Autism
No More Cures, No More Fixes: How Autistic Leaders Are Changing the Therapy Debate – The 74 (the74million.org)
As a parent of an autistic young man, pieces like this (as well as the testimonies I’ve heard from other adult autists) makes me feel better about our decision not to put our son through the ABA wringer.
I suppose it must work for some people…but how much damage does it do along the way?
Career Development
What to Do When You’re Canceled | City Journal (city-journal.org)
Since we’re at a point in our national history where this can happen to anyone, it’s wise to have a plan for dealing with it. You buy homeowner’s insurance. You have evacuation plans in the event of a disaster. At least give as much thought to preserving/recovering your reputation as you do to your domicile.
The most important task when facing a cancellation campaign is to define your goals. Obviously, you want the mobbing to stop and for things to return to “normal.” But ask yourself what, specifically, that means. Do you want to keep your job? Get the position on the law review that you deserve? Become famous? Deter further publicity? Make money off an unexpected opportunity? Retain your reputation for integrity, intelligence, and friendliness? Your strategy will follow from your ultimate aim.
Character Development
The Character Trait of Competence - FEE
Does competence even count as a character trait? I’d like to think it does. Certainly, it is something we admire about people. We look up to those who exhibit it, and we encourage our children to practice it. We also consider its opposite—incompetence—to be a negative quality in a person, something to be eschewed and overcome.
In fact, I think that you can get a sense of how people actually value a given role by examining what levels of competence they do (or don’t) demand of a person fulfilling the role.
Pious Fraud, or the Moral Licence to Lie (quillette.com)
There are those, Nietzsche observed in On the Genealogy of Morals, who “constantly bear the word ‘justice’ in their mouths like poisonous spittle, always with pursed lips, always ready to spit upon all who are not discontented but go their own way in good spirits. … The will of the weak to represent some form of superiority, their instinct for devious paths to tyranny over the healthy—where can it not be discovered, this will to power of the weakest!” Many on the social-justice Left are pious true believers with a victimhood complex. They therefore presume that they have the moral license (or what Thomas Sowell called a “blank check”) to behave as badly as they like.
Climate “Crisis”
The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXXII (Sea Level Rise Edition) — Manhattan Contrarian
What’s most interesting about all this is what it reveals about the sea level rise scare story. The claims of “acceleration” prove to be based on dubious extrapolations from data that show only very slight, if any, deviations from linearity. Those slight deviations may reflect some underlying process or may just reflect the effect on a curve-fitting exercise of one or two outlying data points. Our overlords modify the data to enhance the apparent acceleration, and then claim the ability to use a slight non-linearity to project sea level out 80 years or so to try to scare us with a few inches of difference. In the real world, the few extra inches are insignificant, and none of us will even be around then anyway. I plan to recommend to my grandchildren — all now 5 and under — not to live too near the coast in their retirement. That should take care of it.
If someone can identify a factual or procedural error in Menton’s piece, I’m all ears…
Education
Why College Degrees Are Losing Their Value (fee.org)
Earning a college degree is more of a validation process than a skill-building process. Employers desire workers that are not only intelligent but also compliant and punctual. The premise of the signaling model seems to be validated by the fact that many graduates are not using their degrees. In fact, in 2013; only 27 percent of graduates had a job related to their major.
The biggest winners of Biden’s student debt ‘cancellation’ - Washington Examiner
Bastiat likely would not have been surprised to see U.S. presidents taking credit for using the public treasury, funds obtained from the people under the threat of government force, to cover the loans of wealthy, highly educated families with vast earning power.
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society,” he wrote in Economic Sophisms, “over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
If you want more of this sanity, the Online Library of Liberty has made Economic Sophisms freely accesible.
Energy
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EPA Phase Out of Gas-Powered Cars Has Ominous Historic Echoes | AIER
Remember when President Obama quipped, “If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them,”?
The aged apple seems not to have fallen far from the tree.
The Biden administration and defenders of the policy argue that the EPA’s regulation is “not a ban” on gas-powered cars, since carmakers are not prohibited from producing gas-powered vehicles. Instead, automakers are required to meet a government-mandated “average emissions limit” across their entire vehicle line, to force them to produce more EVs and fewer gas-powered cars.
The problem, for those of us living in the normal American economy, is that:
On average, EVs sell for about $5,000 more than similar gas-powered cars. And EV prices are going up, not down…
“In 2011, the inflation-adjusted price of a new EV was near $44,000. By 2022, that price had risen to over $66,000,” said Ashley Nunes, a senior research associate at Harvard Law School, in her testimony to Congress in 2023…
So see, the government’s not trying to force you to buy an EV…They’re just gonna bankrupt you unless you comply.
Jon Miltimore makes a prescient historical comparison between this emerging debacle and the agricultural disaster unleashed on subjects of the Soviet Union.
While Stalin’s collectivization of farms in 1929 was a massive failure that led to the deaths of millions, agriculture in the USSR of course continued during and after his lifetime. But two distinct sectors emerged: a tiny private sector that produced a bumper crop of food, and a massive collectivized sector that produced very little…
Historians point out that in the 1960s these tiny private farms, which accounted for just 3 percent of the sown land in the USSR, produced 66 percent of its eggs, 64 percent of the potatoes, 43 percent of its vegetables, 40 percent of meat, and 39 percent of its milk…
Entrepreneurship
Never Forget What's Most Important: Business Advice from the CEO of Chobani - Foundation for Economic Education (fee.org)
Where Kraft saw a shrinking business, Hamdi saw entrepreneurial opportunities. Nobody was making quality yogurt for mass-market sale in the supermarkets…
Many think money is the primary key to entrepreneurial success. Many see companies like Chobani and Apple as rare exceptions, believing that start-up success is blocked to all but the wealthy or those who can raise money from venture capitalists.
Too much money and you may lose sight of what is essential: solving an urgent need of consumers. Too much money and you may find, as the dot.com bust company Quokka did, that your budget for pricey Aeron chairs exceeds your annual revenue. Or, you may find yourself, as another well-capitalized bust Flooz did, spending 8 million dollars for a celebrity spokesperson campaign by Whoopi Goldberg. Or, you may, as Chobani did not, hire more employees than your current growth supports.
Too much money and you may lose sight of building your business culture on a foundation of purpose, principles, and values.
Food
The Healthiest Ways to Make Eggs, Ranked
Good information here – especially for those of us with ready access to more farm fresh eggs than we know what to do with.
If that doesn’t describe you, let me put you in touch with my chicken-raising son!
Government
Governments Could Stop Inflating If They Wanted. But They Won't. | Mises Institute
The government is the largest economic agent and therefore the most important driver of aggregate demand, as well as the issuer of currency. The government can end today’s high price-inflation rates any time by eliminating the unnecessary spending that causes the deficit, which is the same as money printing. Taxing the private sector to cut price inflation is like starving the children to make the fat parent lose weight.
The UK Is Reverting to Railway Socialism | Mises Institute
So far as I know, none of my readers live in the UK. Nonetheless, we ought to watch and learn for the inevitable failures and excuses are sure to be repeated here.
If the system for awarding franchises, which supposedly introduces free-market reforms to the system, is so complex that actual private companies drop out and foreign states step in, then you never really had a privatized system in the first place.
History
How Japan Went From High Culture to a Samurai Culture (fee.org)
The Heian Period itself proved ephemeral. By the 11th century, rival clans arose and fought each other to attain control. In a sad story repeated the world over, the lust for power led directly to civil conflict. The Fujiwara family emerged eventually as the real rulers of late Heian Japan, benefiting most the landed, aristocratic elites and alienating the commoners.
The Sound of Ancient Languages.
I’m no linguist, so I can’t attest to the veracity of this…but I just found it interesting and thought you might as well.
Writing
A similar serendipity was afforded by this video explaining the actual differences between Prefaces, Prologues, Forewards, etc.