The title above eventually is apropos of any politician or legislator given a sufficient interval. But it doesn’t stop there. It spreads like the pox to anyone with even a whiff of authority. There’s a gene on chromosome 17, SKNK23a, that’s expressed in early childhood in all humans and amplified by experience that manifests the…
A financial writer recently mused over the complexities of Jerome Powell’s job as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. He focused on the problem of interest rates. Lower them too rapidly and inflation may recur or worsen. Keep them high for too long and consumers will be priced out of the loan market and even worse…
I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy. Richard Feynman Thomas Sowell has been one of America’s greatest public intellectuals for over a half-century. During that span, he has published 48 books. His latest, written at age 93, is Social Justice Fallacies. He didn’t start life behind…
Jake Hegee’s opera Dead Man Walking opened the Met Opera’s new season last week. It’s based on a book of the same name by Sister Helen Prejean. Sister Helen is an ardent opponent of the death penalty. Though opposition to capital punishment is not a feature of Hegee’s opera its depiction of it and Sister…
As anyone semi-sentient knows the great Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic has won more Grand Slam tennis tournaments than any male player in history. He might have won two more had he not been denied entry to Australia and the US last year because he refused to take the COVID vaccine and thus was unable…
The National Association of Scholars has released a report Shifting Sands: The Confounded Errors of Public Health Policy Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, the third report of a series which examines the interface of science and government. The realization that science, medicine, the government, and both the professional and lay media performed badly during the…
The Journal of the American Medical Association already on a woke high of intergalactic dimensions has published Standards of Care for Transgender and Gender Diverse People – its full text is below. The document’s contents would until a short time ago have been considered delusional. I don’t wish to discuss the subject beyond saying that…
Man does not live by it alone, but too much makes him obese. Not just physically fat, but mentally flabby as well. Until about the last 80 years the main human activity was devoted to survival. Hobbes famous declaration that in a state of nature – ie, one without government – life would be solitary,…
Edward Chancellor’s book , subtitled The Real Story of interest, starts with Hammurabi and continues to the present. He shows that interest is older than money and that the compulsion of governments to manipulate it is equally ancient. Interest has been seen as immoral by many religions, but has persisted because commerce is impossible without…
Effect of Prescriber Notifications of Patient’s Fatal Overdose on Opioid Prescribing at 4 to 12 Months is the title of a short paper on the JAMA Open Network. It describes what happens when a physician or physician extender receives a letter from the county medical examiner informing him that his patients has died from an…