Education: Things I Have No Time to Teach This Fall, But That I Would Like to—Note to Self https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/08/things-i-have-no-time-to-teach-this-fall-but-that-i-would-like-tonote-to-self.html: "Data Science" & "Thinking Like an Economist": The Modern Chancery Hand?: Educational Technologies at Berkeley (2017): (More than) A Few Words About Computer Literacy in the 21st Century: Lecture: How to Think Like an Economist…
Fascism: Briefly Noted for 2020-08-21 https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/08/briefly-noted-for-2020-08-21.html: ‘I do confess that I am flummoxed by self-identified positively-valenced “white supremacy” as a thing. My WASPy view was always that America was an America of ethnicities underpinned by the dominant myth-message: “people coming from elsewhere to build a utopia in which we all could live better lives”. This mosaic worked, with cultural influences flowing every which way, with the ideas and cultural orientations of WASPy Massachusetts Puritans, Virginia libertarians, and Kentucky pioneers serving as the first layer of the cultural matrix. The exchange in the 2006 movie The Good Shepherd…
Fascism: Loomis; American Fascism: þis Is þe Real Thing—Noted https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/08/loomis-american-fascism-%C3%BEis-is-%C3%BEe-real-thingnoted.html: ‘I agree with Erik here. The Trump administration isn't "creeping fascism" any more. This is the real thing. Their plan is to have Breitbart, Fox, Sinclair, & QAnon come out hard Wednesday after the election saying "nobody can really tell who won", and then see what happens on the streets: Erik Loomis: American Fascism https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/08/american-fascism-3: ‘Anyone who sees this as bluster and doesn’t take it seriously are equivalent to those who didn’t really take Hitler or Mussolini seriously…
Journamalism: What Does Hanging wiþ þhe New York Times Staff Do to People, Anyway?—Highlighted https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/08/still-mulling-this-over-the-very-wise-very-insightful-and-usually-highly-reliable-michelle-goldberg-makes-i-think-a-sign.html: ‘Still mulling this over... The insightful and usually highly reliable Michelle Goldberg makes, I think, a big mistake here. & something bad does seem to happen often to many people when they start hanging around the New York Times newsroom. They lose their moral compass, and some (not Goldberg) forget that they are supposed to work for their readers and not for their insider sources and their bosses... Ok, that ends the throad-clearing: Here Goldberg half-defends Bennet and Sulzburger's decision to publish Senator Cotton's call for massive violence against demonstrating American citizens by the security services—even William F. Buckley would not go quite so far half a century ago, when all he was willing to say was that white supremacists in the south had the right to defend white supremacy against protesters "by any means necessary"…
Politics: 538: Minnesota as þe Most Likely Battleground—Noted https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/08/538-minnesota-as-%C3%BEe-most-likely-battlegroundnoted.html: ‘Minnesota as the most likely tipping-point state. Democratic edge (in order): Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire, Michigan. Republican edge (in order): Florida, Arizona, Nebraska (2), North Carolina, Ohio: 538: 2020 Election Forecast https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/…
Crisis of the Republic: All Hands on Deck Time—Note to Self https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/08/all-hands-on-deck-timenote-to-self.html: ‘Want to insult a man in America today, call him a woman—as, for example, the New York Times allows and encourages Maureen Dowd to do, albeit only for Democratic and not for Republican male politicians, who somehow seem to always be Manly Men. Want to insult a woman in America today, and you can follow Dowd and call her a man, but it is more effective to call her a whore. It's time for all hands on deck: "hell among the yearlings and the Charge of the Light Brigade and Saturday night in the back room of Casey's saloon rolled into one". It is time for Sadie Burke and Hugh Miller. And we haven't even gotten to the mass vote suppression and miscount part or the potential Rubicon moment part of this election…
Many, Many Baskets of Deplorables: The Trump Movement Is Made Up of Grifters, Ghouls, & Their Victims https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/08/deplorably-the-trump-movement-is-made-up-of-grifters-ghouls-their-victims.html: ‘Deplorably, a large number of easily-grifted morons thought Trump was their friend—or at least that the people lower down in the Trump base were their prey to be scammed. Deplorably, one of the easily-grifted morons in the middle was former Godfather's Pizza executive and Republican politician Herman Cain... on June 20... boasting that he was having a "fantastic time" at Donald Trump's massless, non-social distancing Tulsa rally... on June 24... [he] wrote, with respect to the public-health emergency measures of March and April: 'Never again. We now have the evidence it didn't help at all...' July 1... 'Masks will not be mandatory for the [Mt. Rushmore] event, which will be attended by President Trump. PEOPLE ARE FED UP!'.... On July 30, 2020, life support measures were discontinued, and Herman Cain died.... After his hospitalization, Herman Cain's twitter account was run by a rather cynical gang of ghouls…
Livelogging the Fall of the Roman Republic: Heavy But Inconclusive Skirmishing Between the Military Camps at Ilerda https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/08/heavy-but-inconclusive-skirmishing-between-the-military-camps-at-ilerda-livelogging-the-fall-of-the-roman-republic.html: ‘A strongly unconventional high politician knows that his adversaries will try and convict him of crimes after he lays down his military command, so he lets the dice fly. His first probing military moves demonstrate his position is very strong. From a central position in control of the heart of the empire, he moves first to deal with the Pompeian forces in Spain to his west. He has his men build a fortified camp close enough to the Pompeian base that the soldiers will inevitably start to fraternize: Gaius Julius Caesar: 'HBetween the town of Ilerda and the neighbouring hill where Petreius and Afranius had their camp there was a level space about five hundred yards wide and almost in the middle of this there was a small hillock…
Coronavirus: My Personal Guess as of 2020-07-31 https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/08/coronavirus-my-personal-guess-as-of-2020-07-31.html: My guess is that we are now running at 1.5 million new case a week up from a mid-June low of 650000 cases a week, which is itself down from our late-March infection peak of 2.7 million cases per week. We seem to be stuck: when cases fall, social distancing is relaxed; when cases rise, people get scared and hunker down. The prospect appears to be for depression—national income 10 to 15 percent below potential—and for 6 million infections and 40000 deaths a month until something changes, with any form of herd immunity years away at this pace of infections. But I may well be very wrong, and have missed something very important here: Coronavirus in the U.S.: My Guesses as to Where We Are: https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/07/coronavirus-in-the-us-my-guesses-as-to-where-we-are.html: As of 2020-07-30: New weekly deaths: 7800…. New weekly inferred cases: 1478400…. Weekly R: 0.97…. Past three weeks’ R: 1.08…
Liveblogging the Fall of the Roman Republic: Reflecting on the First Three Months of -49 https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/07/reflecting-on-the-first-three-months-of-49-liveblogging-the-fall-of-the-roman-republic.html: ‘The key question for the first three months of the year -49 is: what did the factions anticipate would happen in that year? The Optimates seemed to think that they had Caesar cornered: Either he surrendered... and then submitted to trial... or he... was quickly crushed.... Cicero appears to have believed that either the Senate surrendered to Ceesar and let him... put Cataline’s conspiracy into action but legally... and then ruled With the support of his electoral coalition of mountebank ex-debtors and ex-veterans to whom he had given land; or... Pompey... crushed Cesar militarily... follow[ed] up with proscriptions and executions after which he would rule as a second Sulla. What is not at all clear to me is what Pompey thought would happen.... My guess, reading between the lines of Plutarch, is that Pompey found himself allied with the Senate in January-February of -49, but not in command of anything—as shown by Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus’s behavior at Corfinium, attempting to trap Pompey into fighting alongside him in central Italy. And so he retreated to Greece, where he was in undisputed command…
Coronavirus: In the U.S.: My Guesses as to Where We Are https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/07/coronavirus-in-the-us-my-guesses-as-to-where-we-are.html: We cannot know where we are going until we know where we have been and where we now are. IMHO, the public health community has not done a good job on setting out even a semi-consensus guess as to where we have been and currently are. The "deaths" graphs lag the current situation by a month. The "cases" graphs are hopelessly distorted by testing inadequacy. Here, for what it is worth, are my guesses as to where we are right now and where we have been, nationwide. Of course, nationwide estimates are also of limited use…
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Responding to Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/07/alexandria-ocasio-corteznoted.html...
Liveblogging the Fall of the Roman Republic: The Optimate Faction Arms for War, & Illegally Usurps Provincial Imperium: Liveblogging the Fall of the Roman Republic https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/07/the-optimate-faction-arms-for-war-illegally-usurps-provincial-imperium-liveblogging-the-fall-of-the-roman-republic.html: ‘A strongly unconventional high politician faces the expiration of his term of office. He knows that, because of his actions in office, he has enemies. He knows that his adversaries will try and convict him of crimes after he lays down his power... Caesar narrates: Whatever norms he may or may not have broken during his consulate—in order to wrest land from the hands of corrupt plutocrats and grant it to the deserving—he says, the Optimate faction does much worse. In the first seven days of the year of the consulate of Lucius Cornelius Lentulus Crus and Gaius Claudius Marcellus Maior, the Optimate faction goes beyond norm-breaking into outright illegality. And to that they add impiety. They illegaly seize power, as they grant themselves proconsular and propraetorial imperium over the provinces, without the constitutionally-required popular confirmation of imperium. They impiously violate the separation of church and state by seizing temple funds for their own use. They thus incur the wrath of the gods. And they incur the enmity of all who believe in constitutional balance, as opposed to armed plutocratic dictatorship…
Coronavirus: Coronavirus in the U.S.: My Guesses as to Where We Are https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/07/coronavirus-in-the-us-my-guesses-as-to-where-we-are.html: ‘We cannot know where we are going until we know where we have been and where we now are. IMHO, the public health community has not done a good job on setting out even a semi-consensus guess as to where we have been and currently are. The "deaths" graphs lag the current situation by a month. The "cases" graphs are hopelessly distorted by testing inadequacy. Here, for what it is worth, are my guesses as to where we are right now and where we have been, nationwide. Of course, nationwide estimates are also of limited use…
Liveblogging the Fall of the Roman Republic: The Optimate Faction Rejects Caesar's Compromise https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/07/the-optimate-faction-rejects-caesars-compromise-liveblogging-the-fall-of-the-roman-republic.html: ‘A strongly unconventional high politician facing the expiration of his term of office. He knows that there is a very high probability that, because of his actions in office, his adversaries will try and convict him of crimes after he lays down his power. Caesar narrates the reasons that the leaders of the Optimate faction—Cato, Lentulus, Scipio, and Pompey—worked hard to set the stage for war, and how the majority of Senators in the timorous middle were robbed of the power to decide freely, and driven reluctantly to vote for Scipio's motion to rob Caesar of his protections against arrest and trial…
Abigail Smith Adams—Lecture Slides https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/07/abigail-smith-adamslecture-slides.html: Reading her letter of 31 Mar-05 Apr 1776 https://tinyurl.com/dl20180226a to her 10 years-older husband John Adams, and parsing out what it tells us about the liberties and constraints of an upper-class woman in the pre-industrial pre-demographic transition commercial revolution age…
No Senator Doing His or Her Job Would Vote for Judy Shelton For Fed Governor—Hoisted from the Archives https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/07/no-senator-doing-his-or-her-job-would-vote-for-judy-shelton-for-fed-governorhoisted-from-the-archies.html: ‘That any Republican senators at all are thinking of voting for Judy Shelton—a woman views whom Milton Friedman dismissed by saying "it would be hard to pack more error into so few words"—for a Fed Governor position reveals an astonishing lack of spine. Yet the Senate Banking Committee chair appears to be attempting to advance her nomination on Tuesday…
The Obelisk of Wokeness & the Dome of Cancellation https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/07/the-obelisk-of-wokeness-the-dome-of-cancellation.html: ‘We do not need to memorialize our slaveholders and our oligarchs. We do need to memorialize our revolutions. And it is fitting and proper that we memorialize our revolutionaries. Come and get me Erik Loomis https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/07/what-to-do-about-jefferson…
This Is What a President Looks Like—For the Weekend https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/07/this-is-what-a-president-looks-likefor-the-weekend.html: If you won't vote for this guy over the incompetent buffoon that is Donald Trump, do me a favor and please never vote again. You are too much of an easily-grifted moron for your voting to be a good idea for anybody...
Coronavirus: Trump Now Winning His Race with Bolsonaro for Worst Major-Country Coronavirus Response in the World https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/05/worst-coronavirus-response-in-the-world-by-the-most-incompetent-ignorant-and-undisciplined-president-imaginable-donald-tru.html: Will the United States's President Trump or Brazil's President Bolsonaro wind up killing more people because of his incompetence in handling the 'rona? Stay tuned.... The United States is certainly doing the worst in the global north.... And no, it is not that our confirmed case numbers are rising because we are testing more: tests-per-confirmed-case are dropping fast…
A Grand Narrative Catechism: The Global Economic History of the Long 20th Century, 1870-2016 https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/07/a-grand-narrative-catechism-the-global-economic-history-of-the-long-20th-century-1870-2016.html: The Long 20th Century began around 1870, when the triple emergence of globalization, the industrial research lab, and the modern corporation in the context of the market economy set the world on the path that pulled it out of the dire poverty that was humanity’s lot in all centuries before; and when America took the steps that made it the place where much of the action was—“the furnace where the future is forged”, to quote Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky. The Long Twentieth Century ended in 2016, with the sharp shock of the near-return of Great Depression-era macroeconomic conditions, with the failure of the anemic economic recovery from the Great Recession that started in 2008 to bring a restoration of the post-1870 normal pace of productivity growth; and with the election of Donald Trump, an American president hostile to global leadership, to global cooperation, and to the very ideas that had made up the core of America...
Liveblogging the Fall of the Roman Republic: Caesar Offers a Compromise Solution (or So Caesar Says): Liveblogging the Fall of the Roman Republic https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/07/caesar-offers-a-compromise-solution-or-so-caesar-says-liveblogging-the-fall-of-the-roman-republic.html: ‘A strongly unconventional high politician facing the expiration of his term of office. He knows that there is a very high probability that, because of his actions in office, his adversaries will try and convict him of crimes after he lays down his power... The Beginning of Caesar's Civil War, in which Caesar says that he had proposed a compromise solution to the political crisis.... 'The dispatch from Gaius Caesar was delivered to the consuls; but it was only after strong representations from the tribunes that they gave their grudging permission for it to be read in the Senate. Even then, they would not consent to a debate on its contents, but initiated instead a general debate on ‘matters of State'.... Scipio spoke... Pompey, he said, intended to stand by his duty to the State, if the Senate would support him; but if they hesitated and showed weakness, then, should they want his help later, they would ask for it in vain…
Liveblogging the Fall of the Roman Republic: _Foreshadowing from Gaius Sallustius Crispus: _ https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/07/foreshadowing-from-gaius-sallustius-crispus-liveblogging-the-fall-of-the-roman-republic.html: A strongly unconventional high politician facing the expiration of his term of office. He knows that there is a very high probability that, because of his actions in office, his adversaries will try and convict him of crimes after he lays down his power. Let us start with some foreshadowing from Gaius Sallustius Crispus...
