Enjoying the 38 days of attacking the evil Iranian Regime by the two best countries in the world: Israel and America,
I am also enjoyong how Western European is showing that it can not be remotely trusted when the chips are down. I was stationed in Germany 60 years ago when the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies were a danger. That danger is long gone.
We need to close our bases in Western Europe and let Western Europe figure out their own future. That has the possibility of making Europe a much better place than it is now because they will have to be seriously introspective and thus reform itself.
If it doesn’t it becomes as important as Zimbabwe.
Very good explanation of a leftist, surrounded by leftism, intellectually honest to find out many of its problems.
I’ve been freely following Dan for a couple of years, as I learned of his characterization of the media as a Marketplace of Rationalizations. Tho I was, and am, disappointed in his own frequent rationalized, rather than reasoned, arguments against Trump. His thinking & writing are clear, understandable, and relevant to the many points he’s making.
He’s quick to claim his criticisms of the left don’t make him right wing, definitely not! He’s clearly uneasy speaking truths that the left doesn’t like.
Lots of his stuff is behind the paywall, and I’m already over budget on that, but the first part is free. A key thing is his prior, naive view was:
Left is Good, Right is Bad.
Those who believe that, strongly, are motivated to reason about things so as to confirm that bias. His habit has long been doing that, which made him aware of his own rationalized positions, so he’s trying to get more T truth.
But without being on the right—which I think he’ll find impossible but his steps & halts & reasons & rationalizations are interesting.
My sister was almost 8 months pregnant before they figured it out. Of course, she’s always been on the… rotund… side.
Trump has to do something about gas prices. $4.60 gas and over $6 for diesel in my area, and that’s going to lose him support if something isn’t done.
Prohibiting oil and fuel exports would bring down prices here. We’re paying these prices because we allow Europe to bid them up. We have sufficient supply internally such that the supply/demand curve would lower our prices. Europe has practically no supply and their prices would skyrocket. Not only are they not helping, they’re actively getting in the way, yet the US is paying higher prices to keep.them afloat.
Why?
If someone ran a survey that said, rise gas prices in Europe to lower ours it would have 90+% approval.
Just read about an article that appeared in the NYT in October of 1903 that said “Man will not fly for at least a million years, or perhaps more.”
Sure enough, in about a million years, or a bit less – December of the same year in fact, the Wright brothers flew!
Apparently the sycophantic NYT was covering for an expert named Dr. Samuel Langley, Director of the Smithsonian institution, who was having no luck whatsoever getting his steam-powered “Aerodrome” to fly! Here’s what I wrote at InstaPundit about the experts:
“The Wrights were high school graduates who pursued the challenge of flight through methodical experiment, such as with wind tunnels, while (Doctor) Langley was pretty much a hacker! A well-funded one, but a hacker nonetheless! His Aerodrome simply followed the dime-novel wisdom of what a flying machine “should” look like.
The Wright Flyer was a “clean sheet of paper” design, driven much more from first principles.
Sound familiar?”
@buddhaha:Prohibiting oil and fuel exports would bring down prices here.
This is the inverse of the fallacious arguments for tariffs. It’s been done in history, over and over, and like tariffs, it can only be made to look like an economic benefit by ignoring the harm done. One difference being that prohibiting exports tends to harm producers more than consumers.
Petroleum is not identical everywhere. US refineries are geared to access to a global market. If you want to impose higher costs, subsidize inefficiency and malinvestment, and threaten domestic supply, forbidding US oil exports is a good start.
If someone ran a survey that said, rise gas prices in Europe to lower ours it would have 90+% approval.
I don’t doubt it, as illustrated by the following folk tale:
One day, a poor villager happens upon a magic talking fish that is ready to grant him a single wish. Overjoyed, the villager weighs his options: ‘Maybe a castle? Or even better – a thousand bars of gold? Why not a ship to sail the world?’ As the villager is about to make his decision, the fish interrupts him to say that there is one important caveat: whatever the villager gets, his neighbor will receive two of the same. Without skipping a beat, the villager says, ‘in that case, please poke one of my eyes out.’
@Ray Van Dune:who was having no luck whatsoever getting his steam-powered “Aerodrome” to fly!
I think he deserves better than being misrepresented by a fable supporting modern skepticism of modern expertise. Langley did a lot of worthwhile things which is why so much is named after him.
Conservative talk radio tells me that 60 Minutes did a propaganda piece on the California train to nowhere. I never watch the show, but it might be a sign that the Democrat powers that be are not thrilled with Newsom as their candidate. The local NPR radio also did a piece on how people are leaving California because of the high cost of living. For once, the phrase “affordability crisis” is being applied to a Democrat state. We should not read too much into them but these are interesting developments.
I assume this was chest-beating, and not a sincere expression of praise for Allah (though Eid al-Fitr was not very long ago). I’m guessing he got it from old Mike Tyson fights?
Did anyone else find it odd
I say, boy, I say that’s a joke son!
Niketas-
Nah, Trump was just sticking it to the Islamists by thanking “their” Allah.
Tom Grey’s link to an article by Dan Williams is quite good. Thoughts of a genuinely intelligent lefty.
This bit below isn’t necessarily the best part of the article, but it struck a chord for me and my recent past.
Basic lessons from economics First, standard left-wing critiques of mainstream economics are biased and low-quality.
– – – – – –
Learning to see human behaviour and the social world through the lens of incentives, constraints, opportunity costs, marginal thinking, trade-offs, strategies, equilibria, and so on is genuinely transformative.
One of my best new friends, in my post marriage life, is a woman I met a few months after she separated from her husband of a couple decades. She is a middle manager professionally and has a business degree, and we have never dated, but go out together sometimes.
Once, after we’d known each other for a couple years, she was musing about her dating difficulties and quandaries. She mentioned the “opportunity cost” of spending a large amount of time dating one guy, who you know isn’t “the one,” when there are other possibilities out there.
I had always kept my social life rather separate from my academic life and had never thought in such terms. I was amused, and little dismissive of her notions, but it stuck in my head.
A little less than a year later, I found myself in a dating situation that really wasn’t working out and I was struggling with how to move forward. Then it suddenly popped into my head. I was struggling with the “sunk costs fallacy.” I had sunk a lot of money and more importantly… time, into this very casual relationship, and I was reluctant to let it go.
I did let it go, and later still, my manager friend and I were having a few drinks and I brought it up. She thought it was hysterical.
Nikitas, I’ll take your comments to heart, but if I said something that was a “fable” please tell me what it was.
One has only to look at Langley’s propellor design compared to the Wright’s to see that he was going on instinct, not experiment. And don’t forget that the Wrights tried to use Otto Lilienthal’s wing data (the gold standard of the time) and found it was flawed. They thus built a wind tunnel and derived their own airfoil data. None of this is a fable… I have read their published collected papers and it is all there.
What a surprise:
Some Democrats + others are trying to find President Trump guilty of, or blame him for, the “January 6 riot”, …
…AGAIN.
[The news site, france24 [dot] com], reported on that event, today.]
And…what a surprise:
this [attempt to find Trump guilty of the riot, + more importantly to the Dems, this attempt to find Trump partly or wholly to blame for:
1] the chaos + violence at that riot, and ” “breaking the law” by trying to overthrow a USA, presidential election”…[which he never did], and,
2] for…my words- accusations of him-“causing violence, and discord in the nation, disturbing the peace, trying to overthrow the US Government + take it over”…and, my words-“causing violent attacks, violent crimes, an insurgency, causing wound-ings, a riot, for whistling at the pretty girls, + in other ways, as being “a rather bad fellow”,…all of these accusations are in a Congress probe that will wrap up SIX DAYS after the November of 2026, Fed. Congressional elections.
Gee, what a coincidence:
this foolish government probe, that is running badly of 3 of its four wheels- is going to happen when the Dems are telling people: “Don’t vote for Republicans for Congress,…because WE SAY- “Trump and the Republicans are bad people”.
And this probe by some Dems + others, is ALSO going to happen when:
the Dems are telling people-“Don’t vote for Republicans for Congress,…because WE SAY- “Trump and the Republicans are bad people”, …well AFTER the 2026…Congressional elections are over.
Wow. What a fair tactic-
the Dems trying to smear President Trump as “a bad guy, + someone who causes big crimes”, when the Dems are TRYING to get Democrats elected into the Congress, and-
how very fair- What a fair tactic: the Dems trying to smear Republicans in Congress as “a bunch of bad guys, when the Dems are TRYING to get Democrats elected into the Congress.
Gosh, world this type of unfair probe cause people to not vote for Republicans?
To my knowledge- Donald Trump was…for lack of other words, was tried TWICE in [impeachment trials] for accusations that he did [any or all crimes] in the January 6 riot,…and he was found NOT GUILTY of [all of the crimes] in the January 6th riot.
How many times do they, the Dems in congress, being found not guilty of these crimes, do they need?
To my knowledge- DURING the Jan. 6th riot, and in the violence and threats of violence in it- the Chief of police of Washington D.C., called Nancy Pelosi and said words like:
“The Washington D.C. Police CAN’T control this violent crowd! Please send the Army National Guard to help shut down this riot. We don’t have the number of officers to STOP this riot, and we CAN’T control the [land] where this riot is happening! Please send us the National Guard to help!”
And Nancy Pelosi refused.
And in fact, [The Chief of police of Washington D.C., called Nancy Pelosi, asking her for SEVEN TIMES to send [the Army National Guard]- to help the police shut down this riot, and for SIX TIMES, she refused.
Only after the SEVENTH TIME that he, the Chief of Police, asked her to send the National Guard to help end this huge riot, did Nancy Pelosi grant his request, and she then sent the National Guard to help the police stop this riot.
What caused the delay?
Was she letting the riot rage on, to try to falsely [blame Trump + the Republicans] for this riot he, and the Republicans, did not do?
This latest Congressional probe, a third try to try to [find Trump guilty of crimes, in legal or Congressional hearings], is : a travesty, a cheap shot, a questionable probe, a waste of the Congress’ time, and a waste of [everybody’s] time.
Wow.
I have a relative who works with, and teaches, 6 year old kids.
These members of Congress are acting like these immature , 6 year old kids.
If she saw 6 year old kids acting like these people, she’d tell the kids: “You are being bad. You are causing problems for no reason. Stop that.
Be quiet, and go sit in the corner.”
In my opinion- some kids, and Congress members, need to learn how to do good behavior, and how to behave better.
Here’s a link to the news story, about that probe:
@ Tom Grey > “Those who believe that [Left is Good, Right is Bad], strongly, are motivated to reason about things so as to confirm that bias.”
You are correct, and I believe there is strong evidence that you could substitute any ideological position for the one in brackets.
Or a scientific position, as we saw in the Langley-Wright story, and during Covid (examples can be multiplied for both from just the last 25 years).
And also for religious beliefs, given that one accepts the idea of “evidence” for spiritual positions.
Very coincidentally, I chose to re-read an old favorite of mine before passing the book on; being of un certain âge myself, there is not much time left to re-read all my treasures, and certainly not to re-re-read any of them!
Without going into a detailed review* of this detective story, the protagonist is in a situation where he becomes crucially aware that the opinions of historians and Great Minds (mostly academic and especially those in the education business), are usually presented as facts, but their proponents are unable to let go of a long-held belief even when the evidence for it is close to nonexistent, and the evidence against it continues to pile up.
The book was copyrighted in 1951, and I read it sometime in the mid-1960s.
I haven’t yet compiled a list of similar observations (whether in fiction or in what passes as reality), but I suspect that the phenomenon (of a very, very few people recognizing that such bias is pervasive) exists in every era.
Abstract and Figures
What is the relationship between aging and the character of scientific advance? Prior research focuses on star scientists, their changing dates, and rates of breakthrough success through history. Analyzing more than 244 million scholars across 241 million articles over the last two centuries, we show that for all fields, periods, and impact levels, scientists research ideas and references age over time, their research is less likely to disrupt the state of science and more likely to criticize emerging work. Early success accelerates scientist aging; while changing institutions and fields and collaborating with young scientists slows it. These patterns aggregate within fields such that those with a higher proportion of older scientists experience a lower churn of ideas and more rapid individual aging, suggesting a universal link between aging, activity, and advance.
Or as someone once remarked, science advances only as fast as old scientists die off.
(The original is much wittier, but my Google-fu is inadequate and I can’t find it.)
*See my next comment.
“Hmm….”
Wonder where me might be able to fit this “transparent” election tidbit in…?
The book I referred to in my first comment is “The Daughter of Time,” by Josephine Tey, featuring Detective Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard.
Wikipedia: “The novel’s title is taken from an old proverb (“Truth is the daughter of time”) which is quoted by Tey as the novel’s epigraph.”
Stuck in hospital with a broken leg, Grant (aided by a young American doing research at the British Museum) occupies his time by attempting to unravel the question of whether or not Richard III killed his young nephews; and if not, who did? If “Grant’s” research presented in the story is correct, Richard did not (I’m sure you all know the person Grant fingered as the real killer).
The fun is in following Grant and his helper acquire and then analyze the evidence from documents of the relevant era, which causes them to reject the then-current position in textbooks that Richard was a “monster of evil” ruthlessly removing the legitimate heirs of his deceased older brother Edward IV. They are somewhat let down by learning at the end of the book that historians from the 17th century onward did the same thing and reached the same conclusions.
Wikipedia again, listing some of the “other eras” I mentioned above:
Other alleged historical myths touched upon by the author are the commonly believed (but false) story that troops fired on the public at the 1910 Tonypandy Riot, the traditional depiction of the Boston Massacre, the martyrdom of Margaret Wilson [in Scotland during the time of the Covenanters], and the life and death of Mary, Queen of Scots. Grant adopts the term “Tonypandy” to describe widely believed historical myths, such as the supposed shootings at the Tonypandy Riots and believes popular accounts of Richard’s activities to fall into this category. This line of thought reflects a dislike and distrust of emotional popular narratives concerning supposed historical injustices which also surfaces in Tey’s other works.
My own research (such as it was, some 20 years ago when I had time to explore my interest in history), pointed to a suspect who is never mentioned in the histories or fiction AFAIKT.
Henry Tudor, the later King Henry VII, was born after his father Edmund’s death, and was raised by his uncle Jasper Tudor, who was a supporter of the Lancastrian King Henry VI, and enemy to the Yorkists Edward IV and his brother Richard. Jasper was the military and political engineer of Henry’s ascent, the younger Tudor having little experience in either area.
Assuming that Richard did not order his nephews murdered to gain the throne (see Wikipedia for Reasons), and also assuming Henry did have reasons to do away with them (ditto), it is not a far stretch to me to suspect that Jasper was the architect of any assassinations, possibly (and most likely) without informing Henry that the matter had been taken care of.
That allows supporters of both kings to have their cake.
The moral of the story is akin to the Gell-Mann Amnesia Syndrome married to the Franklin Maxim: All experts quoted in the first person — our experts — are corrects; it is only in the [second] person — [your] experts — that they are wrong.
In case anyone is interested, there is more on the debate about the disappearance of the two boys, and some of the current evidence uncovered by the “Missing Princes Project” (unavailable to Tey and other fiction writers & scholars).
The verdict is still disputed.
No one really knows what happened to them.
FWIW, Jasper Tudor does not appear among the many suspects considered, either as Henry’s possible agent or on his own initiative. As the King’s Uncle and in concomitant high-ranking positions, he almost certainly would have access to any prison where they were still in keeping.
Anyway, that’s MY position, and I’m sticking to it!
Ray Van Dune:
Greg’s Airplanes and Automobiles on YouTube has excellent, detailed videos, not “fables” (Nick), about the Wright brothers. Most recently why the Wrights used a canard on their gliders and the first Wright flier; they found that existing “knowledge” was wrong (Langley, Linenthal), and deadly to pilots; gliders and aeroplanes without a canard stalled, nose dived and killed pilots. They picked Kitty Hawk NC for prevailing wind conditions and sand to land on. Langley launched his contraptions from atop a houseboat on the Potomac River. It crashed into the river, IIRC the pilot didn’t drown.
Not a problem with a soft landing sand. Because the canard kept the Wright gliders and airplanes from nosing in and killing the pilot.
Fables indeed.
Loss of signal with Artemis II now projected at 34:00 min from now, so 6:42-ish eastern, regain of signal at 40 min after that, so 7:20+ round about. Views of the moon now are spectacular: https://www.youtube.com/live/L0xyWwODvq0
The JP Morgan Chase bank pres., Jamie Dimon gave an interview at the World Economic Forum. Naturally, it’s not easy to find a transcript of it, probably because of the following quote:
“I don’t know anyone, and you guys in the room, you might be Democrats, Republicans who thinks that sending another trillion dollars to Washington D.C will actually improve anything. So when you say raise taxes, if you said raise taxes and directly give it to the people who need it, do it. That does not happen. It goes to all these interest groups, and they give it to their friends and all that.”
“Which is why the people are considered a swamp. It’s kind of a swamp, the 17,000 lobbying groups. But bank companies are guilty too. They’re just fighting for their one self-interest as opposed to what’s good for my country.”
Well, the complaint about bankers looking out for their company’s self-interest is something of a sop.
But he highlights something that’s been bugging me ever since the beginning of the more recent news about “fraud, waste, and abuse” which started with news from Minnesota.
It’s not just a situation that Congress passes some spending laws and then there is insufficient policing and safeguarding of those expenditures. The problem is that there is a systematic scheme to intentionally move vast amounts of federal money into the hands of groups that exist primarily to support Democrats or some purely political power play.
Years ago, when videos surfaced of convoys of illegals moving through Mexico towards our southern border, I noticed how nearly all of them were wearing new clothes, shoes, and backpacks. My kneejerk right-wing assumption was someone like George Soros was paying for that.
Now I believe that if you are paying significant federal taxes, then you are paying for those clothes and backpacks. It’s not an accident, and that’s just one possible example.
Lucy Worsley, if memory served has taken up this trail, and evidence suggests one or two of the princes did survive, one ended up in Ireland? but Tey focuses on the role of Tudor propagandists like Morton, who influenced Shakespeare in the subsequent century, in a similar way, that Il Macchia influenced accounts of the Borgia prince, vs his rivals like the Duchess of Imola, and Sforza,
much as millenia before the latter accounts of Procopius, influenced the portrait of Justinian and his wife, (Procopius, had a falling out a generation before, the Secret History is at odds with his earlier tales) and going back even further to Thucydides depiction of Pericles, vs the account of his successors, (the late Donald Kagan’s monograph was instructive,)
ironically since King Henry, had seven wives, right, several counselors like Cromwell even the very helpful Tyndall, who suggested the schism with the Church, put to death, who is the monster here,
@AesopFan
That quote about science advancing is a shortened version of a longer statement by Planck. But the relevant period 1900-1930 was a revolutionary period in the foundations of physics. There has been nothing like it with the possible exception of Newton’s Principia.
Gauss remained productive into his late 60s. His last students were Riemann and Dedekind, both of whom did great, foundational work in mathematics.
@ miguel > “ironically since King Henry, had seven wives, right, several counselors like Cromwell even the very helpful Tyndall, who suggested the schism with the Church, put to death, who is the monster here,”
Indeed.
I will say that I have never understood the infatuation with Henry VIII as a person; he was a very sorry successor to his father, who at least stayed out of wars and left a surplus in the treasury when he died.
Thanks also for the historical notes, and Chuck for the Planck reference —
I knew some of the Neophiles would come through!
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning.
— Max Planck
Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, trans. F. Gaynor (1950), 97. Quoted in David L. Hull, Science as a Process (1990), 379.
Those [scientists] who dislike entertaining contradictory thoughts are unlikely to enrich their science with new ideas.
— Max Planck
Attributed. (If you know a primary source, please contact webmaster.)
And because this one is very relevant to our current era:
The atheist movement declares religion to be an arbitrary illusion—devised by power-hungry priests—for the pious belief in a higher Power over us. At this point, it is not surprising that the atheist movement describes religion with only words of mockery. The atheist movement eagerly makes use of the advance of scientific knowledge. In apparent unity with the progress of science, atheism accelerates its subverting action on the peoples of earth in all social classes. In short, after a victory by atheism, not only all the most precious wealth of our culture would topple, but—what is worse—the prospects for a better future also fade.
— Max Planck
This is a loose translation by Webmaster. It has been gently rephrased for clarity, from a passage in Religion und Naturwissenschaft, Vortrag Gehalten im Baltikum Mai 1937 (1958), 7. The passage in the original German is prolix. The original German version of this quote can be found, together with a closer translation, elsewhere on this web page, beginning: “Under these circumstances….”
Sagan gives “scientists” more credit than they deserve lately, based not only on the Covid conspiracy but the increasing number of retractions of published research.
But at least they still have the edge over the other groups he mentions.
In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) — Carl Sagan
@Bob Wilson, 3:01pm:
Yes, they ran it… CBS was pretty open (for them) about the full boondoggle status of the project. They were very explicit about what the voters approved funding for and what was done as of today and what other phases were projected to be. Modesto to Bakersfield is a far cry from SF to LA.
None of it made the state look good, and the state transportation chief, and some sidekick he had with him did nothing to counter the failure that it has been to date. It was supposed to be complete in 2020, it is now 2026 (as you know) and there is zero track on the ground. But they recently put out a request for bid to get someone to lay track. The dollar amount of over-run is astronomical.
Wait! there’s more. This City Journal article gives some insight about the CA “billionaire tax” and what the realities are shaping up to be. Again, not what was advertised…
Back to Tom Grey’s link (the article is not paywalled now), I found the author’s experiences in re ideological positions on evolutionary development of social and personal behavior, and the realities of economic activities to be very interesting (other ideological factors were left for succeeding parts of a series).
None of these insights are strictly inconsistent with many aspects of modern left-wing politics. Moreover, they do not support libertarianism. The best societies today combine free, competitive, and open markets with things like judicious regulation, extensive state provision of public goods, and considerable economic redistribution.
This is unsurprising: successful free markets are impossible without a strong state, the rule of law, and some degree of democratic accountability of political and economic elites. However, once a society has achieved such things, there is no reason to restrict the state’s power to the protection of free markets alone.
Nevertheless, learning and thinking about such insights from economics have slowly disabused me of many naive left-wing opinions I used to have and that I still encounter almost daily from left-wing friends, colleagues, or pundits.
Most obviously, I am far more positive about capitalism and far more suspicious about actual and proposed alternatives to it. I also think the left tends to systematically underestimate the importance of wealth creation, innovation, and economic growth relative to issues of redistribution.
More subtly but just as significantly, I have come to see many of the things people on the left blame on capitalism (e.g. self-interest and social competition) as fundamental features of all social institutions. If capitalism is unique, it is unique in the fact that it makes such features of human behaviour undeniable and exploits them to produce beneficial collective outcomes.
Perhaps most fundamentally, I have realised that economies and societies are highly complex and depend on forms of large-scale cooperation that are shockingly difficult to understand, let alone achieve.
Noble intentions and lofty rhetoric about justice and equality are not enough. The kinds of policies and interventions that benefit people often sound bad. Those that hurt people often sound good.
Successful economic policy requires a deep and intellectually humble engagement with incentives, constraints, trade-offs, and unintended consequences, not the emotive moralising and wishful thinking often characteristic of left-wing politics.
Enjoying the 38 days of attacking the evil Iranian Regime by the two best countries in the world: Israel and America,
I am also enjoyong how Western European is showing that it can not be remotely trusted when the chips are down. I was stationed in Germany 60 years ago when the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies were a danger. That danger is long gone.
We need to close our bases in Western Europe and let Western Europe figure out their own future. That has the possibility of making Europe a much better place than it is now because they will have to be seriously introspective and thus reform itself.
If it doesn’t it becomes as important as Zimbabwe.
Very good explanation of a leftist, surrounded by leftism, intellectually honest to find out many of its problems.
https://www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/on-becoming-less-left-wing-part-1-9f4
I’ve been freely following Dan for a couple of years, as I learned of his characterization of the media as a Marketplace of Rationalizations. Tho I was, and am, disappointed in his own frequent rationalized, rather than reasoned, arguments against Trump. His thinking & writing are clear, understandable, and relevant to the many points he’s making.
He’s quick to claim his criticisms of the left don’t make him right wing, definitely not! He’s clearly uneasy speaking truths that the left doesn’t like.
Lots of his stuff is behind the paywall, and I’m already over budget on that, but the first part is free. A key thing is his prior, naive view was:
Left is Good, Right is Bad.
Those who believe that, strongly, are motivated to reason about things so as to confirm that bias. His habit has long been doing that, which made him aware of his own rationalized positions, so he’s trying to get more T truth.
But without being on the right—which I think he’ll find impossible but his steps & halts & reasons & rationalizations are interesting.
My sister was almost 8 months pregnant before they figured it out. Of course, she’s always been on the… rotund… side.
Trump has to do something about gas prices. $4.60 gas and over $6 for diesel in my area, and that’s going to lose him support if something isn’t done.
Prohibiting oil and fuel exports would bring down prices here. We’re paying these prices because we allow Europe to bid them up. We have sufficient supply internally such that the supply/demand curve would lower our prices. Europe has practically no supply and their prices would skyrocket. Not only are they not helping, they’re actively getting in the way, yet the US is paying higher prices to keep.them afloat.
Why?
If someone ran a survey that said, rise gas prices in Europe to lower ours it would have 90+% approval.
Just read about an article that appeared in the NYT in October of 1903 that said “Man will not fly for at least a million years, or perhaps more.”
Sure enough, in about a million years, or a bit less – December of the same year in fact, the Wright brothers flew!
Apparently the sycophantic NYT was covering for an expert named Dr. Samuel Langley, Director of the Smithsonian institution, who was having no luck whatsoever getting his steam-powered “Aerodrome” to fly! Here’s what I wrote at InstaPundit about the experts:
“The Wrights were high school graduates who pursued the challenge of flight through methodical experiment, such as with wind tunnels, while (Doctor) Langley was pretty much a hacker! A well-funded one, but a hacker nonetheless! His Aerodrome simply followed the dime-novel wisdom of what a flying machine “should” look like.
The Wright Flyer was a “clean sheet of paper” design, driven much more from first principles.
Sound familiar?”
@buddhaha:Prohibiting oil and fuel exports would bring down prices here.
This is the inverse of the fallacious arguments for tariffs. It’s been done in history, over and over, and like tariffs, it can only be made to look like an economic benefit by ignoring the harm done. One difference being that prohibiting exports tends to harm producers more than consumers.
Petroleum is not identical everywhere. US refineries are geared to access to a global market. If you want to impose higher costs, subsidize inefficiency and malinvestment, and threaten domestic supply, forbidding US oil exports is a good start.
If someone ran a survey that said, rise gas prices in Europe to lower ours it would have 90+% approval.
I don’t doubt it, as illustrated by the following folk tale:
@Ray Van Dune:who was having no luck whatsoever getting his steam-powered “Aerodrome” to fly!
The small ones flew, and used both steam and gasoline engines. He could not build a large one that successfully flew and carried a man, because he couldn’t simply scale the small models up.
I think he deserves better than being misrepresented by a fable supporting modern skepticism of modern expertise. Langley did a lot of worthwhile things which is why so much is named after him.
Conservative talk radio tells me that 60 Minutes did a propaganda piece on the California train to nowhere. I never watch the show, but it might be a sign that the Democrat powers that be are not thrilled with Newsom as their candidate. The local NPR radio also did a piece on how people are leaving California because of the high cost of living. For once, the phrase “affordability crisis” is being applied to a Democrat state. We should not read too much into them but these are interesting developments.
Did anyone else find it odd that Trump said “Praise be to Allah?”
I assume this was chest-beating, and not a sincere expression of praise for Allah (though Eid al-Fitr was not very long ago). I’m guessing he got it from old Mike Tyson fights?
Did anyone else find it odd
I say, boy, I say that’s a joke son!
Niketas-
Nah, Trump was just sticking it to the Islamists by thanking “their” Allah.
Tom Grey’s link to an article by Dan Williams is quite good. Thoughts of a genuinely intelligent lefty.
https://www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/on-becoming-less-left-wing-part-1-9f4
This bit below isn’t necessarily the best part of the article, but it struck a chord for me and my recent past.
Basic lessons from economics
First, standard left-wing critiques of mainstream economics are biased and low-quality.
– – – – – –
Learning to see human behaviour and the social world through the lens of incentives, constraints, opportunity costs, marginal thinking, trade-offs, strategies, equilibria, and so on is genuinely transformative.
One of my best new friends, in my post marriage life, is a woman I met a few months after she separated from her husband of a couple decades. She is a middle manager professionally and has a business degree, and we have never dated, but go out together sometimes.
Once, after we’d known each other for a couple years, she was musing about her dating difficulties and quandaries. She mentioned the “opportunity cost” of spending a large amount of time dating one guy, who you know isn’t “the one,” when there are other possibilities out there.
I had always kept my social life rather separate from my academic life and had never thought in such terms. I was amused, and little dismissive of her notions, but it stuck in my head.
A little less than a year later, I found myself in a dating situation that really wasn’t working out and I was struggling with how to move forward. Then it suddenly popped into my head. I was struggling with the “sunk costs fallacy.” I had sunk a lot of money and more importantly… time, into this very casual relationship, and I was reluctant to let it go.
I did let it go, and later still, my manager friend and I were having a few drinks and I brought it up. She thought it was hysterical.
Nikitas, I’ll take your comments to heart, but if I said something that was a “fable” please tell me what it was.
One has only to look at Langley’s propellor design compared to the Wright’s to see that he was going on instinct, not experiment. And don’t forget that the Wrights tried to use Otto Lilienthal’s wing data (the gold standard of the time) and found it was flawed. They thus built a wind tunnel and derived their own airfoil data. None of this is a fable… I have read their published collected papers and it is all there.
What a surprise:
Some Democrats + others are trying to find President Trump guilty of, or blame him for, the “January 6 riot”, …
…AGAIN.
[The news site, france24 [dot] com], reported on that event, today.]
And…what a surprise:
this [attempt to find Trump guilty of the riot, + more importantly to the Dems, this attempt to find Trump partly or wholly to blame for:
1] the chaos + violence at that riot, and ” “breaking the law” by trying to overthrow a USA, presidential election”…[which he never did], and,
2] for…my words- accusations of him-“causing violence, and discord in the nation, disturbing the peace, trying to overthrow the US Government + take it over”…and, my words-“causing violent attacks, violent crimes, an insurgency, causing wound-ings, a riot, for whistling at the pretty girls, + in other ways, as being “a rather bad fellow”,…all of these accusations are in a Congress probe that will wrap up SIX DAYS after the November of 2026, Fed. Congressional elections.
Gee, what a coincidence:
this foolish government probe, that is running badly of 3 of its four wheels- is going to happen when the Dems are telling people: “Don’t vote for Republicans for Congress,…because WE SAY- “Trump and the Republicans are bad people”.
And this probe by some Dems + others, is ALSO going to happen when:
the Dems are telling people-“Don’t vote for Republicans for Congress,…because WE SAY- “Trump and the Republicans are bad people”, …well AFTER the 2026…Congressional elections are over.
Wow. What a fair tactic-
the Dems trying to smear President Trump as “a bad guy, + someone who causes big crimes”, when the Dems are TRYING to get Democrats elected into the Congress, and-
how very fair- What a fair tactic: the Dems trying to smear Republicans in Congress as “a bunch of bad guys, when the Dems are TRYING to get Democrats elected into the Congress.
Gosh, world this type of unfair probe cause people to not vote for Republicans?
To my knowledge- Donald Trump was…for lack of other words, was tried TWICE in [impeachment trials] for accusations that he did [any or all crimes] in the January 6 riot,…and he was found NOT GUILTY of [all of the crimes] in the January 6th riot.
How many times do they, the Dems in congress, being found not guilty of these crimes, do they need?
To my knowledge- DURING the Jan. 6th riot, and in the violence and threats of violence in it- the Chief of police of Washington D.C., called Nancy Pelosi and said words like:
“The Washington D.C. Police CAN’T control this violent crowd! Please send the Army National Guard to help shut down this riot. We don’t have the number of officers to STOP this riot, and we CAN’T control the [land] where this riot is happening! Please send us the National Guard to help!”
And Nancy Pelosi refused.
And in fact, [The Chief of police of Washington D.C., called Nancy Pelosi, asking her for SEVEN TIMES to send [the Army National Guard]- to help the police shut down this riot, and for SIX TIMES, she refused.
Only after the SEVENTH TIME that he, the Chief of Police, asked her to send the National Guard to help end this huge riot, did Nancy Pelosi grant his request, and she then sent the National Guard to help the police stop this riot.
What caused the delay?
Was she letting the riot rage on, to try to falsely [blame Trump + the Republicans] for this riot he, and the Republicans, did not do?
This latest Congressional probe, a third try to try to [find Trump guilty of crimes, in legal or Congressional hearings], is : a travesty, a cheap shot, a questionable probe, a waste of the Congress’ time, and a waste of [everybody’s] time.
Wow.
I have a relative who works with, and teaches, 6 year old kids.
These members of Congress are acting like these immature , 6 year old kids.
If she saw 6 year old kids acting like these people, she’d tell the kids: “You are being bad. You are causing problems for no reason. Stop that.
Be quiet, and go sit in the corner.”
In my opinion- some kids, and Congress members, need to learn how to do good behavior, and how to behave better.
Here’s a link to the news story, about that probe:
https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20221021-trump-subpoenaed-in-capitol-assault-probe-ally-bannon-gets-jail-sentence-for-refusing-to-testify
@ Tom Grey > “Those who believe that [Left is Good, Right is Bad], strongly, are motivated to reason about things so as to confirm that bias.”
You are correct, and I believe there is strong evidence that you could substitute any ideological position for the one in brackets.
Or a scientific position, as we saw in the Langley-Wright story, and during Covid (examples can be multiplied for both from just the last 25 years).
And also for religious beliefs, given that one accepts the idea of “evidence” for spiritual positions.
Very coincidentally, I chose to re-read an old favorite of mine before passing the book on; being of un certain âge myself, there is not much time left to re-read all my treasures, and certainly not to re-re-read any of them!
Without going into a detailed review* of this detective story, the protagonist is in a situation where he becomes crucially aware that the opinions of historians and Great Minds (mostly academic and especially those in the education business), are usually presented as facts, but their proponents are unable to let go of a long-held belief even when the evidence for it is close to nonexistent, and the evidence against it continues to pile up.
The book was copyrighted in 1951, and I read it sometime in the mid-1960s.
I haven’t yet compiled a list of similar observations (whether in fiction or in what passes as reality), but I suspect that the phenomenon (of a very, very few people recognizing that such bias is pervasive) exists in every era.
And the internet comes through:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358458621_Aging_Scientists_and_Slowed_Advance
Or as someone once remarked, science advances only as fast as old scientists die off.
(The original is much wittier, but my Google-fu is inadequate and I can’t find it.)
*See my next comment.
“Hmm….”
Wonder where me might be able to fit this “transparent” election tidbit in…?
https://instapundit.com/787928/
The book I referred to in my first comment is “The Daughter of Time,” by Josephine Tey, featuring Detective Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard.
Wikipedia: “The novel’s title is taken from an old proverb (“Truth is the daughter of time”) which is quoted by Tey as the novel’s epigraph.”
Stuck in hospital with a broken leg, Grant (aided by a young American doing research at the British Museum) occupies his time by attempting to unravel the question of whether or not Richard III killed his young nephews; and if not, who did? If “Grant’s” research presented in the story is correct, Richard did not (I’m sure you all know the person Grant fingered as the real killer).
The fun is in following Grant and his helper acquire and then analyze the evidence from documents of the relevant era, which causes them to reject the then-current position in textbooks that Richard was a “monster of evil” ruthlessly removing the legitimate heirs of his deceased older brother Edward IV. They are somewhat let down by learning at the end of the book that historians from the 17th century onward did the same thing and reached the same conclusions.
Wikipedia again, listing some of the “other eras” I mentioned above:
My own research (such as it was, some 20 years ago when I had time to explore my interest in history), pointed to a suspect who is never mentioned in the histories or fiction AFAIKT.
Henry Tudor, the later King Henry VII, was born after his father Edmund’s death, and was raised by his uncle Jasper Tudor, who was a supporter of the Lancastrian King Henry VI, and enemy to the Yorkists Edward IV and his brother Richard. Jasper was the military and political engineer of Henry’s ascent, the younger Tudor having little experience in either area.
Assuming that Richard did not order his nephews murdered to gain the throne (see Wikipedia for Reasons), and also assuming Henry did have reasons to do away with them (ditto), it is not a far stretch to me to suspect that Jasper was the architect of any assassinations, possibly (and most likely) without informing Henry that the matter had been taken care of.
That allows supporters of both kings to have their cake.
PS To make things even more fun, Wikipedia casts doubts on Tey’s contenton via Grant that the Martyrdom of Margaret Wilson was a “fake news” event perpetuated for political reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Wilson_(Scottish_martyr)
The moral of the story is akin to the Gell-Mann Amnesia Syndrome married to the Franklin Maxim: All experts quoted in the first person — our experts — are corrects; it is only in the [second] person — [your] experts — that they are wrong.
In case anyone is interested, there is more on the debate about the disappearance of the two boys, and some of the current evidence uncovered by the “Missing Princes Project” (unavailable to Tey and other fiction writers & scholars).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princes_in_the_Tower
The verdict is still disputed.
No one really knows what happened to them.
FWIW, Jasper Tudor does not appear among the many suspects considered, either as Henry’s possible agent or on his own initiative. As the King’s Uncle and in concomitant high-ranking positions, he almost certainly would have access to any prison where they were still in keeping.
Anyway, that’s MY position, and I’m sticking to it!
Ray Van Dune:
Greg’s Airplanes and Automobiles on YouTube has excellent, detailed videos, not “fables” (Nick), about the Wright brothers. Most recently why the Wrights used a canard on their gliders and the first Wright flier; they found that existing “knowledge” was wrong (Langley, Linenthal), and deadly to pilots; gliders and aeroplanes without a canard stalled, nose dived and killed pilots. They picked Kitty Hawk NC for prevailing wind conditions and sand to land on. Langley launched his contraptions from atop a houseboat on the Potomac River. It crashed into the river, IIRC the pilot didn’t drown.
Not a problem with a soft landing sand. Because the canard kept the Wright gliders and airplanes from nosing in and killing the pilot.
Fables indeed.
Loss of signal with Artemis II now projected at 34:00 min from now, so 6:42-ish eastern, regain of signal at 40 min after that, so 7:20+ round about. Views of the moon now are spectacular: https://www.youtube.com/live/L0xyWwODvq0
The JP Morgan Chase bank pres., Jamie Dimon gave an interview at the World Economic Forum. Naturally, it’s not easy to find a transcript of it, probably because of the following quote:
https://x.com/WallStreetApes/status/2040259280541208650
“I don’t know anyone, and you guys in the room, you might be Democrats, Republicans who thinks that sending another trillion dollars to Washington D.C will actually improve anything. So when you say raise taxes, if you said raise taxes and directly give it to the people who need it, do it. That does not happen. It goes to all these interest groups, and they give it to their friends and all that.”
“Which is why the people are considered a swamp. It’s kind of a swamp, the 17,000 lobbying groups. But bank companies are guilty too. They’re just fighting for their one self-interest as opposed to what’s good for my country.”
Well, the complaint about bankers looking out for their company’s self-interest is something of a sop.
But he highlights something that’s been bugging me ever since the beginning of the more recent news about “fraud, waste, and abuse” which started with news from Minnesota.
It’s not just a situation that Congress passes some spending laws and then there is insufficient policing and safeguarding of those expenditures. The problem is that there is a systematic scheme to intentionally move vast amounts of federal money into the hands of groups that exist primarily to support Democrats or some purely political power play.
Years ago, when videos surfaced of convoys of illegals moving through Mexico towards our southern border, I noticed how nearly all of them were wearing new clothes, shoes, and backpacks. My kneejerk right-wing assumption was someone like George Soros was paying for that.
Now I believe that if you are paying significant federal taxes, then you are paying for those clothes and backpacks. It’s not an accident, and that’s just one possible example.
Lucy Worsley, if memory served has taken up this trail, and evidence suggests one or two of the princes did survive, one ended up in Ireland? but Tey focuses on the role of Tudor propagandists like Morton, who influenced Shakespeare in the subsequent century, in a similar way, that Il Macchia influenced accounts of the Borgia prince, vs his rivals like the Duchess of Imola, and Sforza,
much as millenia before the latter accounts of Procopius, influenced the portrait of Justinian and his wife, (Procopius, had a falling out a generation before, the Secret History is at odds with his earlier tales) and going back even further to Thucydides depiction of Pericles, vs the account of his successors, (the late Donald Kagan’s monograph was instructive,)
ironically since King Henry, had seven wives, right, several counselors like Cromwell even the very helpful Tyndall, who suggested the schism with the Church, put to death, who is the monster here,
@AesopFan
That quote about science advancing is a shortened version of a longer statement by Planck. But the relevant period 1900-1930 was a revolutionary period in the foundations of physics. There has been nothing like it with the possible exception of Newton’s Principia.
Gauss remained productive into his late 60s. His last students were Riemann and Dedekind, both of whom did great, foundational work in mathematics.
@ miguel > “ironically since King Henry, had seven wives, right, several counselors like Cromwell even the very helpful Tyndall, who suggested the schism with the Church, put to death, who is the monster here,”
Indeed.
I will say that I have never understood the infatuation with Henry VIII as a person; he was a very sorry successor to his father, who at least stayed out of wars and left a surplus in the treasury when he died.
Thanks also for the historical notes, and Chuck for the Planck reference —
I knew some of the Neophiles would come through!
Some quotes from Planck, including the one I was looking for, and one at the end of that “file” from Carl Sagan.
https://todayinsci.com/P/Planck_Max/PlanckMax-Science-Quotations.htm
And because this one is very relevant to our current era:
Sagan gives “scientists” more credit than they deserve lately, based not only on the Covid conspiracy but the increasing number of retractions of published research.
But at least they still have the edge over the other groups he mentions.
@Bob Wilson, 3:01pm:
Yes, they ran it… CBS was pretty open (for them) about the full boondoggle status of the project. They were very explicit about what the voters approved funding for and what was done as of today and what other phases were projected to be. Modesto to Bakersfield is a far cry from SF to LA.
None of it made the state look good, and the state transportation chief, and some sidekick he had with him did nothing to counter the failure that it has been to date. It was supposed to be complete in 2020, it is now 2026 (as you know) and there is zero track on the ground. But they recently put out a request for bid to get someone to lay track. The dollar amount of over-run is astronomical.
Wait! there’s more. This City Journal article gives some insight about the CA “billionaire tax” and what the realities are shaping up to be. Again, not what was advertised…
https://www.city-journal.org/article/california-wealth-billionaire-tax?vcrmeid=d8UCKUVYEqVBJXcKkwpcg&vcrmiid=8CZdmb1u-0CLvzBzRHCCZw
Calif is collapsing…. I’m glad I’m old.
Back to Tom Grey’s link (the article is not paywalled now), I found the author’s experiences in re ideological positions on evolutionary development of social and personal behavior, and the realities of economic activities to be very interesting (other ideological factors were left for succeeding parts of a series).
https://www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/on-becoming-less-left-wing-part-1-9f4
This was his conclusion:
I hope he influenced some of his readers.
Re California “is collapsing”…
“Why Californians are leaving — and what Gavin Newsom is spending $19M to hide”—
https://nypost.com/2026/04/05/opinion/gavin-newsoms-a-failed-governor/
H/T Powerline blog.