Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

Reblogged:Friday Hodgepodge

Rate this topic


Recommended Posts

Blog Roundup

1. At How to Be Profitable and Moral, Jaana Woiceshyn reminds us of the meaning of Labor Day on the way to outlining how irrational anti-fossil fuel policies endanger the way of life we celebrate on that holiday:
natty_gas.jpg
Image by Bwag, via Wikimedia Commons, license.
On Labor Day (and every day) we ought to celebrate productive work and those who perform it because productive work makes our life possible and gives it meaning. However, governments everywhere have been undermining productive work, driven by a destructive climate change ideology that has developed into an obsession: stopping greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, despite human suffering.
In the next sentence, Woiceshyn points to a piece by Rex Murphy titled, "Environmentalists' Biggest Triumph Was to Aid Vladimir Putin." Greens endanger not just our prosperity, but also our security.

2. Over at Value for Value, Harry Binswanger has made available a version of a post to the excellent Harry Binswanger Letter mailing list. Its title is "Why I'm Not a Republican," and here's an excerpt, in which Binswanger defends the Mar-a-Lago raid after noting an eerie similarity in the arguments that the right is making about it now -- and those of the left regarding the Second Gulf War:
[Y]ou don't do something as dramatic and theatrical and unprecedented to a man almost half the country already regards as a victim of governmental misconduct unless you either have to or you know what you are going to find.
As another voter who very reluctantly voted for Trump in the last election (and in part for the same reason), I recommend reading the whole thing.

3. The RSS feed of Alex Epstein's Center for Industrial Progress points to a very short excerpt from his recent interview with Mike Rowe, famed for Deadliest Catch, Dirty Jobs, and other television programs.

I listened to the whole interview and highly recommend it.

I have always liked Mike Rowe's work and did not know he had a podcast. Rowe asks intelligent questions and there is a benevolent feel to the whole thing. It did me more good to listen to this than just reviewing Epstein's pro-energy arguments and knowing that this will help expose more active minds to them.

4. Brian Phillips discusses an interesting type of private school I had not heard of until recently:
As the name implies, microschools are small -- typically serving fifteen or fewer students. Often, the students are at different grade levels. Similar to Montessori schools, students can select which projects to pursue and proceed at their own pace. This allows each student to study topics that interest him.

Unlike government schools, microschools are individualized. Like all private alternatives to government schools, parents and students can choose a school that teaches the curriculum and values that the parents support. Because each student can study the subjects of interest to him, the student essentially has control over much of his education. Compare this to the regimented, "woke" curriculum offered at most government schools.
Within, there is a further link to a Forbes story about Josh Pickel, a teacher who became disenchanted with government schools and started a microschool of his own.

-- CAV

Link to Original

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Harry Binswanger's article is wrong in a few ways.

There were a lot of red flags around the 2020 election, which I've already discussed on this site. There is no proof that the election was honest or fraudulent... but it looks fishy, and nothing has come up to make it look any more honest. So Trump's objections (and those of his supporters) did not proceed merely from his feelings. It seems like Binswanger is trying to use the the feelings themselves to draw attention away from the evidence that justifies those feelings.

Two reasons why the FBI may have proceeded with the raid at Mar-a-Lago, even if they knew it would cause Trump's sympathizers to rally around him, would be: (1) Trump had exculpatory evidence about himself and the FBI wanted to deprive him of it, and (2) Trump had evidence of FBI misconduct, and the FBI wanted to deprive him of it. This is why it's good that Trump's request for a special master was granted, although I don't think the special master is looking specifically for that kind of information. It is possible that some of that sort of information is also protected by executive privilege or somesuch, but I don't know if that's the case (or even if such evidence exists).

In some ways these are details rather than big-picture items, but I have read many stories of police seizing exculpatory evidence and then telling courts it doesn't exist, leaving defendants to be convicted of crimes they didn't commit. On rare occasions the police are caught doing this, which is why there are stories to read, but there are doubtless many cases where they are not caught.

I also read an article about the seizure of Mike Lindell's phone and the seizure by the FBI of the phones of other people who worked in the Trump campaign. Apparently there are laws against "tampering with election equipment" and something about hacking into "protected computers," and it is the view of the FBI that it is "tampering" for election officials to inspect voting machines after an election to see if the equipment had been altered (or designed) to report inaccurate results. In other words, it's a crime to look for evidence of election fraud, and if people talk about it, it's "conspiracy." This could implicate many states that tried to audit their elections after 2020. It gives me the impression that the new charges are a cover-up.

I am not a Republican either, I am fiercely independent, and the main reason I don't support Republicans fully is because of the Republicans' over-attachment to religion. If the Left wants a Communist dictatorship, the Right seems to want a Christian dictatorship. They keep promulgating this notion that Christianity is the only answer to "Godless Communists." If the Right keeps pushing abortion to the forefront and letting it take all the attention away from individual rights and freedoms (which religion doesn't really support anyway), then I might just give up on them... but I oppose dictatorship regardless of which party runs it, and so I won't support one dictatorship to oppose the other.

Edited by necrovore
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, necrovore said:

There were a lot of red flags around the 2020 election, which I've already discussed on this site. There is no proof that the election was honest or fraudulent... but it looks fishy, and nothing has come up to make it look any more honest. So Trump's objections (and those of his supporters) did not proceed merely from his feelings. It seems like Binswanger is trying to use the the feelings themselves to draw attention away from the evidence that justifies those feelings.

There will always be some mistakes made in anything as big as an election.  There were more mistakes made than usual in 2020 because election officials were trying to use innovative methods to let people vote in spite of the pandemic and lockdowns, and this created additional opportunity for mistakes.  But there is no evidence that this affected the outcome or was due to any attempt to do so.  Once Trump spread his unfounded accusations of fraud, this resulting in exaggeration of these mistakes and in false accusations.

2 hours ago, necrovore said:

Two reasons why the FBI may have proceeded with the raid at Mar-a-Lago, even if they knew it would cause Trump's sympathizers to rally around him, would be: (1) Trump had exculpatory evidence about himself and the FBI wanted to deprive him of it, and (2) Trump had evidence of FBI misconduct, and the FBI wanted to deprive him of it.

Speculation without evidence.

2 hours ago, necrovore said:

I also read an article about the seizure of Mike Lindell's phone and the seizure by the FBI of the phones of other people who worked in the Trump campaign. Apparently there are laws against "tampering with election equipment" and something about hacking into "protected computers," and it is the view of the FBI that it is "tampering" for election officials to inspect voting machines after an election to see if the equipment had been altered (or designed) to report inaccurate results. In other words, it's a crime to look for evidence of election fraud, and if people talk about it, it's "conspiracy." This could implicate many states that tried to audit their elections after 2020. It gives me the impression that the new charges are a cover-up.

The objections and enforcement actions are not against legitimate election officials checking to ensure accuracy, but against unauthorized persons with an ax to grind wrongfully accessing election equipment and thus compromising its security and integrity.

***********

I, too, am independent.  Sometimes I vote Libertarian.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

32 minutes ago, Doug Morris said:

There will always be some mistakes made in anything as big as an election.

The red flags are more than just "mistakes."

32 minutes ago, Doug Morris said:

Speculation without evidence.

I was addressing the idea that "there is no possible reason the FBI would have raided Mar-a-Lago, especially knowing it would have rallied Trump's supporters, unless they knew they were going to find something incriminating Trump," because there are other reasons they could have raided.

32 minutes ago, Doug Morris said:

The objections and enforcement actions are not against legitimate election officials checking to ensure accuracy, but against unauthorized persons with an ax to grind wrongfully accessing election equipment and thus compromising its security and integrity.

If anyone did cheat at the election, they would want to make the former look like the latter.

Edited by necrovore
removed an erroneous space
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 year later...
On 9/16/2022 at 6:03 PM, necrovore said:

I was addressing the idea that "there is no possible reason the FBI would have raided Mar-a-Lago, especially knowing it would have rallied Trump's supporters, unless they knew they were going to find something incriminating Trump," because there are other reasons they could have raided.

Looks like I found one: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dc-establishment-deeply-concerned-trump-may-have-copies-his-declassified-binder

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 9/16/2022 at 5:31 PM, Doug Morris said:

There will always be some mistakes made in anything as big as an election.  There were more mistakes made than usual in 2020 because election officials were trying to use innovative methods to let people vote in spite of the pandemic and lockdowns, and this created additional opportunity for mistakes.  But there is no evidence that this affected the outcome or was due to any attempt to do so.  

 

We know now that Covid wasn’t as dangerous as we were being told, that lockdowns weren’t only not necessary but were counterproductive. 
 

The policy makers that engineered the ‘innovated methods’ for voting in 2020, were  the same policy makers that were aware that Covid and the mitigation efforts were not necessary or productive. 
 

I wonder what the rationalization for election suspension will look like from such rational and objective quarters when it comes to assessing the next round of innovative measures. 

Are you still masking ?

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 12/31/2023 at 10:40 AM, tadmjones said:

The policy makers that engineered the ‘innovated methods’ for voting in 2020, were  the same policy makers that were aware that Covid and the mitigation efforts were not necessary or productive. 

At the beginning, little was known about Covid-19 and in particular, about how dangerous it was.  But there enough deaths to be very alarming.

On 12/31/2023 at 10:40 AM, tadmjones said:

Are you still masking ?

No.

On 12/31/2023 at 10:40 AM, tadmjones said:

lockdowns weren’t only not necessary but were counterproductive. 

Some people disagree.  Here's something that was posted here a while back.

In this video, Olga Yakusheva, associate professor of nursing, discusses the study’s findings.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If the there were no counter productivity, why does the presenter suggest shorter lockdown periods may have been beneficial, so essentially she is saying the length of the actual lockdowns had ,one would assume, less than optimal consequences. Are counter factuals determinative?

Thenpolicy makers knew early that the IFR was not what was being reported to the public , and those who tried to speak to actual situation were censured from public discourse and shunned professionally. 
 

Prominent officials in the US were seen evading mitigation efforts , do you think they did so despite knowledge to the danger those actions posed to themselves or the public? Was there any recorded influenza deaths during the ‘waves’? The named waves which by the way really helped keep ‘us’ informed about the ferocity and global transmission continued to be during the whole pandemic, until it finally ended.

 

Do the mentioned studies include economic forecasts of the consequences of the non corporate businesses that didn’t survive the lockdowns , the consequences that are still ongoing ? 
 

As far as determining life years or some such, how do they account for the effects on educational development of the children affected by the unnecessary school closures, and the danger or lack thereof to (or from) the little germ ba.. er I mean children was known very early. The prevention of safe and effective treatments basically caused the appearance of a need for lockdown measures , to say nothing of what the active suppression of alternative treatments did to the appearance of justification for mass inoculations.

Theese are now easy to see in hindsight , no ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...