Ineffably Sad

(Instagram photo)

The assassination of Charlie Kirk, 31, is ineffably sad. I say this, not because I agree with many of Mr. Kirk's views but because a young father of two was shot for his political beliefs. He never called for violence against those who disagreed with him; in fact he encouraged college students to argue with him and abhorred moves to silence opponents of all stripes. (There are hundreds of videos showing his spirited, mostly civil engagements.)

Kirk became well-known for debating students in front of an audience in a public setting, offering a conservative, and often provocative, perspective. Videos of him sparring with liberal-minded students garnered millions of views online. According to videos of the attack, Kirk was debating a student about mass shootings involving transgender people when he was shot.

The act of political violence is a jarring coda to Kirk’s meteoric rise from college dropout to standard-bearer of the MAGA movement. Kirk left an indelible mark on the Republican party, drawing young voters to its ranks and influencing Trump’s presidency.

Kirk was a strong advocate for most of the president’s positions, which he discussed in detail during his podcast The Charlie Kirk Show and other media appearances. His support—and talent as an orator—helped him earn significant political sway with the president, with whom he spoke frequently.

Your humble blogger will not over-react by asserting the end of civil society occurred today; that might well have happened fourteen (14) months ago had then-candidate Trump not escaped with his life. Today's damage was grievous enough. R.i.P.

Leave the Sign, Take the Cannoli

(Photo by Bukaty/AP/WSJ)

The question: is the mural over Leavitt’s Bakery "commercial speech" subject to regulation or is it art that is protected by the First Amendment? [bold added]

[The town of Conway, NH] had argued the mural was a commercial sign and in violation of the town’s zoning law, and told him to take it down or adjust the size, which at 91 square feet was nearly four times larger than allowed. [Leavitt’s Bakery owner Sean] Young fought back, saying the mural was art, not advertising, and that the town infringed on his First Amendment rights by trying to regulate its content. He filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the town and sought $1 in damages.

..The ruling, issued by U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante, came after a one-day bench trial in February.

Laplante said Conway’s enforcement of the ordinance was unconstitutional, and ordered the town to stop its efforts.

There are sound reasons for the regulation of commercial speech. Businesses could lie about the benefits, costs, or any other aspects of their products and services and skip town to avoid responsibility; such speech should not be protected by the First Amendment.

In the case of Leavitt's Bakery it's not clear why the public needed protection from the mural; calling it a commercial sign seemed like a pretext to force the bakery to remove an image that some in the town didn't like. Cheers for the judge for putting a stop to legal over-reach.

Peggy Noonan's Take

(WSJ graphic)

Former Reagan and GHW Bush speechwriter Peggy Noonan could not bring herself to support Donald Trump. However, her personal feelings about the President-elect do not prevent her from performing an insightful analysis of Tuesday's results:

It was a triumph for the Republican Party—a sweep, a rout—and a disaster for the Democrats. Much has been written about the demographic facts but when a single candidate increases his totals in almost every group but one, white women, something big happened. Donald Trump will likely receive a majority of the popular vote—the first Republican to do so since 2004. Republicans handily won the Senate and appear poised to take the House. This amounts to a legitimately claimed mandate.

Mr. Trump’s is the biggest political comeback since Richard Nixon, whose career flat-lined in embarrassment in 1962, after a failed gubernatorial race and stumbling news conference—“You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore”—only to roar back to the presidency in 1968. It isn’t enough said that Mr. Trump did this while enduring a shooting, a second, thwarted assassination attempt, and credible intelligence reports that Iran was trying to kill him. He went into all his rallies knowing that. He showed a lot of guts. Mass media didn’t dwell on this, but regular people did.

As for Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump in 2020 lost the Catholic vote. This year he carried it with a healthy 56%. That’ll teach her to blow off the Al Smith dinner.

What did it all mean? The people did what they wished. They revolted. They looked at the past four years of Washington and said no. They said “Goodbye to all that,” to the years 2020-24—to the pandemic, to the pain and damage of that era, which affected every part of our lives. That is the real turning of the page I think, from a time they hated that made them view their government as bullying and not that bright. In terms of issues it was illegal immigration, inflation and a rejection of the deterioration all around them—of drugstores locking up the shampoo and the beleaguered Walgreens employee late with the key to the cabinet and in a bad mood because he’s afraid of thieves and crazy people and it’s wearing him down. It was the woke regime, which people have come to experience as an invading force in their lives. It was Afghanistan, and other wars, and the sense Washington isn’t getting foreign policy right and perhaps barely thinking about it. They just seem to be staggering through each day. The country’s been waiting for years to hear from its leaders: What are America’s interests?

In September, pondering the race, I wrote: “This will be a path election, not a person election.” Once we chose a shining John F. Kennedy, who would choose the path. You chose dazzling Ronald Reagan, and he’d cut a path through the forest. This year I felt people would be choosing a path, not a person. “And I’m not sure they want to go down the Blue Path any deeper than they already have.”

I think that’s what happened. Tens of millions of people who didn’t like Donald Trump voted for the path he promised.

America, after its long journey through the 2010s and ’20s, is becoming more conservative again.

Lest her readers think she has changed her mind about the man, she adds:

As for me, I don’t like the SOB, I think him a bad man who’ll cause and bungle crises almost from day one, but he’ll be the American president, and we all deserve grace. I will pray for him, support what I think constructive and oppose what I think destructive, call it straight as I can and take whatever follows.

Such language, Peggy, what would the Gipper say?

Bad Things Can Come in a Small Package

Earlier this week I agreed with those who avoid discussions about politics:

Count me in the feigning-ignorance crowd. Stress harms one's mental and physical health. Our jobs, finances, and family problems are stressors enough, and voluntarily seeking more in political discussions seems crazy to your humble blogger.

This year is especially off-putting because the negative campaigning seems worse than ever. It's more about how awful the opponent is, rather than what the candidate is for. And political argumentation today involves not only how bad or evil the other person is, but the millions of people who support him or her.

Vilifying others is too easy and appeals to our worst instincts.

(Image from Jared Michael Matthew)

Today's New Testament reading is from James 3: [bold added]

How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue-- a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing.

In my youth I had an acerbic tongue, which I now understand partially stemmed from my own insecurities. Just as a recovering alcoholic avoids an environment where he could relapse, so do I stay away from situations where I would be tempted to diss my fellow man. So...no politics.

Debate Surprise

(Variety photo)

I fell asleep before the debate started. (I'm ten years younger than President Biden and start fading in the early evening, so I give him credit--and President Trump, 78, too--for putting themselves out there at 9 p.m. Eastern.)

Waking after the debate, I flipped between MSNBC, Fox, and CNN expecting to get the usual commentary from partisans about how their candidate won. For the first time in memory there was very little spin from one side, which acknowledged that their candidate did poorly.

Instead we were treated to some Democrats calling for President Biden to drop out of the race. The biggest obstacle is the President himself.

President Biden’s halting performance against Donald Trump left the Democratic Party in turmoil, with allies ranging from lawmakers to wealthy donors discussing Friday whether the 81-year-old should remain on the ticket even as a defiant Biden pressed on with his re-election campaign.

The 90-minute debate, watched by tens of millions of Americans, put Biden’s age, his biggest political vulnerability, on display like no other moment in his presidency. He stumbled over words, stammered through answers and trailed off without finishing sentences, forcing Democrats to publicly confront an issue that many had largely dismissed and some had fretted over privately.

Biden has no plans to drop out of the race, according to one of his senior advisers, and the president remains committed to the planned September debate with Trump. He returned to the campaign trail Friday, acknowledging his age but insisting he remained the right man to take on Trump....

Biden would need to step aside from the race in order for Democrats to replace him, given that he controls most of the party’s delegates headed into their August convention.

I had thought that the biggest pre-convention news was going to be on the Republican side, with former President Trump's hush-money sentencing on July 11th and the designation of his running mate. To almost everyone's surprise the Democratic convention could well be more entertaining.

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

(Image from Today show)

Kansas City Chiefs placekicker Harrison Butker gave the commencement address at Benedictine College, a private Catholic college in Atchison, Kansas, on May 11th. He espoused traditional Catholic values in a way that offended America's dominant secular culture. For example, [bold added]

For the ladies present today, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment. You should be proud of all that you have achieved to this point in your young lives. I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now about to cross this stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career? Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.

Thousands called for his firing by the Chiefs from other statements:

Bad policies and poor leadership have negatively impacted major life issues. Things like abortion, IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia, as well as a growing support for degenerate cultural values in media, all stem from the pervasiveness of disorder.

Our own nation is led by a man who publicly and proudly proclaims his Catholic faith, but at the same time is delusional enough to make the Sign of the Cross during a pro-abortion rally. He has been so vocal in his support for the murder of innocent babies that I'm sure to many people it appears that you can be both Catholic and pro-choice.

Some commentators cited the NFL's apparent hypocrisy in not firing Harrison Butker while it blackballed Colin Kaepernick for kneeling when the National Anthem was being played. For the record, I supported the former 49ers quarterback then, but there is a clear difference between the two: CK expressed his views in full uniform while millions had to watch, but HB was speaking as a private citizen on his own time to a Catholic audience. Most Americans agree that employers have the right to fire employees for workplace behavior that could damage customer relationships.

(To be fair, there were liberal celebrities, like Bill Maher and Whoopi Goldberg, who came to HB's defense while disagreeing with the content of his speech.)

To this humble blogger, what was most interesting about the speech was the importance he placed on the traditional Latin mass:

I've been very vocal in my love and devotion to the TLM and its necessity for our lives. But what I think gets misunderstood is that people who attend the TLM do so out of pride or preference. I can speak to my own experience, but for most people I have come across within these communities this simply is not true. I do not attend the TLM because I think I am better than others, or for the smells and bells, or even for the love of Latin. I attend the TLM because I believe, just as the God of the Old Testament was pretty particular in how he wanted to be worshipped, the same holds true for us today. It is through the TLM that I encountered order, and began to pursue it in my own life. Aside from the TLM itself, too many of our sacred traditions have been relegated to things of the past, when in my parish, things such as ember days, days when we fast and pray for vocations and for our priests, are still adhered to. The TLM is so essential that I would challenge each of you to pick a place to move where it is readily available.

Three years ago Pope Francis gave local bishops the authority to ban the Latin mass. Even this non-Catholic sees the benefit of a tradition that has great meaning to some, so why not keep it optional? Is Pope Francis on "the other side" in the culture wars?

After the break is the text of Harrison Butker's speech from the National Catholic Register:

The Academy Oversteps and Begins to Pay the Price

Bill Ackman, 57, is a hedge-fund billionaire who made his fortune by taking unconventional short and long positions.

He always gives interesting business-related interviews on CNBC, and that, frankly, was the extent of my knowledge about him.

Until he took issue with the December 5th performance of Harvard then-President Claudine Gay before Congress on the subject of anti-semitism and free speech at Harvard, his alma mater.

The scales had fallen from his eyes:

Twenty-four hours after Hamas attacked Israel, Mr. Ackman “saw students supporting terrorists—Harvard students, no less.” With astonishment that hardened into outrage, Mr. Ackman witnessed 34 student groups at his alma mater “come out to say that Israel is solely responsible for the most heinous acts we’ve seen in modern history.”

Harvard wasn’t the only American campus where students railed against Israel and at Jewish classmates. But Harvard was the place to which Mr. Ackman, an “absolutely loyal alum in all respects,” had given $50 million over the years. “I lecture at the university multiple times a year,” he says, adding that he’s on the dean’s advisory board. Observing the protests, and the Harvard administration’s refusal to curb them, he mounted a mutiny of donors, calling on them to help drive Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, from her job. He feared that her continued presence at the helm would lead angry donors to stop giving. “I am personally aware of more than a billion dollars of terminated donations from a small group of Harvard’s most generous Jewish and non-Jewish alumni,” he wrote on Dec. 10.

Ms. Gay’s resignation on Jan. 2 was a result of her maladministration as well as of convincing accusations of plagiarism in her academic writings.

After reviewing Claudine Gay's, as well as MIT President Sally Kornbluth's and Penn President Liz Magill's, testimony before Congress, Mr. Ackman came to believe that their tepid response to student groups' calls for genocide against Jews was attributable to the DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) practices that have pervaded campuses nationwide. On January 2nd he tweeted: [bold added]

Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.”

Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist.

As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology.

In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local and federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to transform society from its currently structurally racist state to an anti-racist one.

Claudine Gay's resignation on January 2nd was only the first battle in what may well turn out to be a long cultural war between wokeness and traditional values. Claudine Gay not only was criticized for her actions as Harvard President but for alleged instances of plagiarism on her scholarly work.

Neri Oxman (WSJ photo)

The Business Insider then accused Bill Ackman's wife, Neri Oxman, for plagiarism on her 2010 doctoral dissertation at MIT. Ms. Oxman apologized.

Bill Ackman, convinced that the source of the Business Insider report was someone(s) at MIT, vowed to develop AI tools to examine a broad swath of MIT dissertations and publications for plagiarism.

Circling back to the three-presidents testimony before Congress on December 5th, MIT President Kornbluth is the only one of the three who still holds office, Penn's Liz Magill having resigned on December 9th. It would be surprising if she lasts out the year.

After the break is the text of Bill Ackman's January 2nd tweet.


 

Presidential Material

He does look presidential

I'm entranced by the idea of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) becoming President just for the confusion that it would engender.

There may be no practical difference between "Whitehouse says" and "the White House says," but copy writers would have to guard against using phrases like "Speaking from the White House, Whitehouse..." or "Invited to the White House by Whitehouse..."

If he's going to get to the presidential mansion, Senator Whitehouse should avoid sillinesses like accusing a Supreme Court justice of "improper opining":

Mr. Whitehouse is famous for publicly examining Brett Kavanaugh’s high-school yearbook for subtle messages of, well, we never could figure it out. And now he says Justice Alito committed “improper opining on a legal issue that may come before the court” in his recent interview with this newspaper [the WSJ]...

Our favorite line in Mr. Whitehouse’s letter says that “at the end, Justice Alito is the beneficiary of his own improper opining.” In other words, how dare Justice Alito defend himself from unfair attacks by Mr. Whitehouse, whose real goal is to coerce the Justices into doing his political bidding.

Senator Whitehouse didn't just say it but wrote a letter to Chief Justice Roberts complaining about Justice Alito's "improper opining." The Chief Justice is now obliged to compose a letter in return, and I'd give a penny, or even two, for his thoughts.

"Be the House"

(NY Post image)

One common characteristic of getting older is that people become more conservative--politically, culturally, and financially. As life's expiration date approaches, this perspective makes sense.

Older people, including your humble blogger, are less willing to take chances because they have more to protect. If a risky bet turns out wrong, recovery--physical and financial--is difficult and sometimes impossible.

That's why Elon Musk is unique. At 51, his enterprises and his wealth are an order of magnitude bigger than they were ten years ago, yet he's still willing to bet the farm to fulfill his vision(s):

In the span of 24 hours this past week, Elon Musk made three very big bets with three very different companies, together showing his penchant to plow ahead despite sizable risks.

Between Wednesday and Thursday evenings, he stripped celebrities, journalists and other high-profile users of their free, legacy verification on Twitter, risking a VIP revolt on the social-media platform. He promised that the electric-car maker Tesla Inc. increase; green up pointing triangle would chase sales volume at the expense of profitability. And he launched SpaceX’s first of its kind giant space rocket, which exploded on the way to the heavens.

Making big bets doesn't mean that Elon Musk isn't aware of the risks:

“If the odds are probably in your favor, you should make as many decisions as possible within the bounds of what is executable,” Mr. Musk said a few years ago. “This is like being the house in Vegas. Probability is the most powerful force in the universe, which is why the house always wins. Be the house.”

Although he's one of the richest people in the world, amassing wealth was not the goal, just a means to get to his destination. Elon Musk's aspirations are grand indeed: interplanetary space travel, efficient autonomous transportation, and a platform for the free-wheeling exchange of ideas.

Along the way Elon Musk doesn't care how foolish he looks to others. Blowing up a rocketship to find out whether it functions (without hurting anybody) is a necessary step on the way to Mars, and crashing cars is the price for making millions of authomobiles self-driving.

Wealth often induces billionaires to become philanthropists and lift individuals out of poverty. Elon Musk's way of using his wealth, IMHO, will enrich humanity's future.

Small Town Mess

Kylie Clark (LinkedIn photo)

Two months ago we noted how the Los Gatos City Council censured planning commissioner Kylie Clark for writing to the State that "rich, white, anti-housing men” controlled housing policy in Los Gatos. The ACLU threatened to sue the town for violating Ms. Clark's free-speech rights, and the City Council removed the censure.

Los Gatos caved to the ACLU because its planning commissioner purportedly was speaking as a private citizen.

[Los Gatos Town Attorney Gabrielle] Whelan said the lawsuit would potentially have cost the town upwards of $400,000.

Since Clark identified herself as a planning commissioner in her email to the state but said she was speaking as a private citizen, she is protected from being disciplined by current case law, the ACLU argued.

To this non-attorney it seems disingenuous to claim that she was speaking as a private citizen on a subject (housing) that fell under her purview as a planning commissioner. Where does this stop? Whenever a politician makes a controversial statement, he or she could walk it back by claiming it was a personal opinion as a private citizen.

But there are further complexities. In real life Ms. Clark has a conflict of interest.

Councilmember Matthew Hudes voiced concerns about Clark’s role as assistant manager of advocacy and public policy at West Valley Community Services (WVCS) overlapping with her role on the planning commission. WVCS provides food, housing and support services to low-income and homeless people in South Bay communities including Los Gatos.

Paid advocacy for a social service organization would seem to color (in a manner of speaking) Ms. Clark's opinion.

But here's the best part:

Clark is in a relationship with Councilmember Rob Moore, who chairs the policy committee, and Hudes said it’s not appropriate for Moore to provide feedback.

Los Gatos, home to Netflix, is very wealthy, but it's still a small town of 33,000, and this is a small-town mess of its own making. Whether Los Gatos continues to chew on this problem or not should not make a difference to the rest of the Bay Area.

It Started with Racism, but Ending it Would be Racism

Cardi B (CBC photo)

The bottom story of last year: the decade-long cultural obsession with big butts was ending.

Since admiration of large backsides had racist origins, ending this trend should have been a good thing, but alas, dear reader, you are wrong:

After almost a decade of our cultural obsession with twerking, peach emojis and Brazilian butt lifts, 2022 apparently marked the end of the era of the big booty.

On TikTok, users speculated that Kim Kardashian had her butt implants removed (a procedure she never confirmed having in the first place). Cardi B recently shared that she had her own implants removed and cautioned others against getting butt injections. And the New York Post ran a headline that said "Bye-bye booty" and declared that heroin chic was back.

Some critics swiftly shot back, saying that women's bodies should not be reduced to trends. They also pointed out the inherent racism in declaring that a particular physical attribute that many women of colour have naturally is no longer desirable.

If men say that they like a certain physical attribute of women, they're being sexist or racist or both. If they say they don't like it, they're still being sexist and racist.

Guys, keep your traps shut. This advice is no guarantee you'll stay out of trouble, but it will help.

Muddled TV Dialogue: More Solutions

The sound customization menu (right) on our Sony Bravia

As we noted last month, television viewers who are not hearing-impaired are turning on closed-captioning:

But your TV is just one of the culprits. The rest of the problem lies within virtually every other step of the audio process, from a studio’s production choices to the device used to watch the content.

In addition to closed captioning and turning up the volume on all sound, newer TVs can amplify speech. On the Sony purchased this year I adjusted the "Voice zoom" from 0 to 4 (picture top).

Go to Settings > Display & Sound > Sound > Sound mode > Dialogue. On the company’s Bravia TVs, there is also Voice Zoom, which lets you adjust how much you would like the dialogue to stand out. Open Settings > Display & Sound > Sound > Sound customization > Voice Zoom.

The WSJ lists buying headphones, investing in speakers, and/or the aforementioned boosting dialogue feature as solutions to unclear speech. As in many aspects of life, tech caused the problem and is providing the solution.

The Audio Doesn't Equal the Video.

The hearing aids that I got in 2018 have been very helpful.

Every day speech with real people is comfortably decipherable--by the way, have you noticed that old people frequently mumble? that's a subject for another day--but for television I often still must turn on closed captioning. More people with normal hearing are also using the feature.

“If you have people talking or shouting during the adventure scenes, the explode-y sounds are way higher than the dialogue,” said Melanie Brooks, a 43-year-old professional musician in Boston. Catching some of the lines in her favorite fantasy and adventure TV series is hard without captions, she added.

People tend to blame their flat-screen TVs for bad sound. The tube TVs of decades past had front-facing speakers that sent audio toward you, while new, super-thin models have speakers that are behind the screen or point downward, bouncing sound away from you. But your TV is just one of the culprits.

The rest of the problem lies within virtually every other step of the audio process, from a studio’s production choices to the device used to watch the content, said Richard Nevens, senior director of audio-hardware product management at Avid Technology, which specializes in audio- and video-editing tools.

Movie sound technology has outstripped the capabilities of the speakers on home devices, including TV's.

It's a relief that I don't have to upgrade my hearing equipment.

Meanwhile, I'll be setting closed captioning to "on."

Seven Dirty Words -- In Retrospect Not So Restrictive

George Carlin (Reuters photo)

This week marks the 50th anniversary of George Carlin's “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," which your humble blogger won't delineate here but can be quickly found with an Internet search.

Knowing the culture of 1972, one can easily guess at a dozen that could be on the list---George Carlin's seven will be a subset--and all refer to sex or excretory functions whose utterance horrified polite society. You still shouldn't say any of them in church, but they are increasingly used in musical lyrics and entertainment.

The bluenose old ladies who once dictated the rules of language have been supplanted by the latter-day Red Guards pouring out of our colleges to police what can't be said (e.g., "all lives matter") and what one must say (e.g., "black lives matter") to avoid shunning.

Maybe Carlin’s gift to the world wasn’t identifying the hypocrisy of having words you can’t say on TV but pointing out that shutting down words or ideas or thoughts is destructive to a free society. He’d probably be aghast at the state of social-media censorship today. If the price of our freedom is that someone may take offense, Carlin surely would think that’s worth the cost. I’d agree.

Thanks to censorship and technology, the public airwaves have been greatly diminished. Car radio moved to SiriusXM and Spotify. Television moved to cable and satellite and Blu-ray. Now it is all streaming and anything goes. I still think youth need to be protected, but good luck with that. Eight-year-olds with smartphones can hear the forbidden words daily. I laugh at Netflix’s kid-magnet warnings: “Gore, Language, Smoking.” Even Disney isn’t as family-friendly as it used to be.

Carlin died in 2008, as cancel culture and campus safe spaces for the anxious were beginning to become widespread. Today, there is a long list of things you can’t say, including “all lives matter” and “chief” and “birth mother” and even “master bedroom.” Goodbye discussion and thought. Then add sports-team names and wrong pronouns on playgrounds and shoot, we miss you, George Carlin.

After seeing how the new Puritanism works, a world where George Carlin can't say seven dirty words doesn't seem as restrictive.

Applause Not Needed

(photo from NY Post)

Warren Buffett is the most successful investor in history. His knowledge of the stock market and financial analysis is unrivalled, but IMHO his wisdom concerning human nature and human behavior are equally important components of that success.

And it all stems from his empathy, i.e., the ability to put himself in another's shoes. The latter was on display when he said why he doesn't talk about politics in public, at least not any more. [bold added]

the CEO explained why he’s not speaking on politically charged topics — because doing so could affect Berkshire and the companies it invests in.

“I don't want to say anything that will get attributed basically to Berkshire, and have somebody else bear the consequences of what I talk about,” Buffett said.

“Why in the world do I want to hurt the people in that other room that do all kinds of things for Berkshire? Why do I want to hurt you? Because I say something that 20% of the country is going to instantly disagree with. And sometimes they will be so upset about us that they will try and…have campaigns against our companies.”

Michael Jordan expressed a similar thought 32 years ago. When he was urged to support the Democratic candidate in a Senate race, he said, "Republicans buy sneakers, too."

My mother asked to do a PSA for Harvey Gantt, and I said, 'Look, Mom, I'm not speaking out of pocket about someone that I don't know. But I will send a contribution to support him.' Which is what I did.

"I do commend Muhammad Ali for standing up for what he believed in. But I never thought of myself as an activist. I thought of myself as a basketball player.

"I wasn't a politician when I was playing my sport. I was focused on my craft. Was that selfish? Probably. But that was my energy. That's where my energy was."

They refrained from politics for different reasons: Michael Jordan didn't want to hurt his own brand, and Warren Buffett didn't want to hurt the people in Berkshire's businesses. Two other similarities: both men have shown enormous discipline throughout their lives, and neither craves the adulation of people who clap because they like their politics.

A Day for Reconsideration

Questions and answers (Chron photo)

During the previous Administration Vice President Mike Pence provided enough reassurance to Democrats that they moved to impeach Donald Trump on two different occasions.

Now that Mr. Pence is unencumbered by the duties of office, he is free to speak his mind. His speech at Stanford yesterday - "How to Save America From the Woke Left”--was sold out.

Pence condemned what he called “cancel culture” in the Biden administration, criticized critical race theory in public education and applauded parents who are “starting to take our schools back, even here in California.”

....“This week in San Francisco, parents recalled three woke school board members who cared more about renaming schools than reopening,” Pence said to whoops and applause. “Those results, I gotta tell ya — those results are sending shock waves across the country. Democrats who supported cancel culture and school closures are starting to wake up. The truth is, many on the woke left have been spending years trying to agitate for a culture war. It looks like they might just get one. And they’re gonna lose.”

The surprise was not in the content of the speech but in Stanford's refusal to allow the assembly to be disrupted by protestors. The overwhelming majority of listeners, very few of whom were registered Republicans, gave Mr. Pence a respectful hearing.

If Stanford continues to stand up for freedom of speech, especially for people who do not parrot the Progressive narrative, I might have to reconsider my refusal to contribute to any more of its fundraisers.

Answering the Trap Questions

Out: build a better (mouse)trap. In: avoid
trap questions. (Korn Ferry photo)

Leaders of major companies are more highly compensated than ever. To be fair, their jobs are also more complicated than ever.

They have to answer to a multitude of constituencies ("stakeholders"), some of whom are concerned with matters other than revenues and profits. The slightest verbal miscues, even not saying something, can put a CEO's job at risk.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is a master at answering the "trap question." Here's an example of one from last month's Stanford economics conference:

"Let’s talk a little bit more about equity. Before the pandemic, the world was facing big challenges: climate change, structural racism, economic insecurity, wealth inequality and more....What is the responsibility of the corporations, particularly the underlying connection to racial justice in the U.S. and elsewhere?”

Before reading Mr. Nadella's answer, how would you respond, dear reader? All the problems on the list are intractable, beyond the capacity of even mighty Microsoft to solve. Also, "responsibility" is a trap word: if he says Microsoft is responsible, it can never succeed; if it is not responsible, he will sound callous.

Here is Mr. Nadella's answer, as described by WSJ writer Andy Kessler:

Mr. Nadella isn’t CEO of a trillion-dollar company for nothing. Coolly and calmly, he explained that “the social purpose of a company is to find profitable solutions to the challenges of people and planet,” crediting Oxford economist Colin Mayer for the definition. “Driving broad economic growth is perhaps the biggest thing that a company can do,” Mr. Nadella added. “In order to have the pie distributed evenly, the pie should first grow.”

As Andy Kessler explains:

finding “profitable solutions” is—shh, don’t give it away—basically the same as Milton Friedman’s “the social responsibility of business is to increase profits,” except with the crowd-pleasing word “planet” tacked on.

IMHO, public figures aren't liars when they say they are against climate change, racism, etc. However, they couldn't have gotten to where they are without a single-minded dedication to their business, their personal skills in sports or entertainment, or whatever else got them to the top of the heap.

Besides obeying the law, all other considerations are nice but secondary, and too many distractions could jeopardize their primary mission. Invest in social-media consultants, practice using words like "systemic racism", "sustainability", "equity", and others that placate the woke, and carry on.

The Truth, If We Are Allowed to Speak It, Will Set Us Free

Wittgenstein (Brittanica)

Having only taken a couple of 1970's-era Philosophy courses--they stopped with Wittgenstein (1889-1951)--I never read in college any of the post-modernist writers that have dominated the discourse in modern Philosophy departments.

Dabbling occasionally in the literature, I think I get the foundation of post-modernism, aka relativism: because we all are unique in terms of our genetic, family, religious, cultural, and even societal backgrounds and characteristics, there is no such thing as "objective" truth; even if there were, no one could know it because of our subjective biases. More generally, one culture is no better or worse than another.

One would think that the predominance of relativism would lead to greater tolerance in the academy--you do your thing, and I'll do mine because we don't know who's right--but instead we see intolerance of people who hold different views. There are now widespread efforts to banish them not only from small study and work groups but entire institutions.

Psychiatrist Norman Doidge, in his foreword to 12 Rules for Life, points out the inherent contradiction between the there-are-no-rules philosophy that was used to tear down the values upon which Western civilization was based, and the strict set of behavioral rules and beliefs that have arisen in its place.

It's a longish read for a blog post, but worth the time.

The hunger among many younger people for rules, or at least guidelines, is greater today for good reason. In the West at least, millennials are living through a unique historical situation. They are, I believe, the first generation to have been so thoroughly taught two seemingly contradictory ideas about morality, simultaneously—at their schools, colleges and universities, by many in my own generation. This contradiction has left them at times disoriented and uncertain, without guidance and, more tragically, deprived of riches they don’t even know exist.

The first idea or teaching is that morality is relative, at best a personal “value judgment.” Relative means that there is no absolute right or wrong in anything; instead, morality and the rules associated with it are just a matter of personal opinion or happenstance, “relative to” or “related to” a particular framework, such as one’s ethnicity, one’s upbringing, or the culture or historical moment one is born into. It’s nothing but an accident of birth.

According to this argument (now a creed), history teaches that religions, tribes, nations and ethnic groups tend to disagree about fundamental matters, and always have. Today, the postmodernist left makes the additional claim that one group’s morality is nothing but its attempt to exercise power over another group. So, the decent thing to do—once it becomes apparent how arbitrary your, and your society’s, “moral values” are—is to show tolerance for people who think differently, and who come from different (diverse) backgrounds. That emphasis on tolerance is so paramount that for many people one of the worst character flaws a person can have is to be “judgmental.”* And, since we don’t know right from wrong, or what is good, just about the most inappropriate thing an adult can do is give a young person advice about how to live.

And so a generation has been raised untutored in what was once called, aptly, “practical wisdom,” which guided previous generations. Millennials, often told they have received the finest education available anywhere, have actually suffered a form of serious intellectual and moral neglect. The relativists of my generation and Jordan’s, many of whom became their professors, chose to devalue thousands of years of human knowledge about how to acquire virtue, dismissing it as passé, “not relevant” or even “oppressive.” They were so successful at it that the very word “virtue” sounds out of date, and someone using it appears anachronistically moralistic and self-righteous.

The study of virtue is not quite the same as the study of morals (right and wrong, good and evil). Aristotle defined the virtues simply as the ways of behaving that are most conducive to happiness in life. Vice was defined as the ways of behaving least conducive to “happiness. He observed that the virtues always aim for balance and avoid the extremes of the vices. Aristotle studied the virtues and the vices in his Nicomachean Ethics. It was a book based on experience and observation, not conjecture, about the kind of happiness that was possible for human beings. Cultivating judgment about the difference between virtue and vice is the beginning of wisdom, something that can never be out of date.

By contrast, our modern relativism begins by asserting that making judgments about how to live is impossible, because there is no real good, and no true virtue (as these too are relative). Thus relativism’s closest approximation to “virtue” is “tolerance.” Only tolerance will provide social cohesion between different groups, and save us from harming each other. On Facebook and other forms of social media, therefore, you signal your so-called virtue, telling everyone how tolerant, open and compassionate you are, and wait for likes to accumulate. (Leave aside that telling people you’re virtuous isn’t a virtue, it’s self-promotion. Virtue signalling is not virtue. Virtue signalling is, quite possibly, our commonest vice.)

Intolerance of others’ views (no matter how ignorant or incoherent they may be) is not simply wrong; in a world where there is no right or wrong, it is worse: it is a sign you are embarrassingly unsophisticated or, possibly, dangerous. But it turns out that many people cannot tolerate the vacuum—the chaos—which is inherent in life, but made worse by this moral relativism; they cannot live without a moral compass, without an ideal at which to aim in their lives. (For relativists, ideals are values too, and like all values, they are merely “relative” and hardly worth sacrificing for.) So, right alongside relativism, we find the spread of nihilism and despair, and also the opposite of moral relativism: the blind certainty offered by ideologies that claim to have an answer for everything.

And so we arrive at the second teaching that millennials have been bombarded with. They sign up for a humanities course, to study the greatest books ever written. But they’re not assigned the books; instead they are given ideological attacks on them, based on some appalling simplification. Where the relativist is filled with uncertainty, the ideologue is the very opposite. He or she is hyper-judgmental and censorious, always knows what’s wrong about others, and what to do about it. Sometimes it seems the only people willing to give advice in a relativistic society are those with the least to offer.

Modern moral relativism has many sources. As we in the West learned more history, we understood that different epochs had different moral codes. As we travelled the seas and explored the globe, we learned of far-flung tribes on different continents whose different moral codes made sense relative to, or within the framework of, their societies. Science played a role, too, by attacking the religious view of the world, and thus undermining the religious grounds for ethics and rules. Materialist social science implied that we could divide the world into facts (which all could observe, and were objective and “real”) and values (which were subjective and personal). Then we could first agree on the facts, and, maybe, one day, develop a scientific code of ethics (which has yet to arrive). Moreover, by implying that values had a lesser reality than facts, science contributed in yet another way to moral relativism, for it treated “value” as secondary. (But the idea that we can easily separate facts and values was and remains naive; to some extent, one’s values determine what one will pay attention to, and what will count as a fact.)

The idea that different societies had different rules and morals was known to the ancient world too, and it is interesting to compare its response to this realization with the modern response (relativism, nihilism and ideology). When the ancient Greeks sailed to India and elsewhere, they too discovered that rules, morals and customs differed from place to place, and saw that the explanation for what was right and wrong was often rooted in some ancestral authority. The Greek response was not despair, but a new invention: philosophy.

Socrates, reacting to the uncertainty bred by awareness of these conflicting moral codes, decided that instead of becoming a nihilist, a relativist or an ideologue, he would devote his life to the search for wisdom that could reason about these differences, i.e., he helped invent philosophy. He spent his life asking perplexing, foundational questions, such as “What is virtue?” and “How can one live the good life?” and “What is justice?” and he looked at different approaches, asking which seemed most coherent and most in accord with human nature. These are the kinds of questions that I believe animate this book.

For the ancients, the discovery that different people have different ideas about how, practically, to live, did not paralyze them; it deepened their understanding of humanity and led to some of the most satisfying conversations human beings have ever had, about how life might be lived.

Likewise, Aristotle. Instead of despairing about these differences in moral codes, Aristotle argued that though specific rules, laws and customs differed from place to place, what does not differ is that in all places human beings, by their nature, have a proclivity to make rules, laws and customs. To put this in modern terms, it seems that all human beings are, by some kind of biological endowment, so ineradicably concerned with morality that we create a structure of laws and rules wherever we are. The idea that human life can be free of moral concerns is a fantasy.

We are rule generators. And given that we are moral animals, what must be the effect of our simplistic modern relativism upon us? It means we are hobbling ourselves by pretending to be something we are not. It is a mask, but a strange one, for it mostly deceives the one who wears it. Scccccratccch the most clever postmodern-relativist professor’s Mercedes with a key, and you will see how fast the mask of relativism (with its pretense that there can be neither right nor wrong) and the cloak of radical tolerance come off.

In case it's not clear, I don't like the atmosphere of fear that has been created. People are self-censoring out of concern that the mob will descend upon them next, and that they'll lose their jobs or worse.

The Internet, far from liberating humankind, has become an instrument of suppression.

Netflix' Holidate

It's the plot of at least a half-dozen Hallmark Christmas movies:

Fed up with being single on holidays, two strangers agree to be each other’s platonic plus-ones all year long, only to catch real feelings along the way.

The movie even has Hallmark regulars Frances Fisher and Kristin Chenoweth acting in the roles of secondary characters.

So why is Holidate on Netflix? The lead actress' monologue in the first minute gives the viewer a clue.

Nothing like smoking a cigarette and an f-bomb to tell us we're not in Hallmark any more

The two leads are attractive, the humor is laced with sexual and scatological references, and the swearing is pervasive with even child characters indulging. Nevertheless, at the center of its beating heart is a sweet Hallmark movie with the ending telegraphed in the first five minutes. Holidate has got some laughs and is a pleasant enough way to spend the afternoon, but not with the kids around.

Comforting Words to the Speaker, Not the Listener

George McCalman (Chron photo)

For years San Francisco artist George McCalman has heard words of sympathy from well-meaning white friends when a black person's death is in the news.

He's sick of the words that seem to comfort them more than they do him:[bold added]

This summer brought a reverberating pattern of conversations and emails and texts from friends, collaborators and acquaintances, revealing a prescribed and self-accepted way of communicating. A form letter of sameness of how white people in America discuss race, with us and themselves...

In staring at my mourning, I began to collect the phrases that had triggered me the most — variations on the same theme of a lack of accountability, a blithe uselessness and an emotional apathy. They communicated a silent expectation that the burden was mine to carry, that it was for me to orient and settle the speaker. My role was victim and teacher all at once. I was the antagonist, and they were the protagonist in their own narrative. “Race” was being done to them. This was the language of white America that I knew. Far away and up close. It sucked the air out of our exchanges. And I wanted to breathe...

In a flash of Black anger, I wanted to act. My soul and sanity demanded it. I decided I was going to paint the phrases. Art as therapy. I wanted to create billboards as three-dimensional totems and reflect them as far away as possible. I wanted to return them energetically to their origins. I wanted to take these seemingly benign words and show the garish truth. Reveal the context of their meaning, back to its source. Away from me.

Some of the phrases that set him off, and his explanation why:

“Here If You Ever Want To Talk” (Unsolicited kinship with no context.)

“For Your Selfcare” (Unsolicited money being offered to pacify the speaker.)

“I’m Ashamed Of My Complicity” (Said by too many white women everywhere.)

“I’m Just Here To Listen” (For what, exactly?)

George McCalman responds creatively and honestly to his pain. I doubt his politics agree much with mine, but I'll bet we foresee a familiar outcome to this recent turmoil. As I wrote three months ago:

I am not going to dismiss or deride the feelings of those who are upset, but this geezer has seen such emotion many times before. Programs will be started, most of which will be ineffectual.

All this, too, shall pass.