data are regarded with suspicion), that society is merely a system of powers and hierarchies, and there is no longer any emphasis on the individual or universalism (everything is contextualized in terms of discourses and identity groups).  And by virtue of its almost ethereal nature, unrestrained by any scientific method or measurement, it strives to make itself unfalsifiable and immune from criticism.  It basically begins with a conclusion and then works backwards to find proof, unreceptive to any challenge.  And from this starting point, we have different iterations, from postcolonial theory, to queer theory, to gender studies, to (my focus) critical race theory (under which I would probably be a racist by the logic of a believer).

Critical race theory at its core argues that “race is a social construct that was created to maintain white privilege and white supremacy”.  It rejects liberalism and its notions of equality, legal reasoning, and enlightenment humanism.  It suggests that only white people can be racist, and that those of an oppressed group have a special insight to diagnose racism, such perspective not to be questioned and to be deemed authoritative.  It is driven by “research justice”, “epistemic justice” and experiential knowledge (spoiler: not scientific or objective analysis).  It espouses systemic racism in the face of ever improving legal, political and economic status for people of color.

And that kind of is the point – the context is that these theories have gained momentum and volume all as civil rights, liberal feminism and gay rights have made remarkable progress legally and politically.  The system of liberalism, science and reason – which enabled these achievements – is now viewed as the problem because there is still some manifestation of something bad somewhere.  Which only confirms that the social justice theorists don’t actually understand how and why progress is made.  Liberalism.  A system which believes in equality, which allows us to perpetually question, challenge and debate, which uses logical reasoning and experimentation to figure out what works, and which gets nothing accomplished – except everything.  And which fundamentally, in stark contrast to social justice theory, promotes fairness and reciprocity.

The Real Grievance

Over the past few months I have been having an internal conversation in an attempt to dig in on what the real travesty is in this country.  And I think it comes down to blatant hypocrisy.  I can accept losing, even when I think the guiding wisdom for that loss is donkey logic (pun intended).  What I struggle with is rationalizing double standards with no accountability, as if there is a moral and intellectual superiority that makes awful behavior somehow better if it is generated by one side of the debate rather than other.  Thus, I stumbled onto a libertarian blog post (primarily focused on the debate around wearing masks -- I wear a mask, as does 80% of the country), and the following couple of sentences encapsulated my own feelings extremely well:

"The Left specializes in situational ethics; in fungible etymology.  Like Humpty Dumpty, a word means what Left says it does until the Left says its means something else...The Left is defined not so much by its leftism but its psychotic doublethink.  It is rancidly intolerant while touting itself as ethereally tolerant."

You're Hired

The subtitle is Untold Successes and Failures of a Populist President and the author is Casey Mulligan (2020).

Mulligan is a Chicago economist who served on Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors from 2018 to 2019.  The book examines the major policy initiatives that Mulligan contributed to during that time, but also provides first-hand accounts of working in the White House that represent a stark contrast to the media’s relentless narrative of the Trump Presidency.

He viewed Trump as a Populist who was deeply experimental in his approach, using Twitter as a way to beta test ideas – and also as a manner to get the media, which proved reluctant to report on his successes but would happily refute his exaggerations, to correct him and ultimately disseminate the story that he wanted to put out there (it is a logic that marries well with Scott Adams’ theory that Trump would push debate in 2016 to an illogical extreme in order to control the issues under focus).  His greatest successes could largely be derived from his keen effort to deregulate, thereby bringing costs down and putting more money in people’s pockets – whether that be the elimination of the individual mandate or removing regulations that protected special interests in health care and the auto industry.  His administration was the first that exceeded its own economic growth forecasts over its first two years.  And following major inflation in prescription drug prices because of Medicare Part D, prices actually declined for the first time in 46 years in 2018 after he got the FDA to reduce hurdles that come with generic drugs getting approval after patents expire.  These realities often were not well covered, or simply denied, by the media – a denial that extended beyond the press corps – economists would deny their own academic findings and articles when they saw the Trump administration relying on them.

Anecdotally, emphasizing how politicians simply do not read the bills that they propose and pass (and as Mulligan has been a longstanding and vocal critic of the ACA), he notes that the “Medicare for All” legislation pushed by Democrats is anti-market, with the most recent version including the following language: “There is a moral imperative to correct the massive deficiencies in our current health system and to eliminate profit from the provision of health care.”  If you don’t realize, the profit motive is why we might hope to have more doctors and nurses, which is what makes health care more accessible and affordable.  And the ideas underlying that legislation, in a time where Democrats now control all branches of government, should make everyone nervous about what might come next

How Numbers Work

I do love how transparent and honest the new administration has been so far.  Especially with respect to COVID.  As you may be aware, President Biden is striving for the very aggressive tally of 100 million vaccinations over the first 100 days of his term.  Relatively easy math, that is about 1 million vaccinations per day.  Impressive, no?  Wait, you're not impressed?!  Well, let Jen Psaki, the new White House press secretary, regale you then:

"Well, none of us are mathematicians, myself included, so I asked our team to do a little math on this.  So, the Trump administration was given 36 million doses when they were in office for 38 days.  They administered a total of about 17 million shots.  That’s about less than 500,000 shots a day.  What we’re proposing is to double that to about 1 million shots per day.  And we have outlined this goal and objective in coordination and consultation with our health and medical experts.

So it is ambitious.  It’s something that we feel is bold and was called that certainly at the time, and we’re working overtime to help to achieve it — try to achieve it."

Turns out that I'm not a mathematician either, but I'm also not a gullible idiot.  What Ms. Psaki provided is an average of how many doses were administered, which is a number, but not one that actually offers any context for whether the Biden plan is actually an improvement.  As it turns out, per Bloomberg, in the final week of the Trump term, average daily vaccines were up to 938,000 doses per day.

So, they are BOLDLY increasing vaccinations by 62,000 doses per day -- and they are working overtime to do it.  Dat shur iz sumthin.

I'm here all week, try the veal. 

We are f#*^ed!

The results from the Georgia Senate races are concerning.  No obvious barrier to stupidity and lunacy remaining.  I hope a hero steps up...

As far as the week that was, good to see the Democrats taking one final crack at impeachment.  They still have 12 days left to repudiate the 2016 election.  America will be saved and morality back.

Details, details, details

 

How To Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

The author is Ben Shapiro (2020).

I got turned onto this one because the author has a podcast that I enjoy very much.  Up front, he is a conservative Republican, so his views follow a certain set of norms.  Notwithstanding that, he is really sharp and logical in his explaining his positions.

This book is an overview of how the lefty lunatics, who he terms Disintegrationists, push ideas that deviate deeply from the founding principles of this country and undermine efforts to move the ball forward.  He poses this argument by contrasting his views (which he describes as Unionism) on American philosophy, culture and history against the way such matters are portrayed by the other side.

His view is that this country was founded on the basis of individual rights that preexist the government, and that such rights should trump government power and pure majoritarianism.  The Founding Fathers specifically strove to create a system where the government only had "powers enough to do what we would not mind it doing were the government controlled by those who disagree".  In other words, that "governments are instituted to protect rights, not a majority's definition of the 'good'".  Equality before the law might be the most succinct way to explain it.

On the other side, the Disintegrationists seem to believe that because there are disparities between people, which is of course nature, that equality before the law is actually unequal, and therefore prefer something that resembles equality of outcome.  Disparities are at all times treated as a systemic problem and chalked up to discrimination -- the evidence of such discrimination simply being the existence of inequality of outcome.  Natural rights do not exist, instead rights are simply what the government gives us.  It leads to growing entitlements, at the expense of actual rights in the name of the "common good", and the loss of equality before the law.  It means that free markets can be interfered with in the name of economic fairness, that free speech can be infringed upon because someone might be offended.  It means that what is good and moral is entirely subjective and dictated by the whims of the majority at any time, a foundation that can lead to tyranny.

Shapiro is clear that America's is not without its tragedies and dark moments -- but the basic point is that the light outshines the dark, and the mistakes are overcome over time.  Racism still exists, but it is a problem that becomes less pronounced and prevalent with every generation.  Income inequality exists, but even the poor now are better off than they were a generation or two ago.  To suggest that anything short of perfection is unacceptable is to deny progress.  It also is to deny history and to suggest that the only answer is disintegration, which is not an answer at all.

More

Following the election, I went through a few days of being compulsively attached to social media, like for hours at a time, down insipid rabbit holes, and re-living all my agita several times per day.  And, then, I simply decided, enough.  I deactivated all my social media accounts and felt it was time to move on.

Well, not completely.  I discovered and turned my attention to podcasts, mostly of a right-leaning variety.  In particular, among my favorites, is the Megyn Kelly Show.  She cuts through the bullshit in a manner consistent with my own thinking, and I like it.

I bring this up because today she had Dave Rubin as her guest, another like-minded individual.  And he said something that resonated.  I paraphrase, but the gist was that people on the right think the system is all screwed up and want to be left alone.  Folks on the left think the system is all screwed up, but the solution is let's give it more money, more power, and just get the right people in.

All of it reminded me of a passage from the book The Revolt Against the Masses by Fred Siegel:

"Liberal interests never reexamined their assumptions, even when faced with social and political failure.  They never asked why, despite the vast sums expended, poverty had become worse rather than better.  Instead, they pointed to shards of success and, more significantly, in the hopes of maintaining their grip, redefined the problem.  Great Society social programs originally designed to reduce if not eliminate poverty were now justified in terms of rights, racial justice, or diversity.  And then there was the fallback to the fallback: the insistence on good intentions rather than outcomes...Their claim to moral superiority rested more on self-image than real-world results."

A timeless comment.