Elizabeth Kiss, Warden and CEO of the Rhodes Trust, has a rebuttal about complaints that the Rhodes scholarships have gone down in quality recently.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/all-rhodes-scholarships-are-based-on-merit-11620849970?mod=opinion_major_pos16

If you boil it down to remove all the filler she says that the selection criteria changes every year and that character is always a significant part of the selection.

I.e. they've always played loose with the award and Ms 1619 who published blatantly false history is the type of character they like.

• Annie Coulter notes this morning that Biden has started building the wall soon sooner than Trump did.

• French answers Vance:

David French
@DavidAFrench· May 11

Trump left us with the worst wave of death in a century, the worst crime increase in years, the first net job loss in generations, and an insurrection attempt based on an avalanche of lies told across all forms of media. Twitter was one of his least important problems.

J.D. Vance @JDVance1· May 11


We have a border crisis, inflation, and gas shortages in Florida, but what's really important is that the president is nice on Twitter.

Turns out Colonial paid 'em off.

You're in a chair, right? Close eyes, deep breath. Take a moment to consider what this means for your future.

Are we not entertained? I love this. ~ Crid at May 13, 2021 6:19 AM

Not really. This whole "blame Trump" thing has become simplistic and rapidly tiresome.

Presidential politics is, by its nature, a "prepare three envelopes" scenario. The Biden Administration and its supporters are rapidly burning through the first envelope.

That the Biden Administration is, in just a few short months, furtively building the same "Trump's Wall" it earlier condemned should tell you how much of a mess it was handed and how much of a hash the administration itself has made of that situation.

Joe Biden is not the cure for the ills of the Trump administration. In electing "Sleepy Joe" we've shot off our foot to cure a hangnail.

Turns out Colonial paid 'em off. ~ Crid at May 13, 2021 8:14 AM

That's not good. If you give a mouse a cookie.... Even if that first mouse does not demand a glass of milk, the next mouse certainly will.

How much more will we pay for gasoline because hackers are now encouraged to hold pipelines for ransom? Mafia tactics writ digital - nice little business you got here; be a shame if anything happened to it.

Hackers are after anything and everything they can get access to. And thanks to the internet those hackers can be anywhere in the world. Which is why I've been very grumpy with Xilinx. Their decades long drive to connect every FPGA to the internet so you can reburn it from anywhere at anytime with all the standard levels of security (user name:user password:password YAY!) are behind a lot of this.

But all that said Colonial paying them off isn't that big a deal. Colonial isn't a government agency. Millions of dollars in ransom provides a strong business case for disconnecting from the general internet and otherwise figuring out alternate solutions.

The bigger issue is why one pipeline services such a large percentage of the nation. Why are there no alternate paths? What happens when Colonial is run by inbred nepotism and completely fucks up their business? Because that sort of stuff happens all the time. Businesses collapse for a reason, and not infrequently. The answer to that once again is bad government policy.

What happens when Colonial is run by inbred nepotism and completely fucks up their business?

Or as a reward for political loyalty, which amounts to about the same thing.

> be a shame if anything happened

Indeed, Conan— And so far as we know, every supply chain in our lives is as weakly defended.


There's a bitcoin node running in the basement. For the record, it's just a node, with no private financial data whatsover: it would never be used for transactions. All my crypto is in the coldest of cold storage, and perfectly safe.

The laptop is old and kinda shitty… you might pay $140 for it, if you felt my eyes looked sad and needy during the sales pitch. It has a 1TB flash drive attached, which cost (almost) one HUNDRED dollars!… As an instrument of computing candlepower, schoolchildren would laugh at it. It's essentially a piece of pawn-shop trash. No thief would bother.


And it's the most reassuring expression of data / financial security in my life, even though my big money is in typical investments. It's set to reboot every other morning at 05:58:10 (just for the Hell of it), and to show the blockchain traffic on a crawling line chart.

Nothing's as comforting as that little cardiograph of data. Those pulses prove that there are sane people on this planet, and not just in America. We communicate in a profoundly intimate way, even though we don't trust each other at all. (To Bitcoiners, Descarte's Great Deceiver was a subway pickpocket, a teenage punk in sweatpants making his first grab.)

Yet every ten minutes, a new data block is published, and we agree about Bitcoin, all of us.

That's a lot more clarity than you'll ever take from the Federal Reserve, or from the FBI's investigation of Colonial's control systems.

ORD, if I asked you to listen to a reeeely long podcast, would you do it?

Maybe I should just cue up the part from Srinivasan about the difference between entrepreneurial and inherited legitimacy.

(He agrees with you, and has a lot of insights about that problem.)

> This whole "blame Trump" thing

I believe public servants deserve to be judged* for every hour of their past, present and future. YMMV

*Harshly

ORD, if I asked you to listen to a reeeely long podcast, would you do it?

Shoot me the link!

Email soon

A rare female "football fish" (deep-sea anglerfish) washed up in California. That led to this fun slideshow of 59 weird fish (you only had to click once, thankfully):

https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/crazy-looking-fish-from-deep-sea/

Only one or two look familiar. I think one of the smaller ones is a dogfish.

I believe public servants deserve to be judged [harshly] for every hour of their past, present and future. YMMV ~ Crid at May 13, 2021 10:24 AM

No variance. I agree. However, that judgement should be reasoned judgement, not wild accusations on social media by people whose understandings of politics and economics could fit on the side panel of a cereal box and still leave room for the ingredients.

Every president says the problems he encounters are from the previous administration's incompetence. And, in some cases, they're right. Sometimes not.

In some cases, it's because the proposed policies runs counter to the prior administration's enacted policies -- e.g., tax cuts vs. spending programs -- and so a period of adjustment is necessary. Blaming the prior administration soothes a base impatient for immediate results.

In other cases, it's because the new administration has not yet gotten traction on an issue and needs a scapegoat to blame for its inaction or mis-steps.

In some cases, it's because the successor administration is continuing the prior administration's policies and needs to keep anyone from noticing.

In other cases, it's because a figure from the prior administration has become a favorite punching bag for political partisans and is blamed as a matter of knee-jerk recourse, and not any intelligent reflection on policies.

GW Bush, Obama, and Trump have all taken an outsized amount of blame for their successors' initial or ongoing issues, not only by their successors, but from a vocal segment of the successors' parties.

While offering a calm to Trump's wildly chaotic presidency, it seems likely that Biden will not be remembered as a particularly competent president. What's more, Harris will probably be worse.

====================

ORD, if I asked you to listen to a reeeely long podcast, would you do it? ~ Crid at May 13, 2021 10:16 AM

I'll listen as long as it holds my interest. I recently watched a fairly long video of Milton Friedman discussing inflation in a 1980 PBS segment of "Free to Choose." Dry subject, economics. Dry delivery, too. Nonetheless, the segment provided an interesting background and panel discussions that somehow seem like they have renewed relevance today.

Here's a problem. Stretch it out to the 25 year or max view.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m0

> Dry subject, economics.

Alright… Yes, the keyboard is kinda hinkey. And the laptop got rebuilt after I spilled ice water into it on an airliner in 2016. (Drenched the guy in the middle seat, too. Still feel bad about it.)

And that other USB port is sorta sketchy.

But the screen is gorgeous! Laptops don't grow on trees, Conan. So $125 is as low as I can go if you want that fantastic 2010-era machine. Economics.

Okay, $97.50. Call the office and ask for Shannon.

"Here's a problem. Stretch it out to the 25 year or max view." ~IRA

SHH, IRA! There is no inflation. None. Don't look behind the curtain!

Lenona, a lot of the chubby-looking ones ('Sad,' 'Gollum,' etc.) are just deep-sea fish that have been brought to the surface, so they look swollen and weird without the usual ten- or twenty-atmospheres of pressure on their bodies. You'd look even worse, and scary-skinny, if you visited their coffeeshops. I used to see parrot fish like 'Washed-up' all the time when diving in coral reefs. They knock the coral off with those teeth… and then shit new, pristine white sand over sport divers in bombing runs.

There's another choice that's mine, and I keep it in my pants.

Mario Cuomo's explanation of how his sexual harassment isn't really harassment is Clinton-level amazeballs.

The guy is shoveling as fast as he can.

Balaji Srinivasan has been a guest on a lot of good (and very long) podcasts. I like him enough that it's worthwhile to load them into audio software to cut out comments and questions from gasbag hosts, for efficient listening while driving. You will probably not like him that much, but here are couple clips from a February chat.

• Start at 20min 30sec to hear about the international attractions of crypto, specifically BTC. Try to listen for five minutes or so: There are good reasons for people hate American money. (Also, the western world is about about to suffer a punishing pulse of inflation: This is how governments extract the value from your savings, sitting quietly in the bank, to spend on whatever they want… Whereas the price of Bitcoin may go up or down, but Jerome Powell has nothing to say about it.)

• Start at 33min 40sec to hear about the authority of founders (competence) versus the authority of inheritors ('legitimacy'). That distinction plays out in some very interesting ways. Try to hang in for at least 12 minutes.

He's going to write a book soon, but the ideas come so quickly from this guy, it's hard to imagine he'll have time to write it.

Sowell brings you the truth.

It is something that is about to happen to YOU.

"Inflation is a quiet but effective way for the government to transfer resources from the people to itself, without raising taxes." ~ Thomas Sowell (from a link by Crid at May 13, 2021 8:19 PM)

Milton Friedman brought up the very same point in his "Free to Choose" PBS broadcast I mentioned earlier. Which is not surprising, since Friedman was Sowell's professor and mentor at the University of Chicago.

Thanks for link.

Start at 33min 40sec to hear about the authority of founders (competence) versus the authority of inheritors ('legitimacy'). That distinction plays out in some very interesting ways. ~ Crid at May 13, 2021 6:40 PM

Interesting.

That made me think especially of Whitmer, a woman of no achievement or creation (she's spent her life in education and law), who sent out all those repellent, scolding tweets to her electorate as deadly Covid was blossoming. It was so obvious in that hour that she'd never actually done anything with her life: With her back to the wall, her only tools for leadership were half-forgotten schoolyard taunts in the style of the popular girl from Plainjane Elementary back in Lansing.

See also, yesterday's dickless clucking from the President. It doesn't matter that his staff composed and sent that tweet: It's got his name on it because they're faithful to his spirit, and similar in their inexperience of leadership.

Here's an unrelated but fun tweet from Balaji this AM: See "here is" etc.

And the weirdest thing about this horrible modern propensity for impractical, incompetent leadership is that it summons the same impulse for many voters raised in American liberty and the servile automatons of China: Golly, we should give our 'leaders' more power, so they can tell other people how to live without hearing arguments in response.

…Because you see, people just don't love Don or Joe or Xi as much as they should!

It would be great if you guys listened to a full 25 minutes after the start of the second clip: Srinivasan talks about what Bitcoin means to people in other countries who don't trust either the American courts or the Chinese courts to handle foreign financial matters fairly.