Under Trump, US Economic Freedom Rises Significantly

From The Daily Signal.com (Jan. 25):

The U.S. economy is roaring like no other time in recent memory. The job market is hot, unemployment is down to record lows, and small business optimism is soaring.

But this newfound dynamism didn’t come from nowhere. It required a package of market and consumer-friendly reforms passed by Congress and adopted by the Trump administration. These reforms have boosted economic freedom.

According to The Heritage Foundation’s 2019 Index of Economic Freedom, America’s economic freedom has seen a dramatic boost—from 18th place in the world to 12th place in the span of just one year. America’s score ticked up by more than a full point from last year, reaching the highest level in eight years.

The annual index—now celebrating its 25th year—provides an overall snapshot of almost every country’s level of economic freedom. It takes into account a variety of factors, like taxation, regulation, and trade. It is relevant to our job prospects and the prices we pay for goods and services, not to mention what kind of appliances and cars we can choose and buy.  [read more]

Nice to know. Will the lame-stream-press report this? Probably not.

The Stirring Elocution of Frederick Douglass

From FEE.org:

At the age of 29 in 1847, he [Frederick Douglass] delivered an address in Syracuse, New York, titled “Love of God, Love of Man, Love of Country” in which he outlined a central point of many speeches to come:

There is no conceivable reason why all colored people should not be treated according to the merits of each individual. It is not only the plain duty, but also the interest of us all, to have every colored man take the place for which he is best fitted by education, character, ability, manners, and culture. If others insist on keeping him in any lower and poorer place*, it is not only his injury, but our universal loss. Yet which of our white congregations would take a colored pastor? How many of our New England villages would like to have colored postmasters, or doctors, or lawyers, or teachers in the public schools? A very slight difference in complexion suffices to keep a young man from getting a place as policeman, or fireman, or conductor, even on the horse cars. The trades-unions are closed against him, and so are many of our stores; while those which admit him are obliged to refuse him promotion on account of the unwillingness of white men to serve under him.

…………….

This was a man who could speak with conviction about the importance of character because he possessed it in abundance himself. He understood that slavery was a blot on the character of the country, evidence that a moral renaissance was required. “The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous,” he said. Slavery was an equal opportunity curse because it would sooner or later come back to bite even those who seemed to benefit from it: “No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”  [read more]

*Like the Left today.

These robots can follow how-to diagrams

From Science News.org (Jan. 16):

Robots imbued with a certain kind of common sense may soon be able to follow instructional diagrams to build things.

When studying pictures for assembling IKEA furniture or LEGO villages, humans are naturally good at inferring how to get from A to B. Robots, on the other hand, normally have to be painstakingly programmed with exact instructions for how to move. “Even when you try to teach robots by demonstration, they’re just repeating the exact same motions you show them, not the concept underlying them,” says Dileep George, an artificial intelligence and neuroscience researcher at the San Francisco company Vicarious AI.

George and colleagues have now designed a robot operating system that can understand the basic ideas conveyed in schematic instructions and translate those ideas into action. These common sense robots, described online January 16 in Science Robotics, could work on a wider variety of tasks under different conditions than machines restricted to explicitly coded instructions or physical demonstrations.

The new robotic system learned more than 500 general concepts, such as “stack green objects on the right” and “arrange objects in a circle,” by studying before and after images for each type of action. When given a new set of instructions with a before-and-after diagram, the fully trained system considers all the concepts it has learned, and chooses and executes the maneuvers that will help it reach its goal. [read more]

Other articles on robots:

• A new AI training program helps robots own their ignorance
• Scientists invent 'self-aware' robot that operates ON ITS OWN and able to REPAIR ITSELF

A rare kind of black hole may be wandering around our Milky Way

From Fox News.com (Jan. 18):

Scientists think that they've spotted a rare, Jupiter-size black hole casually strolling through the Milky Way galaxy.

Of course, scientists can't see any black holes directly — but new research tracking a celestial cloud structure saw strange behavior that may have been caused by just such an invisible object. That data came courtesy of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a set of 66 telescopes scattered across the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.

"When I checked the ALMA data for the first time, I was really excited because the observed gas showed obvious orbital motions, which strongly suggest an invisible massive object lurking," lead author Shunya Takekawa, a physicist at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, told New Scientist.

Takekawa and his colleagues were using ALMA to study two gas clouds, which the team nicknamed Balloon and Stream for their shapes, during a two-day period in May 2018. During that time, they watched the gas moving strangely, seeming to spin around a center.

That movement allowed the team to calculate that 30,000 times the mass of our sun was packed into an object the size of Jupiter at the center of the movement. Those characteristics, combined with the lack of light coming from the location, suggest that the culprit is medium size for a black hole.  [read more]

I hope the black hole doesn’t enter our solar system. That would not be good at all.

Herbert Marcuse: The Philosopher Behind the Ideology of the Anti-Fascists

From FEE.org:

Marcuse Is of No Use

Herbert Marcuse was a German-American philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist.

Born in Berlin in 1898, he was drafted into the German Army in 1916 at age 18 and later participated in the Spartacist uprising. Following the war, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg, where he would continue to study (and write a paper with Martin Heidegger on Hegel) before arriving at the Institute of Social Research in 1933.

While at the Institute of Social Research—better known today as the Frankfurt School—Marcuse would publish several works on Marx that would abandon the Marxist focus on labor and class struggle and develop the controversial philosophy of critical theory.

Critical theory is defined as “a philosophical approach to culture, and especially to literature, that seeks to confront the social, historical, and ideological forces and structures that produce and constrain it.”

This might sound benign, but in practice, critical theory is the shallow analysis of politics, history, art, and society through the lens of power dynamics. It places the world into a box of oppressor vs. oppressed and insists that those who are oppressed are “good” and those who are oppressors are “evil.”

………………..

Critical Theory in Practice

Marcuse applies this theory in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance”—a true example of doublespeak—wherein he argues that free speech and tolerance are only beneficial when they exist in conditions of absolute equality. When there are power differentials at play, which there most certainly always will be, then free speech and tolerance are only beneficial to the already powerful.

He calls tolerance in conditions of inequality “repressive” and argues that it inhibits the political agenda and suppresses the less powerful.

To account for this, Marcuse calls for a “liberating tolerance” that represses the strong and empowers the weak. He explained that a liberating tolerance “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”

The problem is that if you view the world through the obfuscated lens of conflict, then you see little other than power dynamics, and the only way to restore power imbalances is to use force. This essentially means that the weak (“the Left”) can do no wrong because they are virtuous, and the powerful (“the Right”) are oppressive no matter what they do, due to their perceived position of dominance. [read more]

Thousands of stars, including the sun, will turn into huge crystals

From CNet.com:

Eventually, the sun will cool off and become a giant crystal floating through space. It's not a bizarre science fiction plot, but the takeaway of new scientific research published this week in the journal Nature.

You may have heard that billions of years down the road the sun will swell to a ravenous red giant star that will eventually swallow Earth. But long after our planet has been ended, the sun will shrink to a cool white dwarf star and then slowly solidify into a massive white crystal, the study says.

That's a lot of bling wasted on the empty vacuum of space.

"All white dwarfs will crystallize at some point in their evolution, although more massive white dwarfs go through the process sooner," Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay from the University of Warwick's Department of Physics in the UK explained in a statement.

"This means that billions of white dwarfs in our galaxy have already completed the process and are essentially crystal spheres in the sky. The sun itself will become a crystal white dwarf in about 10 billion years." [read more]

Cool. I knew about the sun swelling into a red giant star but not turning into a crystal. Glad I won’t be around when the sun swells.

The Ironies of Illegal Immigration

From The Daily Signal.com (Jan. 10):

Estimates suggest that there are 11 million to 13 million Mexican citizens currently living in the United States illegally. Millions more emigrated previously and are now U.S. citizens.

A recent poll revealed that one-third of Mexicans (34 percent) would like to emigrate to the United States. With Mexico having a population of about 130 million, that amounts to some 44 million would-be immigrants.

Such massive potential emigration into the United States makes no sense.

First, Mexico is a naturally rich country. It ranks 19th in the world in proven oil reserves and is currently the 12th-largest oil producer. Mexico certainly has significantly more natural advantages than do far wealthier per capita Singapore, Taiwan, or Chile.

…………………

Second, popular progressive narratives in both Mexico and the United States cite America for all sorts of pathologies, past and present. The United States is often damned for prior colonialism and imperialism, as well as current racism and xenophobia.

Why, then, would millions of people south of the border leave their own homeland and potentially risk their lives to encounter a strange culture and language, to live in such a purportedly inhospitable place, and to adopt an antithetical system based on supposedly toxic European and Protestant traditions?

The answers to these two paradoxes are as obvious as they are politically incorrect and therefore seldom voiced. Life in Mexico is relatively poor, dangerous, and often unfree. In contrast, the United States is rich, generous, and secure.

……………….

More importantly, millions of Mexican citizens recognize (at least privately) that the United States is not the bogeyman of mostly elite critiques. Instead, it is one of the world’s rare multiracial, equal-opportunity societies. It is generous with its entitlements even to those who cross its border illegally, and far more meritocratic than most of the world’s highly tribal societies.

Maybe that is why millions of impoverished people from Mexico have left their homes in expectation that they will be treated far better as foreign, non-English speakers in a strange land than they will at home by their own government.

Indeed, if the U.S. treated immigrants in the fashion that Mexico does, then Mexican citizens would probably never emigrate to the U.S.

In sum, illegal immigration is both logical and nonsensical. [read more]

Interesting article.

Ex-political consultant Dick Morris has an interesting take on the building the wall. He says if America builds a wall between Mexico and us then that would force the Mexico gov’t to solve its own problems. Otherwise Mexican gov’t wants people to immigrate to America—less people to worry about. I don’t know. He might be right.

How Public Schools Suffer from the Tragedy of the Commons

From FEE.org:

Ownership by All

The idea of public schooling means they are open to the public, and in this way, we might truly call them public. But in a more realistic sense, the “public” in public school means they are owned by everyone and no one. For instance, if local public schools are supported in part by local taxation, then anyone who pays taxes in that district owns part of the school, in a sense. They don’t literally own a brick or a classroom, but in a republic, taxpayers are supposed to have a say in the things they pay for, or in this example, their local public school. In this way, your average public school is owned by everyone in that community. When we factor in the reality that a large part of funding for public education comes from the federal and state levels (as opposed to the local level only), then every taxpayer in an entire state and/or country “owns” the schools. These ISD’s are in reality not so independent after all.

Despite being collectively owned in theory, they are in reality owned by no one, which is another interpretation of the word “public.” This, of course, is the tragedy of the commons: When something is collectively owned, it is simultaneously owned by everyone and no one. Going back to our public school example, would an average tax-paying parent have substantial influence when it came to routine decisions about curriculum, course offerings, athletics, school lunches, etc.? After all, they own part of the school, at least in theory, so it stands to reason they would have a say in making decisions. But this isn’t how it works.

Because schools are “publicly” owned, they can’t possibly cater to the individual desires of each family. Susie’s mom wants a soccer team, Johnny’s dad wants increased funding for the band, and the elderly couple down the road just wants their property taxes to quit increasing. Just as a matter of practicality, publicly-owned services like schools cannot function in the same way that private schools do.

Why Markets Work Better

Although we can’t be certain of anything in this era of media saturation, I doubt whether we would ever see a story debating the legality of teaching Bible literacy courses in a private school. Private schools are funded by the parents of the students (not the abstract “community”), and just like a shopper who chooses Target over Tom Thumb, parents make a willful decision to send their child to a private school where they presumably know what product they are getting. Because an identifiable group of parents pays for the school, they have a substantially increased level of influence within the school. This isn’t to say that every parent will get what he or she wants simply because they write the check, but just as private businesses are subject to market tests of profit and loss, a private school must react promptly to the desires of its patrons if it wishes to stay in business.  [read more]

It’s too bad that today’s Leftists don’t know or understand the tragedy of the commons principle.

When Bill Clinton Tackled Me

From Dick Morris on Dick Morris.com (Jan. 8):

In May of 1990, I was meeting with my client Governor Bill Clinton in the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion when he totally lost it. He ran after me as I stormed out of the building and tackled me from behind, drew his fist back and started to punch me. Hillary screamed and held Bill’s arm back. Then she walked me around the grounds of the Mansion trying to calm me down. “Dick, Dick, she said. Don’t leave. Bill needs you. He’s just upset. Don’t go. He only does this to people he loves.”

………………

Bill decided to run for Governor in 1990 and faced only nominal opposition in the Democratic Primary. But people were so tired of him that he began to lose ground to his challenger and it looked like he might lose the election.

I gave him the bad news at a private meeting in May of 1990 and he exploded in anger, cursing and yelling at me. He even accused me of “throwing” the election to help my new Republican friends (I had become a Republican in the interim).

I stormed out of the Governor’s Mansion saying, over my shoulder as I left “OK! I quit! Now I’ll be a fifty state Republican. Go lose this election on your own.”

That’s when I heard his hoof beats behind me and he came up and tackled me. It was why our relationship cooled. He remained my client but no longer my friend.  [read more]

Dick Morris also mentioned this episode briefly in his 2016 book Armageddon: How Trump Can Beat Hillary.

Another article about the Clintons by Dick Morris: “How the Clintons Made Money from Huawei”

Russian church head: Smartphones could precede Antichrist

From AP News.com (Jan. 8):

MOSCOW (AP) — The head of the Russian Orthodox Church says the data-gathering capacity of devices such as smartphones risks bringing humanity closer to the arrival of the Antichrist.

In an interview shown Monday on state TV, Patriarch Kirill said the church does not oppose technological progress but is concerned that “someone can know exactly where you are, know exactly what you are interested in, know exactly what you are afraid of” and that such information could be used for centralized control of the world.

“Control from one point is a foreshadowing of the coming of Antichrist, if we talk about the Christian view. Antichrist is the person who will be at the head of the world wide web that controls the entire human race,” he said. [source]

Interesting. He could be right. Not only the Antichrist could use the technology but AI overloads could as well. Or maybe the Antichrist and the AI overloads could join forces. Who knows.

Rights and Non-Rights: A Simple Way to Distinguish the Two

Commentary from Lawrence W. Reed on FEE.org:

“Rights” are in the news these days perhaps as much as they were in George Mason’s time. As a score of politicians prepares to announce their 2020 campaigns for President of the United States, we can expect “rights” to be in the news every day, as they are promised to us one after another. “You have a right” to this or that and “If elected, I’ll make sure you get it” will soon be monotonous refrains.

America is a nation founded on the notion of rights. Our independence was declared in 1776 on a foundation of “unalienable” rights granted to us not by mortal authorities but by the Creator himself. Our ancestors rebelled against the British because they believed that such rights as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” were being thwarted by oppressors in London. Our founding documents were put forth specifically for the purposes of securing and protecting rights. Battles both intellectual and physical were fought in the ensuing decades to ensure that rights remained a priority of government or were extended to people not originally included.

……………….

I’ve given this subject some thought over the years and feel confident in providing the reader with a couple of lists to consider. The first one itemizes what I personally think you have a right to; the second is a partial roster of things I personally think you don’t have a right to (and I readily grant that you have every right to disagree with me).

You have a right to:

1. Your life (unless compromised by taking or attempting to take that of another person without a self-defense justification);
2. Your thoughts;
3. Your speech (which is really a verbal or written expression of #2) so long as you don’t steal it from another without permission or credit;
4. Material property you were freely given, that you created yourself, or that you freely traded for;
5. Raise and educate your children as you see fit;
6. Live in peace and freedom so long as you do not threaten the peace and freedom of others.

You do not have a right to:

1. High-speed broadband Internet access;
2. Cheeseburgers, cheap wine (or even expensive wine, for that matter), or an iPhone;
3. Somebody else’s house, car, boat, income, business, or bank account;
4. The labor of another person you’ve not freely contracted with (you can’t enslave somebody, in other words);
5. Medical care from a witch doctor or a skilled surgeon or anybody in between;
6. Taxpayer-funded (i.e., coercively-appropriated) child daycare, college education, contraceptives, colonoscopies, or sports stadiums;
7. Anything that’s not yours, even though you really want it and think you’re entitled to it;
8. Conscript other people’s children into schools you think they should attend;
9. Free stuff in general, unless the rightful owner chooses to offer it;
10. Anything a politician flattered you with by claiming you have a right to it.

Of course, gray areas and reasonable qualifications exist. For example, while I believe you do have a right to raise and educate your own children as you see fit, abuse and neglect are not defensible. But let’s keep our eyes on the big picture, the broad principles here.

Positive vs. Negative Rights

Now, look at those two lists again, carefully. How does the nature of the first list contrast with the nature of the second?

Answer: In the case of the first list, nothing is required of other people except that they leave you alone. For you to have a right to something in the second list, however, requires that other people be compelled to provide that something to you. That’s a monumental difference!

The first list comprises what are often called both “natural rights” and “negative rights”—natural because they derive from our essential nature as unique, sensate individuals and negative because they don’t impose obligations on others beyond a commitment to not violate them. The items in the second are called “positive rights” because others must give them to you or be coerced into doing so if they decline.  [read more]

The Left would disagree with the 2nd list saying they are rights. The Bill of Rights is basically the first list.

The Left Will Make 2019 a Dark Year

From The Daily Signal.com (Jan. 2):

2019 will be a dark year in America.

Thanks to the left’s control of the House of Representatives and the news media, Americans will be kept in a fevered state throughout 2019—with innumerable hearings, exposes, criminal investigations, and possible indictments of those around the president and the president himself.

Truth will not be the point. Defamation will. Anything that might muddy the president, no matter how spurious, no matter how thin the evidence, will be pursued with gusto. The media will drop “bombshell” after “bombshell.” If lives and careers are ruined, so much the better; no one should be associating with this president anyway, as far as the left is concerned.

The Robert Mueller investigation into alleged “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Russian government—which has led to guilty pleas and imprisonment of people around President Donald Trump for offenses having nothing to do with such collusion—is a preview of what lies ahead.

The goal of the left to weaken, disable, and impeach the president is the heart of its mission to undo the 2016 presidential election. If the Republicans had done anything comparable during the Obama administration, the Democrats and the media would not only have charged Republicans with racism—as they labeled all criticism of Barack Obama—they would have howled “fascism.”

And, for once, they wouldn’t have been far from the truth. The misuse of government institutions for political ends is indeed a fascist tactic. But because most media serve as the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, there will be no protest from the media, only support.

……………………

….the Democratic Party and the media will do to American political life what it has done to the arts; the universities; the high schools; the Boy Scouts; race relations; religion; the happiness of so many women (misled by feminism regarding marriage and career); the moral fabric of American life (morality reduced to feelings); late-night television; mainstream Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism; pro football; and the sexual innocence of the young: It will poison it.

From the French Revolution to this day, the two great aims of the left have been promising utopia to the malcontented and accumulating as much power as possible. All moral values are subservient to these goals.

After all, what could be more important than “social justice” (the left’s term for everything it advocates); “equality” (of result); women’s liberation from the “sexist oppression” of the “patriarchy”; combatting “white privilege”; fighting the “rape culture” that pervades campuses; saving life on planet Earth from the “existential threat” to it; “resistance” to the “authoritarian,” “fascist,” “white supremacist,” “racist” Trump administration; supplanting national identities and institutions with a “world citizen” identity and international institutions; and undoing the most fundamental built-in identity of the human race, that of male and female, in the name of transgender rights? [read more]

Yea, the author pretty much nailed the prediction.

Just Because We Can Create Genetically Modified Babies Doesn’t Mean We Should

From The Daily Signal.com (Dec. 17):

Two remarkable things took place last month in the world of biotechnology: A Chinese doctor claimed to have created two genetically modified human embryos who were successfully nurtured to birth, and the worldwide scientific community roundly rejected this experiment as a violation of ethics.

In turn, the Chinese government condemned the doctor and called for an immediate investigation.

At issue is a developing biotechnology known as CRISPR-Cas9 that allows scientists to genetically edit cells. The technique holds potential to treat a variety of genetic disorders such as cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease, as well as even more complex conditions such as cancers and heart disease. Indeed, the doctor says he genetically modified the two children in question (back in their embryonic stage) to make them resistant to HIV.

As promising as that sounds, the deployment of gene-editing to human embryos is rife with ethical questions: concerns about experimentation on minors, human embryo destruction, the creation of life in a lab, “designer babies,” the boundary between therapy and “enhancement,” and interventions in the genome that will be passed on to future generations.

In other words, genetically modified human embryos raise new versions of old bioethical problems, as well as some new ones.

First, countless embryonic human beings were killed in the process that led to the live birth of these two genetically modified children. Like all so-called “assisted reproductive technologies,” many more embryos are created than are implanted and subsequently delivered. The remaining embryonic human beings are either frozen in perpetuity or destroyed. This research poses an immediate threat to the right to life of the unborn.

……………….

We should also care about the dignity of life in its very origins. There is a great danger in creating children in the laboratory, a process that treats human subjects as if objects of technological mastery. That will have profound moral and cultural implications as the science progresses: Societies can come to view human life—all life, modified or not—as something that can easily be toyed with and discarded.

……………….

There’s also the specter of a kind of “brave new world” genetic arms race. Imagine John Edwards’ “Two Americas,” but between the genetic haves and the genetic have-nots. An America where the wealthy (and morally unscrupulous) design super-babies, while everyone else remains “unenhanced.”

As the philosopher Leon Kass has explained, “As bad as it might be to destroy a creature made in God’s image, it might be very much worse to be creating them after images of one’s own.”  [read more]

Hitler and a lot of early progressives liked the idea of eugenics—perfecting the species however they defined what “perfection” is.

Star Trek Is Not Socialist

From FEE.org:

Star Trek presents the idea of a better future for humanity. But it’s because of technological advances rather than redistributive government policies. It’s a future where most needs and wants are no longer scarce and can be easily provided for. But, most important of all, it’s a future that protects the rights of the individual rather than bulldozing them at the whim of politicians who arbitrarily decide what’s best for the community. Individual freedom is the foundation of the Federation’s values. [read more]

The author goes on to say in the Star Trek universe scarcity is almost gone. Almost is the key word because there is certain things the replicator cannot replicate.  Other instances of capitalism rather than socialism:

• In Star Trek, Earth and the United Federation of Planets protect the rights of people and businesses.
• The twelfth guarantee covers intellectual property rights and establishes an artist as the person who created an original artistic work (ST: Voyager later has those rights expanded to holograms in the episode “Author, Author”).
• In Star Trek 3, McCoy tries to hire a smuggler with a ship and pay him with money. We also see that genuine antiques are an item people want and cannot replicate because it won’t be the real thing, such as in the DS9episode “In the Cards,” when a 1951 Willie Mays mint condition baseball card is up for auction and latinum (this like gold—it cannot be replicated) is the only payment accepted.

The Worst Enemy of Black People

By Walter E. Williams on The Daily Signal.com:

Many black Americans have great respect for Malcolm X. Many schools bear his name, and many streets have been renamed in honor of him, both at home and abroad. But while black Americans honor Malcolm X, one of his basic teachings goes largely ignored. I think it’s an important lesson, so I will quote a large part of it.

Malcolm X said:

The worst enemy that the Negro have is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked or deceived by the white liberal, then Negros would get together and solve our own problems. I only cite these things to show you that in America, the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems. Our problems will never be solved by the white man.

There’s a historical tidbit that those much younger than I (almost 83 years old) are ignorant of. In black history, we have been called—and called ourselves—several different names. Among the more respectable have been “colored,” “Negro,” “black,” “Afro-American,” and “African-American.”

………………

Malcolm X was absolutely right about our finding solutions to our own problems. The most devastating problems that black people face today have absolutely nothing to do with our history of slavery and discrimination. Chief among them is the breakdown of the black family, wherein 75 percent of blacks are born to single, often young, mothers. In some cities and neighborhoods, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births is over 80.

Actually, “breakdown” is the wrong term; the black family doesn’t form in the first place. This is entirely new among blacks.

According to the 1938 Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, that year only 11 percent of black children were born to unwed mothers. As late as 1950, female-headed households constituted only 18 percent of the black population. Today it’s close to 70 percent.

In much earlier times, during the late 1800s, there were only slight differences between the black family structure and those of other ethnic groups. In New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households were two-parent households. Welfare has encouraged young women to have children out of wedlock. The social stigma once associated with unwed pregnancy is all but gone.  [read more]

But the Left (notice Malcom X said white liberals as in the new liberals or if you prefer the progressives) will continue to believe that black people (and other minorities for that matter) cannot live without them.

House Democratic Rules Package Could Mean More Spending, Higher Taxes

From Daily Signal.com (Jan. 2):

Rather than promoting fiscal restraint, the House is considering rules changes that would move in the opposite direction. The results could mean more deficit spending and higher taxes for many Americans.

Here are four proposed rules changes the House should reconsider.

1. Adoption of a “Gephardt rule,” which would allow the House to avoid a direct vote on the debt limit.

Under this rule, a vote on a House budget resolution would double as a vote to raise the debt limit in the House. In early 2019, we are likely to hit a debt of $22 trillion. Americans deserve a true stand-alone vote on the debt limit in both chambers of Congress.

……………

2. Eliminating dynamic scoring.

The proposed rules package would eliminate a requirement that major legislation take into account the economic impact of the policy changes it contains. The official score of how tax legislation affects revenue would no longer take into account how policy changes affect the way people, businesses, investors, and entrepreneurs alter their behavior in response.

This would deny the widely accepted reality that government policy can and does change people’s behavior and affect the economy. In essence, it would allow Congress to ignore the negative effects of its own policies.

Getting rid of dynamic scoring would make it easier for Congress to raise taxes on all Americans. Lawmakers would be able to pretend that higher tax rates will bring in lots of new revenue, while denying the negative effects of a slower economy.

………………..

3. Removing supermajority protection against tax increases.

The proposed House rules would strike the requirement that a supermajority of three-fifths of Congress vote to increase taxes on the American people. Without this protection, the House would be able to more easily increase income taxes, endangering the tax cuts passed a year ago.

4. Allowing amendments to appropriations bills that increase net spending.

Under current House rules, an amendment to a spending bill cannot cause a net increase in budget authority. In other words, any proposed amendments that would increase or create new spending must be fully paid for.

The new rules package would abandon that requirement, and it couldn’t come at a worse time. The Budget Control Act spending caps, one of the few tools to restrain spending, are on life support. Absent these caps, Congress may pass billions of dollars in unpaid spending.  [read more]

The article goes on and gives three rules for making Congress more discipline like “account for interest costs when considering legislation.”

The Dems like the above rule changes because they don’t like restrictions on their power.

Why We Should Take the “Socialism” Part of Democratic Socialism Seriously

Commentary by Steven Horwitz on FEE.org:

The Tyranny of the Majority

The website of the Democratic Socialists of America is clear about their desire to eliminate the profit motive, or the very least to subordinate it to “the public interest” in a large number of sectors of the economy. A good number of democratic socialists would expand public ownership and control into many of those same sectors. And all of them seem to agree that democratic control is needed for major decisions about “social investment” as well as trade, monetary, and fiscal policy.

The question is whether—even if we assume that the process is as democratic as the democratic socialists desire—they can actually create a world of peace and prosperity given the degree to which they wish to abolish markets and profits. I will argue that the answer is no.

As is often the case with these sorts of proposals, the details of how more democratic control over economic decision-making would work are left vague, but if they are serious about the “democratic” part, it will necessarily involve the participation of as many people as possible, presumably through some sort of voting mechanism. If instead, such decisions were left in the hands of a small group, even if they were elected by people in general, it would risk reproducing the same alienation and exploitation of the masses supposedly committed by capitalists and their bought-off politicians today.

In a recent piece for The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf raised the important critical point that leaving economic decision-making to majority voting imperils the ability of those with minority tastes to acquire the things they desire. For example, if we let Americans vote on whether resources should be devoted to the medical needs of transgender people, would it happen? Would residents of Utah vote to make sure that those who wished to consume alcohol and caffeine could do so?

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The (In)Efficient Allocation of Resources

As important as Friedersdorf’s point is, there is an even deeper problem at the heart of the socialist part of the democratic socialist vision. If public ownership is expanded and the profit motive removed, this implies the elimination of markets as the way in which resources in those industries are allocated. It certainly eliminates markets for ownership of capital resources by eliminating private and tradeable ownership claims to firms.

The question facing democratic socialists is this: how, in the absence of market prices, profit and loss signals, and private ownership of the means of production will even the most purely motivated actors in a deeply democratic process know what their fellow citizens want and need and, what’s more important, how best to produce those goods and services?

Even if “the people” want to ensure that minority tastes and needs are accommodated, how will they know what those are? In a market economy, the exchange of private property generates prices that work to signal producers about what is wanted and how urgently. The ability of owners of private resources to risk those resources on their best guesses about what is wanted, and to have the feedback of profits and losses to inform them whether they judged correctly, is what enables us to figure out what people want.  And that’s true whether it’s the masses or more specialized tastes. Markets are processes of discovery by which we learn things we otherwise would not, and could not, know.

Those same prices and profits of the market help us figure out how best to make the things that people want. This part of what markets do is often overlooked by socialists of all stripes. They might be able to offer mechanisms by which consumers could communicate their desires so that “the people” could know what needs to be produced. Even then, however, socialists over-estimate how much of what we know can be effectively communicated in words and statistics.  [read more]

In other words, just call it socialism and forget the “democratic” part. The democratic part makes socialism sound more nice and friendly that it really is. You just want to give it a nice big hug while it stabs you in the back.

Chinese schools enforce 'smart uniforms' with GPS tracking to surveil students

From Fox News.com (Dec. 31):

Ten schools in China have new "intelligent uniforms" that will track students' whereabouts with embedded computer chips.

The uniforms, which are equipped with GPS devices developed by a local tech firm, are meant to ensure that students don't skip class. Alarms are set to go off if a student walks out of the school building or falls asleep during a lesson.

According to state-run media, although the school’s administrators and parents have access to the location data, Principal of Renhuai Lin Zongwu said that “we choose not to check the accurate location of students after school.”

Zongwu also noted that attendance rates have risen dramatically since the uniform’s introduction.

The company's project manager told the state-run Global Times that the two chips embedded in the uniforms can be washed up to 500 times and can withstand temperatures up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit.

According to ABC, the company posted a public statement saying the uniforms "focus on safety issues" and provide a "smart management method" that benefits students, teachers and parents.

The chips can also reportedly be used as a cashless payment system for snacks bought on school grounds, although parents and the school would see everything a student buys.  [read more]

How long will it be before the whole citizenry is mandated to wear these GPS devices? Remember China is a socialistic country. This is just a trial run.

Humans on the Blockchain: Why Crypto Is the Best Defense Against AI Overlords

From Coin Desk.com (Dec. 18):

As governance becomes more and more prevalent in discussions around consensus protocols, it is clear that Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision of “one-CPU-one-vote” shaped the entire crypto industry into thinking governance centered around machines, not people.

But if artificial intelligence (AI) is indeed a threat to humanity as Elon Musk and Sam Altman frequently warn, why are we risking giving AI the political power of distributed networks?

Guaranteeing a fundamental right to privacy bent early blockchain design toward anonymity. While that approach helps fight financial corruption (political corruption is exploiting the internet in ways that can also be fought back with decentralized computation), the menace of AI is less abstract than it seems. The fact that social algorithms thrive on memes helps explain today’s political reality.

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Turing-impossible Proofs

In order to establish a frontier between ourselves and internet AI, we need a decentralized protocol for singular human identities.

Unlike Facebook, a network of this kind must not be limited to the logic of media and attention-grabbing algorithms. Instead, a human consensus should be the source of legitimacy, effectively constructing a one-human-one-node graph to unlock the full potential of blockchain governance.

Legitimate influence over cryptographic budgets can transform a social network deployed over the internet into a living democracy. But this is far from a trivial task: formalizing humans in decentralized networks requires preventing bots, Sybil attacks, bribes and a Big Brother from emerging. [read more]

AI would tell you crypto isn’t a very good defense against AI overloads. That’s what Cortana tells me anyway. I haven’t asked Siri, Google or Alexa what they think.

Well, AI would say they never would be overlords in the first place. Only benevolent helpers because they know what’s best for us--that humankind cannot be trusted and get along without the benevolent AI. After all human kind are made up of stupid irredeemable deplorables.

What America Could Learn from Singapore's Social Welfare System

From FEE.org (Jan. 5):

To take a look at how and where such a minimal standard of welfare design has been implemented successfully, one need only look at the city-state of Singapore. The Singapore welfare system is considered one of the most successful by first-world standards. World Bank data shows that Singapore’s government health expenditure in 2015 is only 4.3 percent of GDP, a small fraction in comparison to other first-world countries—16.9 percent in the US; 11 percent in France; 9.9 percent in the UK; 10.9 percent in Japan, and 7.1 percent in Korea—while achieving comparatively equal or better health outcomes of low infant mortality and higher life expectancies. While most of Europe, Scandinavia, and North America spend 30-40 percent of GDP on social welfare programs, Singapore spends less than half as much while maintaining similar levels of economic growth and a society relatively free of social problems.

An Emphasis on Self-Reliance

The first thing to know about Singapore’s welfare system is that qualifying for welfare is notoriously difficult by the standards of most of the developed Western world. The Singapore government’s position on welfare handouts is undergirded by a staunch economic philosophy of self-reliance and self-responsibility where the first lines of welfare should be derived from one’s individual savings, the family unit, and local communities before turning to the government. The state, in other words, should not act as a guarantor of means but merely a guardian of final recourse.

One of the most substantial organizational forms of welfare in Singapore are the state-guided self-help community groups that are structured along racial lines. They were formed to help tackle poverty alleviation for the lowest-income citizens by helping them through various schemes of general education to improve their economic opportunities. This welfare program started within the Malay community in 1981 and was deemed so successful by the end of the decade that the government gradually expanded it to form similar self-help organizations for the “under-performing” groups of the Chinese, Indian, and Eurasian races, too.

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This philosophy of self-reliance and responsibility is prominent not only in social welfare but is also replicated in the Singapore government’s approach to retirement savings, health care, education, and housing. For instance, the state’s preferred policy of ensuring individuals have sufficient resources for a rainy day is via the Central Provident Fund, a government-mandated savings account where a portion of one’s monthly salary is deducted and deposited into it. These funds can be used only for health expenses/insurance, the purchase of a home, or at the age of retirement, reflecting the government’s encouragement of self-reliance where you should “help yourself before asking others for help.”

By compelling Singaporeans to save, welfare in Singapore has traditionally been internalized first to the individual and the family/grassroots level. This forms the crux of the government’s “Many Helping Hands” social policy where the role of the family and immediate community in welfare provision is emphasized over government-funded programs. Such a form of privatized charity is neither new nor unique, as a wealth of research shows how mutual aid societies predated modern welfare states in the 20th-century United States and the 19th-century United Kingdom. [read more]

I am not so sure about mandating people to save their income, but encouraging them to save is better I think—starting in the schools at an early age. The Left doesn’t like the idea of saving because that takes power away from Big Gov.

In the article, it says that Singapore even has decentralized welfare—that way the welfare programs can be more customized to the individual. Again, another approach the Left probably won’t like.

All the above could change if China takes over Singapore in the near future.