“I was watching MSNBC the other day – I know, but it is fun to look into a parallel universe where progressive ideals appeal to the vast majority of Americans, it makes me appreciate reality all the more – and I had to check my phone to make sure I had the right year. You wouldn’t know it was 2024 if you’d just gone by the rhetoric belching its way over the airwaves. Donald Trump is a Russian stooge (a tool of Putin) who is only interested in … well, you know the rest of that song. In fact, you know the rest of all the songs, as the political left has morphed into a cover band playing all their hits that were never really hits in the first place. They learned nothing from the election.” (01/07/25)
“‘If their duty, their honor, and their oaths will not bind them, let us not put into their hands our liberty and all our other great interests.’ These are the powerful words of Gouverneur Morris, the ‘Penman of the Constitution’ and author of its preamble. Morris did not mince words during the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, and his warning remains essential today. Politicians across the spectrum routinely violate their oaths to the Constitution, and rarely, if ever, face accountability. Why? Perhaps the answer lies in ignorance, fear, or a lack of self-respect among the people who tolerate these transgressions. Let’s explore the original understanding of the oath to the Constitution, its foundational importance, and the dire consequences of its neglect.” (01/06/25)
“An economic approach to Homer’s Odyssey is most definitely not about ‘what Homer really meant.’ Instead, the economic approach views Homer through a lens that Homer himself probably never entertained, namely a series of relatively simple models about preferences and constraints. The economic approach is thus a distortion, but perhaps a useful or interesting distortion. It is taking the richness of ideas, presentation, and narrative in Homer and remixing it. For all the complexity lost, this process induces us to engage in a certain kind of reductive prioritization as to how Homer wrote about human nature and politics, and thus it will bring out some elements of the story more than others.” (01/06/25)
“As Inauguration Day approaches, President-elect Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportation at an unprecedented scale and the infighting within his own movement over H-1B visas have understandably taken center stage. But it’s also worth focusing on what is perhaps his most brazenly unconstitutional proposal of all: ending birthright citizenship, the legal principle that confers automatic citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. … if the president-elect believes he will be able to unilaterally undo this policy by executive fiat, he is sorely mistaken: birthright citizenship is clearly established in the U.S. Constitution, which means a presidential order cannot abolish it.” (01/06/25)
“The American Medical Association is the professional association and political lobby of the nation’s physicians. Ever since President Harry Truman proposed national health insurance in 1945, the AMA has been an implacable enemy of a single-payer system, though today many harried doctors wish we had it. It turns out that the AMA is also a prime driver of the gross imbalance between primary care doctors, who tend to be overworked and underpaid, and specialists who make a fine living and have more control over their schedules. The AMA does this via a secretive panel called the Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC). The relative value scale was legislated by Congress in 1989 as a way to assign values to thousands of medical procedures and restrain Medicare costs. The RUC was created by the AMA in 1991 to make sure that that the AMA would dominate the process.” (01/07/25)
“Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula (1892) was written as a Victorian-style moralizing tale of sin and its consequences. The author, a political and religious conservative of his times, never could have imagined that his novel would become a bestseller in his own time largely due to its lascivious imagery and terrifying plotline that fed into every anxiety over morality, science, and public health, much less kick off a century and a quarter of vampire films. It also served as a crossover allegory with another concern of the time: the problem of infectious disease, which was then seen as traceable to some exogenous poisoning of the blood.” (01/06/25)
“Some people recoil in horror at the thought of designer babies, ones genetically altered to incorporate sought-after traits when they are born. The rhetoric talks of the ‘insolence’ of ‘playing God’ instead of letting nature take its course. The case against seems to be one of allowing every fertilized ovum that attaches to a placenta to be born with the genes it acquired from its parents instead of having them altered. If parents were given a choice of traits their newborn might arrive with, they might choose clever, more talented ones, creating a gulf between those who were selected for a greater chance of success in life and those who were not. … If intervention of this nature gives us human beings who are better physically and mentally, the case is very strong that it will lead to a much better world for everyone.” (01/06/25)
Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by Sarah McLaughlin
“One decade ago this week, two gunmen entered the offices of satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo and opened fire, killing cartoonists, journalists, and security personnel as part of coordinated terror attacks that would ultimately claim 17 lives. The attack on the magazine — which is now commemorating the 10th anniversary with a God cartoon contest — was likely due to its cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. In the immediate aftermath, proverbial battle lines were drawn around the contentious magazine and the legal and social rules around what we can, without punishment or retribution, say about religious symbols, holy figures, and their believers. … amidst the shifting legal and moral boundaries since 2015, the advocates of limiting our right to religious dissent are gaining ground.” (01/06/24)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“One of the things humans value is the welfare of other humans, most obviously their children but often other people as well. How can we fit that fact into economic theory? Gary Becker offered an answer, an economic theory of altruism. His model does not fit all altruistic behavior, as we will see, but it incorporates altruism into economics with a single, simple, assumption that produces an evolutionary explanation for why altruism, including non-kin altruism, exists.” (01/06/25)
Source: The Atlantic
by Charlie Warzel & Mike Caulfield
“Fairly quickly, the narrative emerged that the attack was a false flag, and the media were in on it. … For a while, the rush to gather evidence produced a confusing double narrative from the right. In one telling, the riot was peaceful — the Trump supporters in the Capitol were practically tourists. The other highlighted the violence, suggesting that anti-fascists were causing destruction. Eventually, the dueling stories coalesced into a more complete one: Peaceful Trump supporters had been lured into the Capitol by violent antifa members abetted by law-enforcement instigators working for the deep state. The function of this bad information was not to persuade non-Trump supporters to feel differently about the insurrection. Instead, it was to dispel any cognitive dissonance that viewers of this attempted coup may have experienced, and to reinforce the beliefs that the MAGA faithful already held.” (01/06/25)
