Of late, Mr. Trump’s defense lawyer, John Lauro, has been making rounds of the TV News shows. All with a purpose, of course. Turns out that Mr. Lauro wants to defend Mr. Trump not against the charges of the recent indictment accusing Mr. Trump of conspiring to subvert American democracy but against other, different things […]
According to this WaPo article, the average physician in the US earns $350K/yr. I didn’t click through to the actual data, but from the first table, I’m guessing that “average” means median, not mean. And physician income isn’t a Gaussian distribution—there’s a long right-hand tail for the specialties. Why is this? It looks to me […]
How long until the historically tight jobs market reverts to trend? – by New Deal democrat There are some very unusual cross-currents going on in the housing sector, revealed by yesterday’s existing home sales report. But it will take some time-intensive organization to present it to you, so I’m saving it for (hopefully) Monday. In the […]
Per the Heritage Foundation (Heritage), each year, American civilians use firearms defensively between 500,000 and 3 million times. Which is saying that they have been exercising their relatively newly lawful Second Amendment Right to bear arms for the purpose of self-defense a lot. Further research might indicate that the number is well below 700,000 (might […]
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, the notional Democratic presidential candidate, made himself even more foolish than he already was recently by speculating that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was engineered to protect people of Chinese and Jewish descent. Setting aside the fact that there is zero evidence that the virus was engineered and most evidence points to an […]
In humans, the traits of high intelligence and good judgment are unlinked. There are many such examples; viz: • Kary Mullis, who won for co-inventing the technique behind PCR testing, went on to deny that HIV causes AIDS, helping to sway South African president Thabo Mbeki into rejecting antiretroviral therapy, costing hundreds of thousands of […]
The US Constitution was their best effort to answer the question, “How should it be?” Then, they were seeking a new and better way of governance. Now, some two-hundred-forty years later, a latter-day majority of Justices on the US Supreme Court, the one charged with interpreting the Constitution, are saying, “This is how it should […]
An important reason to read history is to gain a perspective on current events. If you watch exclusively mainstream media television, particularly Fox News, you might be forgiven for the belief that things in this country are the worst they have ever been in history. “1877: America’s Year of Living Violently” by Michael Bellisiles is […]
“From his very first term, Bush shocked many by reaching who had either been convicted or pleaded guilty to crimes during the Reagan and Bush administrations’ and others who many felt should have been indicted.“ “You have a very long list of people and what emerged through the two terms was that people who seemed […]
The death of Daniel Ellsberg on Friday reminded me of his contribution to economics and his influence on my own thinking. In 1987, I was at Cornell, beginning an abortive PhD candidacy. In one of my courses there was an assigned reading on decision theory by Leonard Savage. One of the footnotes referred to an […]