“There’s a reason why presidential contests have been as tight as they have been for a while, and why control of Congress has flipped back and forth so much over the last couple of decades. It’s not because of voters like me, who just want to vote for politicians and policies that won’t bankrupt the country or rob me of the ability to make meaningful decisions in my life. It’s not too much to ask for candidates who aren’t colossal assholes, mental incompetents, or fakers that routinely lie and dissemble about all sorts of stuff. Your parties don’t stand for anything consistent or appealing or responsible or responsive. You’re not going to win elections easily until you stand for something consistent, productive, and respectful of the people you seek to govern.” (11/04/24)
“Unlike most advocates of tariffs in the Trump-Biden era, Alexander William Salter is willing to ask ‘Will Free Trade Bring Peace and Prosperity?’ (The Wall Street Journal, October 29). The Rawls College of Business Administration academic even sees said peace as an admirable if uncertain goal, and acknowledges that the answer to the second half of the queston is probably yes. Yalie JD Vance, and for that matter his high school social studies teacher debate opponent Tim Walz, could use some of that remedial Adam Smith 101.” (11/05/24)
“One way to view the last eight years is as a decade-long professional wrestling storyline: The emergence of a monster heel (Trump) who destroys an aging face who was never fully over with the crowd (Hillary). The heel then goes on a reign of terror, drawing heat the likes of which no one has ever seen. The problem is, the writers didn’t really know where to go from there. The heel champion can’t hold the belt for forever, because the audience eventually tunes out. But in 2020 there weren’t any new babyface characters ready for the main event. So the writer brought an old, beloved performer out of retirement (Biden, obviously) to beat the heel and serve as a transitional champion. But the audience wasn’t ready to see the heel retired, either.” (11/05/24)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“Regardless of who wins the presidential election, one thing is certain: We will continue to live our lives as serfs under the welfare-state/warfare-state/regulated-managed economy way of life under which we have all been born and raised. That’s because the only thing we are doing in this presidential race is the same thing we have always done in presidential races all of our lives. We are electing someone who will preside over the system that makes us serfs.” (11/05/24)
“The words used in public discussions shape the outcome of debates. In political discourse, language plays a critical role in conveying ideas, shaping perceptions, and even determining public opinion. In the 21st century, despite the successes of liberalism in expanding freedom and reducing poverty, liberal ideas remain unpopular in many parts of the world. This suggests that the issue may not be with the ideas themselves, but with how they are communicated.” (11/05/24)
“The more government spends on farming to aid nature, with targets, plans and insistences to farm to aid nature, the worse the effect of farming upon nature is. … European governments have been doing farming for 80 years now, at minimum, and their farming has got worse as time goes on. Oh well, three generations on the land and government’s just continued to make it all worse. Time to agree that the experiment has been tried and it doesn’t work. Government’s just not very good at farming so government should stop doing farming. So, the full New Zealand then. Wholly and entirely abolish the rules, supports, subsidies and interference. Just cancel the entire idea and leave farmers be to work out how best to use their own land. It did, of course, work in New Zealand so it will, of course, work here too.” (11/05/24)
“November 2024 has a real juggling act: it kicks off with a nation practically splitting at the seams over election drama, only to hope that a few days of forced Thanksgiving togetherness at the end of the month can magically glue it all back together.” (11/05/24)
“Turns out subway madman Jordan Neely was alive after Daniel Penny released his chokehold — why on earth is the broader public just learning this now? Bombshell video played in the opening days of Penny’s trial … two of the cops who arrived on the scene confirming that Neely still has a pulse. Penny has been portrayed by leftist activists and their media allies as a cold-blooded racist killer. This footage dramatically undercuts that (though the detail about Neely’s faint pulse has appeared in court filings). … After all, Bragg is famously pro-crime, even violent crime. So why on earth would he come down so hard on Penny? The ugliest answer here is almost certainly the truest: Penny is white and Neely is black …” (11/04/24)
“We are living amid a Great Ethical Collapse. Medicine has failed us in the past four years. But that failure has been part of a much broader failure: Science has failed us. Government has failed us. Academia has failed us. Business has failed us. And, yes, even many of our spiritual leaders have failed us. All have abandoned critical thinking and moral responsibility to a degree we have not seen in the past 80 years. All have been “fundamentally transformed” into Postmodern caricatures of their former selves. ‘Truth’ has become a relative term. Everything, it seems, has been reduced to ideology. How did we get here? There is a controversial and frankly often misunderstood concept in Complexity Theory, Retrospective Coherence.” (11/05/24)
“[T]he AI boom of the last 12 years was made possible by three visionaries who pursued unorthodox ideas in the face of widespread criticism. One was Geoffrey Hinton, a University of Toronto computer scientist who spent decades promoting neural networks despite near-universal skepticism. The second was Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, who recognized early that GPUs could be useful for more than just graphics. The third was Fei-Fei Li. She created an image dataset that seemed ludicrously large to most of her colleagues. But it turned out to be essential for demonstrating the potential of neural networks trained on GPUs.” (11/05/24)
