"Hope"

 It is fitting that an essay on ‘hope’ should be sent during the week we remember the 79^th anniversary of the Normandy invasion, for it was hope for its success that filled the hearts of the millions of those who for most of a decade had lived under the boot of Nazism.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Hope”

June 9, 2023

 

“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement.

Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.”

                                                                                                                                Helen Keller (1880-1968)

                                                                                                                                Optimism, 1903

 

Hope is a verb and a noun. It reflects one’s optimism and posits one’s positive, achievable goals. It should not be confused with Walter Mitty-like grandiose dreams. It speaks of the possible. Hope has been around as long as humans. Speaking to the Corinthians five decades after the death of Jesus, Paul spoke of the need for faith, hope, and charity. Helen Keller, blind and deaf since age two, wrote the words quoted in the rubric above while a student at Radcliffe. Two months before his death, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke in Washington, D.C.: “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” 

 

Politically, hope has been absent in the U.S. for almost a generation. From the end of World War II until the assassination of President Kennedy, America was filled with promise. We faced challenges. Bomb shelters were built for fear of nuclear annihilation, and the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik lent concern that the Soviets were leading in the space race. But our nation’s response was positive, and we felt safe. On May 25, 1961, in a speech before a joint session of Congress, President Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade – a goal the nation achieved when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon’s surface on July 20, 1969. Sadly, Kennedy did not live to see this, but the U.S., during those years, had a can-do spirit, driven by admiration for Country, self-confidence, and hope.

 

In the second half of the 1960s, with Vietnam, student riots, and a drug-infested and sexually voyeuristic Woodstock, hope dissipated.  Malaise set in during the 1970s, as the country experienced Watergate and the first ever resignation of a President, the ignoble evacuation of Saigon, an oil shock, inflation, prolonged recession, and a stock market that treaded water over ten years. The confidence we felt in those post-War years was gone. But by summer’s end 1982 a feeling of relief spread across the land, and the stock market began to rise. The dragon of inflation had been slain by Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, at the cost of a short but steep recession. Ronald Reagan, a gifted speaker filled with optimism and confident in America’s future, had been elected President in 1980. His “morning in America” persisted into the 1990s, only to be impaled by a tech bubble and the attack on September 11, when Islamic extremists flew four airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing almost 3000 civilians.  

 

In the ensuing twenty-two years, with credit and bank crises, spiraling debt, inflation, and political division, we have never regained that sense of confidence and hope. Many thought the election of Barack Obama signaled such a return. But unfortunately, he chose to deepen racial divide. Today the nation is filled with anger, despair, and a sense of helplessness. Even Moms for liberty is seen as a hate group. We are divided by race, gender, and sexual orientation. Identity has replaced merit. Equality of outcome is deemed more equitable than equal opportunity. Urban politicians, dependent on donations from teachers’ unions, refuse to offer school choice to their cities’ poorest residents. For too many, persistent and rising welfare benefits lead to dependency. Instead of two-parent families, it is said to “take a village” to raise a child.

 

Police are under attack and crime has risen. Our southern border is porous. Cities like San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia have lost not only their charm but their livability, as stores are shuttered and the homeless defecate on streets. A sense of impending doom has descended on the nation’s young, as climate scaremongers say we face an existential crisis, if we persist in using gas stoves and do not drive EVs. Drug use is up, as are suicides, especially among the young. Teachers’ unions have become the most important financial backers of Democrat politicians, yet student scores keep declining, affecting most seriously the poorest in inner cities. Blacks are told to express their grievances, that their fate is to be a victim, dependent on government largesse. Whites are told they are oppressors. The ladder that allows for ascension up the socio-economic steps has been yanked away by the political left. 

 

One consequence has been a decline in birthrates, which, more than climate change, pandemics, or AI, threatens mankind. Exponential economic growth depends upon exponential growth in the labor force. Fertility rates below 2.1, needed to maintain a population, mean an aging and, ultimately, a declining population. Some of that can be made up with immigrants, but, as Malcolm Collins wrote recently in The Telegraph, those in the U.S. “…often don’t realize the pools from which they draw (Central America, South America, and the Caribbean) collectively fell below the sustainable rate in 2019.” This is a problem for the West. Mr. Collins added: “Western countries are like farmers draining an evaporating pool to keep their crops healthy, and ignoring the situation because the pond is unlikely to totally dry up in their lifetimes.”

 

Government, not individual initiative, is seen as the answer to all problems. “We have to paint a dark, bad picture because that’s what justifies more spending,” said Robert Doar, who once ran social services for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in an interview in last weekend’s The Wall Street Journal. Joe Biden projects the image of a doddering old man. Donald Trump, a man I supported twice for President, looks backward, focused on retribution, rather than a brighter future. E Pluribus Unum, the 1782 motto of the United States, is no longer applicable, replaced by the metaphor of a salad bowl, which emphasizes differences, rather than what we have in common. 

 

But the future is never clear. Habits and attitudes change. What climate fear mongers overlook is the ability of species to adapt, and for the Earth to adjust through, for example, what is known as the Iris Effect, which exerts “a significant negative climate feedback that stabilizes tropical temperatures and limits climate sensitivity.” This according to Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi, writing in the February 2022 issue of Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences. They were quoted by Andy Kessler in the June 5, 2023 issue of The Wall Street Journal. Cyanobacteria, one of the earliest known forms of life, has been around, according to microbiologists, for 3.5 billion years. Ctenophores date back 700 million years, Sponges 600 million years, Horseshoe Crabs and the Elephant Shark over 400 million years. Man first evolved in Africa between two and six million years ago, during the late Cenozoic Era. He has lived through myriad temperature changes. Adaption, not scare tactics, should be part of any environmental plan.

 

Man is almost infinitely resourceful and adaptive. He is aspirant, and, when allowed by the political system under which he lives, he is creative, and innovative. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, in the depths of the 1930s Depression, in the early days of World War II, at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in the jungles of Vietnam, after the attack on 9/11, and during the credit crisis of 2008-9, it was hard to be confident of America’s future. But those earlier periods – the two decades after World War II and the 1980s-1990s – showed what was possible. We need leaders today who are honest about our challenges, not issuing canards to deflect the truth. We need leaders who, unafraid to acknowledge our faults, emphasize our goodness. We need leaders who offer hope, not fear. At the start of the Civil War, but in a posthumously published poem, Emily Dickinson wrote; “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul/ And sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.”

"TMI"

                                                                   Sydney M. Williams 

More Essays from Essex

“TMI”

May 6, 2023

 

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.”

                                                                                                                Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, 1998

                                                                                                                E.O. Wilson (1929-2021)

 

TMI stands for too much information; it refers to the divulgence of personal data or an expression of boredom regarding particulars offered. For example, if I spoke inappropriately about someone or complained about a personal ailment, one of my children would say, “TMI, Dad.” This essay uses that acronym to express the fact that we are overwhelmed with a plethora of information, from books, magazines, newspapers (on-line and print), and from e-mails, texts, and all forms of social media.

 

Too much is tossed our way, yet our brain has not evolved to accommodate the increase. This is not new, as Professor Wilson (in the rubric) noted a quarter of a century ago. It has just gotten worse. Long before the internet and when there was far less data to consider, Sherlock Holmes was conscious of an overabundance of information. In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes responded to Dr. Watson: “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out…” Today, the amount of information is multiples of what was then available, yet our cranial capacity is unchanged. We are deluged. Estimates are that the amount of information doubles every two years, most of it useless for individual purposes. 

 

Online subscriptions account for about half of newspaper and magazine sales, a trend that will persist as computer literacy increases. Nevertheless, the number of journalists in the U.S., according to a recent study at Northwestern University, has declined from 75,000 in 2005 to 31,400 in 2021. On the other hand, a Pew Research Center survey showed that the number of bloggers in the U.S. – those who offer opinions regardless of facts – has increased from 11 million in 2005 to 32 million in 2021. The consequence: we get less real information and more (to borrow one of President Biden’s favorite words) malarkey. 

 

This expansion of digital information appears unstoppable. Dr. Melvin Vopson, Lecturer in Physics at England’s University of Portsmouth, recently wrote on the subject for The Conversation: Each day, across the world, “we generate 500 million tweets, 294 billion e-mails, 4 billion gigabytes of Facebook data, 65 billion WhatsApp messages, and 720,000 hours of new content added daily on YouTube.” The enigma: How to wend one’s way through this morass?

 

The important thing is to not let your brain become cluttered with useless trivia. The good thing is that a headline tells us if the story is worth reading. If it is about Hollywood, Harry and Meaghan, a gruesome murder, or the Kardashians, I let it go. Except for following half a dozen people on Instagram, posting my essays on LinkedIn and a blog, and texting my children and grandchildren, I don’t use social media. As Andy Kessler recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “Distraction is a curable affliction.”

 

If you read this far, thank you; but consider: You could have spent the time taking a walk, smelling a flower, or holding a loved one’s hand.

"So, Who's the Liberal?"

 

Despite headlines of portending doom and schadenfreude-laden Cassandras who thrive on tales of woe, 2023 has had a decent first ten days. While internal squabbling has made House Republicans look amateurish, we should never forget that our Representatives are not expected to always march together in sync. Stocks are up about a percent and a half, the yield on the Ten-year has declined about 25 basis points, the VIX has declined modestly, and the Dollar has retained its strength. On Monday, the UN Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization issued a report in which they found a “significant thickening” of the ozone layer (“a bit of good news for the planet”), suggesting that perhaps our grandchildren will have a world in which they can live. Topping things off, the January 2023 issue of The Spectator published an article, “The great anti-ESG backlash,” foretelling the end of a policy that has brought political correctness to investing and bank lending, a policy that Warren Buffett has called “asinine.” And, at least for a few months, we will be rid (or mostly rid) of politicians politicking. 

 

Onward, as Charon was wont to say, as his ferry slipped its mooring on the river Hades.

 

Sydney M. Williams

https://swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“So, Who’s the Liberal?”

January 11, 2023

 

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, 

“it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

 

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

 

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

                                                                                                                                Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)

                                                                                                                                Through the Looking Glass, 1871

 

The word liberal reminds one of Humpty Dumpty’s proclamation. It means different things to different people. The word is polysemous. To the Left it means big government, which actively supports social change. To the Right it refers to less government interference, the endorsement of individual rights, civil liberties, and free markets. The word stems from the Latin, liber, meaning free or unimpeded. In Lewis Carroll’s story, the word that caused the skirmish was glory, when used as a verb. “They’ve a temper – some of them, particularly verbs,” Humpty Dumpty says to a puzzled Alice. The word liberal is not temperamental (at least as far as I know), but it can self-camouflage, to ambush the unsuspecting. 

 

Over the years, the Left has usurped the word. so that for most the word refers to those who prefer a large role for government in their lives, while conservatives have become deplorables, birthers, conspirators, or just plain racists or right-wing nuts. We on the right should seize the word back. In his 1953 book The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk wrote of Edmund Burke (1729-1797), of how he defended the liberties of Englishmen against their king and of Americans against king and parliament. He defended those liberties not because they were innovations, “…but because they were ancient prerogatives, guaranteed by immemorial usage. Burke was liberal because he was conservative.” (Highlights mine.)

 

It is amusing to consider how the definition of liberal has morphed over time, so that today’s social liberals consider themselves the sole owners of the word, “even as,” Daniel Henninger wrote in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, “they surrender to the state an array of long assumed freedoms – of opinion, speech, and privacy.” Classical liberals believe that such rights, along with “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” are natural; they are God-given. The purpose of government is to secure and ensure those rights, not to dictate social behavior.  

 

While classical (conservative) liberals emphasize the freedom of the individual to achieve his or her goals, they recognize the necessity of government in maintaining order, in protecting us from enemies, in providing a quality high school education, in ensuring a sound currency, in adjudicating differences, and in making sure that the sick and the elderly – those who cannot care for themselves – live comfortable lives. At the same time, they emphasize the dignity of work, personal independence, self-determination, personal responsibility and accountability, and the importance of thinking for oneself.

 

On the Left there are social liberals who see the state’s role as being ubiquitous, that equality should include outcomes as well as opportunities, that ease of voting should trump security of the polls (they are equally important), and that healthcare should be free for all. Their efforts have encouraged the growth of the administrative state, creating agencies with expansive legislative, regulatory, and judicial powers. Have they pushed liberalism too far? In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Andy Kessler wrote: “Liberals, implied in the name, say they are for freedom, but are they? The progressive wing is full of authoritarians telling others what to do or how to think: America is a racist country. Wear a mask. Limit charter schools. Bees are fish (in California.)” Regulatory bodies, created by Congress and managed by unelected bureaucrats, are not accountable to the people. Their powers, however, can be unleashed – or restrained – by whomever is President. Recently courts have begun to push back, questioning, for example, the doctrine of “deference to regulators.” It is the Left that comprises the bulk of college professors and administrators, and they decide what speech and which speakers are acceptable. Social liberals control the teachers’ unions and most of mainstream and social media. In Up from Liberalism (1959), Williams Buckley (1925-2008) wrote: “Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them that there are other points of view.” Are liberals open to contrary opinions? Am I? I hope so.

 

Is it liberal to call those who question the efficacy of a vaccine anti-vaxxers? Is it liberal to denounce as deniers those who question the contention that man is the primary (or sole) reason for climate change? Is it liberal for a university liberal arts professor to deny a speaker who does not hew to a preferred political ideology? Can a liberal believe in tradition and custom? I am not sure about a social liberal, but a classical liberal would answer yes, when the question refers to long-established modes of behavior: accepted manners, respect for others, humility, and charity. But he or she would not if it meant providing advantages to preferred groups – racial, national, or ethnic – whether it is America in the 1950s or in the 2020s. Is it liberal to replace merit and achievement with identity essentialism? I think not.

 

Who is a liberal? It depends, as Lewis Carroll wrote, on who is using the word. But well-intentioned authoritarianism, whether from the Right or the Left, is not liberalism. A school friend, now living in Denver and with whom I reconnected fourteen years ago at our fiftieth reunion, writes a clever, satirical piece, The Apocryphal Press. He puts to rest the old belief among conservatives that the Left is devoid of humor. Today, we are good friends, yet we stand at opposite ends of the political spectrum. We both describe ourselves as liberals. And yet, while I believe my friend when he professes to be liberal, I see nothing liberal about policies his side backs: universities that deny conservatives the right to be heard, schools that teach gender identification to pre-teens, biased media organizations, corporations that require adherence to woke dogma, social policies that disrupt or discourage family formations, and an administration that demands social media companies comply with demands regarding vaccinations and that still fails to enforce immigration laws at the border. And I see nothing liberal about politicians – on both sides of the aisle – who lie about their backgrounds.

 

So, who is a liberal? Perhaps they have become endangered, at least in Washington.

"Common Sense & COVID-19"

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Common Sense & COVID-19”

October 15, 2020

 

“Common sense is seeing things as they are,
and doing things as they ought to be.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

 

A desire for more power for themselves and the state, identity politics and unadulterated hatred for Mr. Trump, have driven common sense into the nether regions of the progressive mind. The Oxford English Dictionary defines common sense as “good sense and sound judgement in practical matters.” It is, as Harriet Beecher Stowe put it, “seeing things as they are,” not as we might like them to be. It is, according to Thomas Edison, an imperative quality: “The three essentials to achieve anything are: first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.” A lack of common sense infects all issues, from the economy, to climate, to the Senate Judiciary Committee. It is the effect of a lack of common sense regarding COVID-19 and reactions to it that concerns this essay. 

 

We have always lived in a politicized world, but we now live in one made more pervasive by the advent of the internet and social media. Attitudes toward masks have become flashpoints in the battle against COVID-19. It is said that opinions regarding masks differentiate Democrats from Republicans. Perhaps, but it sounds too simplistic. I do believe, however, that one can distinguish the individual who abrogates rational behavior to a political narrative. A friend wears a mask when driving alone in his car, but unlike many on the left he is honest as to his reason. He admits the purpose is to send a signal that he cares – not to protect himself or others against the virus – but a sign of his righteousness. But he ignores risks to his health; for, no matter how “woke” he may feel, we all need the fresh air an open car window provides. Dr. Margarite Griesz-Brisson, a German Consultant Neurologist and Neurophysiologist is quoted: “We know that the human brain is very sensitive to oxygen deprivation. There are nerve cells, for example, in the hippocampus that can’t be longer than three minutes without oxygen – they cannot survive.” It is an opinion that resonates common sense. Yet, Mr. Trump is ridiculed for removing his mask, when ten or twenty feet from others, while Mr. Biden has spoken of imposing a nation-wide mask-wearing mandate.

 

Believing it helps Mr. Biden, mainstream media highlights the number of COVID-19 infections in the U.S. and compare them unfavorably with the rest of the world. They ignore an inconvenient perspective – a higher number of tests per thousand people yields a higher number of positive cases. The U.S. has been testing 2.87 people per thousand, while Canada, France and Germany are testing a third fewer. More tests generate more confirmed cases. Hospitalizations, a more important number, get little attention probably because those numbers are down by two thirds since a bump in July, despite more people testing positive. And positivity rates likely do not indicate the extent of the spread. Most officials argue the number of 7.5 million Americans having tested positive for COVID-19 is likely off by 90%, suggesting the real number is closer to 75 million, with the vast majority being asymptomatic.  

 

The Left prefers draconian “lockdowns” to a system that, first, protects the vulnerable and then, with commonsensical safeguards, opens the economy. Their priority, as explained by Mr. Biden, is to defeat the virus before addressing the economy. It is an elitist attitude that assumes everyone can either work from home, can live for a year without an income, or assumes taxpayers will make up the difference, oblivious to the fact the economy has been stunted. As Dr. Scott Atlas said, a “lockdown is a luxury of the rich.” It is a policy that has forced school closings and encouraged remote learning, despite the fact that, for school-age children, the virus is no more dangerous than the flu. The policy has been especially harmful to the nation’s most needy. Nearly 100,000 U.S. businesses, mostly small ones, have gone bankrupt. While the labor participation rate has improved since April, it is still down almost two percentage points from before the pandemic, which means there are still three million fewer people employed than at year end 2019. Lockdowns have unintended consequences. For example, in my state of Connecticut, domestic violence shelters are running at 150% of capacity, requiring victims to be placed in hotels.

 

The Left claims to “follow the science,” yet the science they follow is one that accords only with their political views. When the science is at odds with their predetermined narrative, it is rejected. The Great Barrington Declaration is a case in point. It is a treatise prepared by three epidemiologists from Stanford, Harvard and Oxford: Doctors Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, respectively. Joel Achenbach, writing for the Associated Press, referred to them as “maverick scientists,” a comment that says more about Mr. Achenbach than it does about the three doctors. The doctors urge adoption of what they term “focused protection” of the vulnerable, while publicly acknowledging the increasing evidence that “current lockdowns are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health,” and that “keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.” The paper has been signed by over 30,000 doctors and scientists around the world. The Left’s denial of the group’s authenticity is based on the fact that the research was underwritten by the American Institute for Economic Research, a think tank in part funded by the “hated” Koch family. Science is never fixed; it is always a work-in-progress.

 

Common sense says listen to all sides, then form your decisions. In my case, it means wearing a mask when inside and around strangers, or outside if people come within six or ten feet. I wash my hands, often and carefully. I avoid crowded venues and socially distance. I use sanitizers. Most importantly, I try to employ common sense and try not to be fearful. If you are not infected and you know the same is true of those with you, i.e. your family, a mask is unnecessary. When outside, alone and in the fresh air, a mask does more harm than good, as we inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. The idea that a mask mandate should be imposed is ridiculous, harmful and serves no purpose other than to fire up a partisan divide. There has been no such talk of mandating surgical gloves, yet when I pump gas or go into a supermarket, I wear them, because my judgement tells me it makes sense. Public policy should assure protection of the vulnerable, but it should also be cognizant of the harmful psychological effects of loneliness; it should let students return to schools and allow the economy to sensibly reopen. We should be fully aware of and never forget the unintended consequences of public policies gone awry.   

 

A lack of common sense is manifest across our culture and society. It could be seen last year when 181 CEOs of U.S. companies, desirous to be “woke,” committed to “stakeholder capitalism, a “collective creed of workers, customers, communities, climate and country,” as Andy Kessler wrote in The Wall Street Journal. The term “stakeholder capitalism” stirs the emotional loins but is redundant. Businesses that do not treat its workers well, keep customers happy, pay taxes, and heed rules and regulations will be out of business. That’s the way markets work. It is common sense. Milton Friedman’s advice of a half a century ago remains applicable: “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” If it does, workers, customers and the community thrive. If it does not, they do not. A lack of common sense can be seen in the adamancy of climate advocates who claim anyone who questions their advocacy is a “denier.”

 

Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield, in a letter to his son, wrote: “A weak mind with no common sense magnifies trifling things and cannot receive great ones.” Those words characterize progressives intent on abandoning rational discourse for the sake of a narrative that serves their desires – more power for themselves and the state.