The Bomber Story 2020

 Lots of crazy here.

When officers arrived at Perry’s home, police said she had two unloaded pistols sitting next to her on the porch. She told them those guns belonged to “Tony Warner,” police said, and she did not want them in the house any longer. Perry, then 62, was then transported for a psychological evaluation after speaking to mental health professionals on the phone.

Throckmorton told The Tennessean that Perry had fears about her safety, and thought Warner may harm her. The attorney was also at the scene that day, and told officers Warner “frequently talks about the military and bomb making,” the police report said. Warner “knows what he is doing and is capable of making a bomb,” Throckmorton said to responding officers.

https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-nashville-police-21f4f5b6b75216fcfe06c10e82606ae6

Authoritarian Power Sans Trump

Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.

In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-threat-of-authoritarianism-in

Learning About Gratitude

Suddenly altering one’s lifestyle to include verbal affirmation for others will not cure anxiety or depression or miraculously alter one’s mindset.

Rather, making a concerted effort to show gratitude for others in one’s life can help generate a feeling of support. It creates a sort of network of goodwill.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/wellness/the-science-of-gratitude/ar-BB1chgHw 

The Sacred Cow (Stole the Movie Title)

A friend was patiently explaining to me the reasons he believed meat eating, and therefore hunting, is wrong. He's a deep thinker with impeccable logic, but often hasn't delved too deeply into the issues he's feeling strongly about. 

But as for the ethic of meat eating ...

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Non paid support for this, go check it out:    https://www.sacredcow.info

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First, there is no option that is less damaging to animals. Industrial mono cropping gave us:

-pesticides

-fertilizer from oil

-oil used to transport seeds, prepare for seeding, seeding, weed control, insect control, harvest, transport, preparation from the raw product and refined to the food portion

-very low quality nutrition for humans

-massive quantity of animals killed in the process, from the oil extraction and transport to the other transportation stages to the plowing, insect control, weed control and harvest. Snakes and other small predators, mice, grasshoppers, crickets, slugs, snails, birds, etc; all are killed in the process

-irrigation adds salt to the soil, eventually it will be unfit to grow any plant; although, plant engineers are growing mono crops that are more salt resistant to delay the inevitable

-oil based fertilizers leave the ground unfit to grow anything but mono crops; the fertilizers kill the soil bacteria

-the fertilizer runoff has created a massive dead zone where the Mississippi dumps into the GoM

Summary: industrial mono-cropping is environmental disaster, kills more animals than animal farming and provides food that is of low quality for humans and drives poor health outcomes

CAFO animal husbandry utilizes the products from industrial mono-cropping to feed the animals. The waste from the confined operations is not manageable and becomes toxic. The amount of anti-biotics needed to help cattle tolerate corn based diets makes the cows sick and increases risk of anti biotic resistance. The famous methane cow farts you have heard about result from cattle being fed food that makes them sick whilst being injected with antibiotics to make it possible for them to survive the sickness from the food they are fed (fattening cows with corn is effective and cheap, but very costly in the larger picture)

Economists call these outcome "negative externalities". They are not the point of the system, but they are hand in hand with the system. 

The only approach that can generate the food that humans need without negative externalities described above is pastured meat animals. They fertilize the soil, and support the life cycle around herd animal grazing that is natural and sustainable. The carbon impact is not only low – it is inverse, because pastured animals are part of the creation of topsoil which sequesters large amounts of CO2.
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Best books on the topic: Guns Germs and Steel and The Vegetarian Myth

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All animals are made to die to feed either another animal, bacteria or a plant (often all 3). Plant to animal, animal to plant, that’s how life goes. Deer in particular are built to live about 8 years, after which their teeth become so poor they cannot eat enough to survive the winter. A deer will starve of old age, be hit by car or be eaten by a predator. Humans have taken away the predators that would keep the weak and ill out of the herd, and would keep populations stable – over population of deer is bad for deer and their immediate environment due to over browsing. In Maine, the winter kill is estimated to be 30%, and even with that the herd is growing enough that either sex permits are needed to keep the population regulated (lower deer populations help reduce the incidence of Lyme disease).

In studying the remains of cultures at the time they shifted from hunting and gathering to farming, those populations became shorter, had very poor teeth, lived shorter lives and showed more markers of starvation in their bones (including vitamin deficiency diseases).

Summary: humans are omnivores and apex predators. We are engineered to eat meat and meat is far more nutritious for humans than any vegetable products. A deer is essentially a nutrition refinery for a human – they eat high amounts of food you and I could never live on and turn it into complete, perfect human nutrition.

Until a few hundred years ago, humans at nose to tail; tongue, eye balls, genitals, internal organs, bones for marrow and soup, and the brains – and the skin and sinews and bones became tools and clothing. We were made to kill and eat large mammals and are at a peak of health when we do.

Why The Rich Pay For Everything

I'm always glad to see Tamny's stuff and this one is more readable than most, and just as helpful to be clear about the significance of human freedom to human well being.

I hope the good doctor found as much satisfaction as it seems like he should have ... some of the successful do not. 

 https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2020/12/29/remembering_the_great_lawrence_d_dorr_md_654733.html

Real "Tolerance" ....

 This article is full of MSM nonsense about Trump, but Haidt strikes a chord I agree with. It will never be the case that "all of us" will agree on the complex issues of government and human liberty. It would serve us better if we could view those with differing perspectives as "equally human" in spite their threat what we value. 

Haidt discovered that conservatives had some important insights to offer on human nature, the value of institutions, and the importance of moral capital. He felt conservatism offered an important counterbalance to the excesses of progressivism. He also came to appreciate the pedigree of conservatism, from the writings of people like Edmund Burke in the 18th century to Thomas Sowell in the 20th. (Haidt told me he considers himself to be a centrist, engaging with views from multiple sides in order to understand issues. But he’s a centrist who only ever votes for Democrats, because he thinks the Republican Party has been in a state of moral and philosophical decline for many years.)

Haidt laments the state of contemporary American politics, believing that on both the right and the left we’re seeing populism that responds to real problems but in illiberal ways. “On the right,” he said, “the populism there is really explicitly xenophobic and often explicitly racist … I think we see strands of populism on the right that are authoritarian, that I would say are incompatible with a tolerant, pluralistic, open democracy.”

Looking in the other direction, Haidt says, “we’ve messed up the word liberal and we’ve used it to just mean ‘left.’ I’ve always thought of myself as a liberal, in the John Stuart Mill sense. I believe in a society that is structured to give individuals the maximum freedom to construct lives that they want to live. We use a minimum of constraint, we value openness, creativity, individual rights. We try hard to maximize religious liberty, economic liberty, liberty of conscience, freedom of speech. That’s my ideal of a society, and that’s why I call myself a liberal.”

But on the left, Haidt said, “there’s been a movement that has made something else sacred, that has not focused on liberty, but that is focused instead on oppression and victimhood and victimization. And once you get into a framework of seeing your fellow citizens as good versus evil based on their group, it’s kind of a mirror image of the authoritarian populism on the right. Any movement that is assigning moral value to people just by looking at them is a movement I want no part of.”

Haidt went on: “I think this is a very important point for us to all keep in mind, that left and right in this country are not necessarily liberal and conservative anymore. On the left, it’s really clear that there are elements that many of us consider to be very illiberal; and on the right, it’s hard to see how Trump and many of his supporters are conservatives who have any link whatsoever to Edmund Burke. It’s very hard for me to see that. You know, I would love to live in a country with true liberals and true conservatives that engage with each other. That, I think, is a very productive disagreement. But it’s the illiberalism on each side that is making our politics so ugly, I believe.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/jonathan-haidt-pandemic-and-americas-polarization/612025/

Walter Williams on Individual Liberty

 He appeals to the authority of the founders too much, but his logic is always spot on. Hand salute, again, Dr. Williams, on the journey.

On the other side of the coin from limited government is individual liberty. The Founders understood private property as the bulwark of freedom for all Americans, rich and poor alike. But following a series of successful attacks on private property and free enterprise—beginning in the early 20th century and picking up steam during the New Deal, the Great Society, and then again recently—the government designed by our Founders and outlined in the Constitution has all but disappeared. Thomas Jefferson anticipated this when he said, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

"Ironically, the free market system is threatened today not because of its failure, but because of its success. Capitalism has done so well in eliminating the traditional problems of mankind—disease, pestilence, gross hunger, and poverty—that other human problems seem to us unacceptable. So in the name of equalizing income, achieving sex and race balance, guaranteeing housing and medical care, protecting consumers, and conserving energy—just to name a few prominent causes of liberal government these days—individual liberty has become of secondary or tertiary concern."

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/future-prospects-for-economic-liberty/?utm_campaign=williams&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=101929147&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_7Xid2e4YvUwbiTjrmw2xXJfrmqurfhpWDcYSOULhZa6PD5GENDtXckseLMDURb4szR5W3KFI3lBpJpBJAg8BFOkBbVA&utm_source=housefile