AS maga CALLS IT, bIDENOMICS:

The Dow jumps 150 points as strong earnings and GDP growth boost stocks (Vinamrata Chaturvedi, October 30, 2024, AP)


The Dow and other major indices jumped Wednesday morning, fueled by a stronger-than-expected earnings report from Alphabet (GOOGL) Google’s parent company, and new GDP data signaling a stable U.S. economy. Released just days before the U.S. election, the third-quarter Gross Domestic Product (GDP) report showed an annualized growth rate of 2.8%.

PERFECTLY UNDERSTANDABLE THEY FEEL THREATENED BY MORALITY:

Quebec’s Secularism Laws Are About Control, Not Freedom: My teaching career ended because I chose to keep my hijab (Fatemeh Anvari, 10/28/24, MacLean’s)

I spent my childhood in Tehran and moved to Ottawa when I was 10 years old. After some years, we returned to Iran to be closer to family. There, I earned an English literature degree and taught English to students of all ages; working with young children brought me the most joy. In 2017, when I was 23, I moved back to Canada and pursued a master’s in education at the University of Ottawa. I’d spent most of my life in Iran, where the ruling regime took away many of our basic freedoms and controlled women’s bodies by enforcing the hijab. Canada felt like a place where I could be myself, where diversity and freedom of expression were celebrated. Or so I thought.

I first heard about Quebec’s proposed Bill 21 in the second year of grad school, during a discussion with one of my university professors. The bill was part of Premier François Legault’s push for laïcité, a secular principle that emphasizes the separation of religion and state. Specifically, the bill would ban public servants in positions of authority—including teachers, police officers, doctors and judges—from wearing religious symbols. This meant no Christian crosses, no Muslim hijabs, no Sikh dastars and no Jewish kippahs. I was shocked. How could this be happening in Canada, a country that celebrates diversity? My professor reassured me that it wouldn’t happen. “Not in Canada,” she said. However, in June of the following year, it passed into law.


A few months later, I moved to Gatineau, Quebec, where I planned to work as a supply teacher in English-language public schools. I applied to jobs and eventually got a call from a school asking me to come in to teach. I wondered what would happen when I showed up and they saw that I wore a hijab. I was nervous they’d turn me away. But that wasn’t the case; I got the job without any issues. The English Montreal School Board, or EMSB, the largest English-language public school board in Quebec, even argued to the Superior Court of Quebec that Bill 21 shouldn’t apply to English schools, citing the need to protect minority language rights. Although the Superior Court upheld most of Bill 21 in April of 2021, they agreed with the EMSB and made an exemption for English schools. The Quebec government wasted no time appealing that decision.

In October of that year, I was hired at an English elementary school in Chelsea, near Gatineau, teaching third-grade English Language Arts and serving as a homeroom teacher. At the time, the English school exemption was still in the appeal process, and I was optimistic that it would stand. However, less than two weeks after my contract started, the Quebec Court of Appeal rejected a request to temporarily exempt English schools from Bill 21 while the appeal was ongoing. This means that I was not allowed to wear my hijab at the school anymore.

HATING GREENS WON’T STOP THE LAWS OF ECONOMICS:

The Expedia of solar panels confirms new rooftop panels are more powerful than ever — and it’s leading to enormous savings: It has fueled the adoption of solar energy on an unprecedented scale. (Elijah McKee, October 28, 2024, The Cool Down)

[T]he technology is more powerful than ever, with a single cell capable of producing over 400 watts. And get this: 97% of them do exactly that — another huge step up from just four years ago, when most panels performed below that mark, according to a marketplace report by EnergySage.


This colossal evolution of solar power is not just a cool fact. It has also fueled the adoption of solar energy on an unprecedented scale and had real impacts on the financial benefits of switching residential and commercial fuse boxes over to solar.

For example, the lifetime energy savings after installing rooftop panels can now be as high as $33,000, Forbes reported.

WHY CAN’T WE BE FRIENDS:

J.B. Mauney conquered the toughest bulls in the world. As he prepares to enter the Bull Riding Hall of Fame, he reflects on the injury that made him hang it up (Ryan Osborne, May 7, 2024, WFA)

He arrived in Lewiston as beat up as ever — breaks in his left leg and foot and right ankle — and he drew an old bull named Arctic Assassin.

He lowered into the chute for his first go-around.

Arctic Assassin spun and kicked out of the gate, and Mauney “sat down on my ass.” That mistake, as subtle as it was, knocked his timing out of sync. He started to fall, and then one last kick launched him into a backflip.

“I just round-assed off the thing,” Mauney says now, describing a predicament that makes more sense seen than heard.

He landed on the side of his head and rolled onto his knees. When he pushed down to stand up, he felt it: His neck had broken.

“Felt like somebody stuck a hot knife right in the back of my neck,” Mauney says. “I’d broke my back before, so I knew. I was like, ‘Son of a b—-, I just broke my neck.”

Mauney continues explaining the rest of it: the trip to the hospital, the surgery, the doctor’s orders — no more bull riding, at the risk of paralysis or death — and, finally, his decision a week later to retire from bull riding for good.

Then he walks across the front pasture at the XV Ranch, and calls out to an old black bull.

“C’mon, biggun!” Mauney shouts as he kicks over a bucket of feed.

After one more call, Arctic Assassin lumbers over.

DEMOCRACY IS A FUNCTION OF THE LONGBOW:

Who was the real St Crispin, and what did he have to do with the Battle of Agincourt? (Ian Morton, October 25, 2024, Country Life)

Critical to the outcome of the Battle of Agincourt were the English archers, some 7,000 forming the bulk of Henry’s army, pouring a torrent of arrows into the ranks of the French, who were jammed together and bogged down on a muddy field between two woods. Archers were the artillery of the age, the word coming from Middle French, meaning the provision of weapons, including projectiles. Chaucer mentioned the term in The Canterbury Tales of 1405. The bow and the arrow were artillery before cannon, powder and shot. Royal Artillery gunners with the surname Archer, Bowman, Bowyer or Fletcher may inherit closer links with history than they might suppose.

UNIVERSAL LAWS DRAFTED IN PARTICIPATORY FASHION:

A Principled Revolution: a review of Public Philosophy and Patriotism by Paul Seaton (Richard M. Reinsch, Law & Liberty)

Seaton also looks to identity politics’ binary of oppressed vs. oppressor and its replacement of individual rights with group rights. How does the Declaration’s articulation of individual rights, and its inherent appeal to the rule of law, deliberation, limited government, representation, and a people united under God for its support of liberty against oppression stand against the binary of identity politics, with its insistence that limitless government is needed to serve diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) or what is the same: racial and gender socialism? Identity politics brings tremendous passion in the service of justice but does so in the complete dismissal of every institution in American life that it confronts, promising the transvaluation of every cardinal and civic virtue to achieve group justice for the oppressed. It promises to unleash tremendous injustice on individuals in the service of its future promises.

Who does identity politics speak for, Seaton asks? While identity politics claims to rectify past injustices it revels in present injustice by subsuming the human person into racial and gender characteristics, removing man from his highest feature: reason. Those drafting and approving the Declaration were sent by rebellious public authorities to promulgate a verdict of separation on behalf of the colonies, a judgment accepted by the people. They spoke comprehensively on behalf of the persons in the colonies who were being denied the protections of the law, preventing them from flourishing as individuals in community with others. It was precisely because individuals as moral creatures, made to pursue happiness freely, were being denied this right by arbitrary government, that the colonists rebelled. Contrast this with the understanding of power and speech displayed by identity politics leaders, who state that only the designated victim groups should speak on behalf of their justice. Thus, they are permitted to cast impossible demands for justice on those whose word is officially devalued because of their group trait as historical oppressors. Nothing could be further from the deliberation and argumentation in the Declaration.

Where equality of opportunity requires removing interference with liberty, equality of outcome requires imposing interference.

THE TEXT AND EVERYTHING AFTER:

First Moon Colony: A star physicist teaches us how to read the Torah, book by book. First up: Genesis. (Jeremy England, October 21, 2024, The Tablet)

Editor’s note: This is the first of five columns by Jeremy England. England is an American-born physicist noted for his argument that the spontaneous emergence of life may be explained by the extra energy absorbed and dissipated during the formation of exceptionally organized arrangements of molecules. He is also a rabbi. In this series, he will teach modern readers how to understand the Torah, one book at a time. First up is Genesis, a book that, according to England, establishes a specific truth—one that many of us, under the sway of the Enlightenment’s caricature of biblical thinking, misunderstand: “God is not a claim about the facts of the world to be proved or disproved, but rather is the focus for a method we are meant to use to interpret the events of our lives and the world.” —The Editors

Here are a few tips for how to read Genesis. Assume the book’s account of God is absolutely correct, which means He wrote it, as well as all other books and your genome. Assume God knows everything you know, everything you could know, and more. Assume God is the unfettered author of your life, world history, and the universe. Infer, therefore, that the Hebrew Bible—“Tanakh”—is unique not because its existence expresses the Creator’s will (since that’s true of everything there is) but rather because its content serves as the Creator’s official autobiography and a job description for His willing servants. Given all this, note that trying to prove its statements to be factually true or false is about as confused as trying to reach someone on the phone by dialing the license plate number on his car.

You don’t have to be an Albert Einstein or a Richard Feynman to know that plants need sun to grow. So when plants make their first appearance in Genesis “before” the sun does, even the most skeptical student of the text might conclude that he is not, in fact, perusing a simple chronology. If he manages, just for a moment, to forget how our post-biblical culture expects us to read biblical text, he might even notice that a basic message of the seven days of creation is that true statements about God are guaranteed to sound enigmatic in some way.

While this is an evident enough point to discuss with an interested 7-year-old Jewish day school student, it was lost on a great many Jewish atheist theoretical physicists during the last hundred years. Never has so much intelligence done so little to justify arrogance as when Feynman or Steve Weinberg mouthed off about theology. For all their genius, these Wicked Sons were never taught to read, and so, sadly, when it came to the subject of Eden or Abraham they applied their intellects to bludgeoning straw men and sniping at a heritage they did not even try to understand.

I too was once a Jewish atheist theoretical physicist, who, like many others, grew up worshipfully reading Feynman’s memoirs, hoping to understand “the universe” as profoundly as he and Weinberg and a dozen other Torah-rein 20th-century yidden had. However, through a series of providentially happy accidents, I managed eventually to get a glimpse past the smokescreen. Imagine my shock to discover that the most profound and free-ranging intellectual pursuit I had ever experienced—Torah study—had been distorted or even deliberately obscured from view by the pontifications of my childhood heroes. Weinberg once said, “[Scientific education] is corrosive of religious belief, and it’s a good thing, too!” Today I can retort that quantum field theory may be fun and useful, but it only ever amounts to playing around in one little sandbox according to a stultifyingly narrow set of mathematical rules. Maybe one day I will forgive Weinberg and Feynman for the way they stunted my understanding of the world and mankind’s condition in it, but I’ll have to avenge myself on them first.

The best revenge I can think of is to turn the eye of a physicist to righting the false trail laid out by Weinberg and others. Proper scientific education is favorable to proper religious belief, and vice versa, and it’s a good thing, too.

So let’s begin.

IT’S ALL ULTIMATELY AESTHETICS:

Stop Blaming Foucault: It’s ontological absolutism, not the postmodern emphasis on deconstruction and contingency, that is turning the humanities into a race-obsessed, pro-genocidal wasteland (Ari Gandsman, October 21, 2024, The Tablet)

Sadly, the vision of academic pursuit in the social sciences and humanities being guided by disinterested inquiry is obsolete. Job descriptions, not just in the humanities but also in the empirical sciences, increasingly demand explicit ideological and activist orientations (e.g., decolonialism, environmental justice, anti-racism). Analytic distance and critical detachment are denounced as outmoded colonial vestiges of cisgendered white male supremacy. Meanwhile, a scholar’s identity and therefore their experience is privileged, especially if they are from underrepresented groups where a tacit and often condescending expectation often exists that their topics of research overlap with their identity. Academic pursuit guided by nondogmatic, open-ended inquiry hears its death knell.

A popular explanation for this larger shift blames the abandonment of the pursuit of truth as root cause and points the finger at social constructivists like my doctoral adviser. This argument is epitomized by public intellectual Yascha Mounk’s recent book The Identity Trap which names the usual suspects—the French philosopher Michel Foucault, critical theory, and the bogeyman known as “postmodernism”—as key culprits of the new dogmatism. With truth dead, everything is permitted.

Yet as someone who grew up intellectually in this milieu, I believe that today’s stridency and moral absolutism is less explained by social constructivism but by its rejection. While social constructivists emphasized doubt, ambivalence, and uncertainty, academics now speak with absolutist, if imaginary, moral clarity on a host of issues ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

A main explanation for this is “the ontological turn” that swept many disciplines, including my own, anthropology, in the first decade of the 21st century. While social constructivist approaches are associated with epistemology—questions of knowledge and how we know what we know—ontologists are concerned with questions of being, the essence of existence, and the nature of reality. To see all knowledge as socially constructed means seeing our own knowledge is too. This leads to a modesty of what we can claim to know about the world.

In a major article from my minor discipline of anthropology 40 years ago, my doctoral adviser argued against thinking we could pierce through our own cultural precepts to access “demystified reality.” He cautioned against uncritically believing our own beliefs were the true ones or that our own concepts and interpretations of the world were necessarily better than others. This required embracing what the late great philosopher Richard Rory referred to as “contingencies.” Or as the influential anthropologist Clifford Geertz once put it, lifting from the great sociologist Max Weber, we are “an animal suspended in webs of significance” that we ourselves spun.

Geertz cites an apocryphal Indian story in which the world was described to an Englishman as resting on the back of an elephant that rested on the back of a turtle. When the Englishman asked what the turtle rested on, he was told, “it is turtles all the way down.” We were trapped in our own representations and could never get to the essence of existence, yes—but we did not see this as a bad thing. We took seriously Nietzsche’s famous observation that believing in a “true world” was both myth and error.


Ontologists not only make broad and foundational claims about the world but also normative claims about how it should be. If knowledge-oriented social constructivists were focused on how our ways of seeing the world were filtered through our own cultural and historical lenses, ontologists attempt to break through the filters to get to absolutes.

Post-modernism is a return to pre-modernism. Once you get back you have to choose your faith. the oncologists above choose a particularly ugly one.

“FOR YOUR FREEDOM AND OURS”:

The afterlife of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko: Reflections on forty years since his death shook communist Poland (Ben Sixsmith, 10/19/24, The Critic)

What had made the slim, sickly 37-year-old priest such an imposing enemy of the state? He had preached. He had preached to striking steelworkers in Warsaw. He had preached to the trade unionists of Solidarity. His sermons had been broadcast on “Radio Free Europe”.

He had led the funeral of Grzegorz Przemyk — an 18-year-old aspiring poet who had been beaten to death by police officers. A gigantic funeral procession had marched peacefully in protest.

Censorship was tight in Poland. Its tentacles, Norman Davies wrote in God’s Playground, “regulated the activities of all the media, all news and translation agencies, all publishing houses” et cetera, with themes to be suppressed including “criticism … of the party line, all comparisons between the Soviet Union and Tsarist Russia, all civil disasters, all shortcomings in industrial safety, all defects in Polish export goods, all references to the superior economic and social standards of non-communist countries and … all information regarding the existence of the censorship.”

One exception was church services. The communists tolerated some amount of independence for the Church — believing that suppression was unsustainable — and Popiełuszko had used that to his advantage.

He had preached about the value of the truth. He had preached against violence and indignities. He had even preached about the virtue of patriotism. His sermons referenced historical events where Polish courage and determination had been illuminated, like the 19th century uprisings and the Miracle on the Vistula. Popiełuszko “did not include the historical references just to present facts,” writes Grzegorz Szczecina:

… although this would have made sense in the context of the Communist propaganda. The main purpose was to show to … fellow Poles the meaning of self-sacrifice and suffering as a price which had to be paid in the struggle for national liberty over centuries.

WONDERED WHEN HE’D BRING US ANOTHER:

The Warriors review – Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis come out to play with firecracker musical: This concept album based on Walter Hill’s 1979 film features megastar rappers, Hamilton alumni and styles from metalcore to salsa – it is pulled off with breathtaking brio (Chris Wiegand, 17 Oct 2024, The Guardian)

In their adaptation, a concept album that raises the tantalising prospect of a future staging, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis achieve something similar. The blistering, kaleidoscopic opener is presided over by dancehall dynamo Shenseea as a DJ introducing MCs for each borough. Amid punchy fanfares, they are deftly delineated: Chris Rivers as a raspy Bronx, Nas cranking up intrigue as Queens, Cam’ron smoothly humorous as Manhattan (“when you say New York, we’re actually what you mean”), Busta Rhymes’ explosively gruff Brooklyn and Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah and RZA spinning ethereal suspense for Staten Island, repeating the detail of their arduous route to the Bronx, “taking a train to a boat to another train”. […]

Miranda and Davis deliver the same lurid pulp jolts as the movie, finding equivalents for Hill’s arsenal of whip pans, wipes and slo-mo violence, yet they also share the more sociological perspective of Sol Yurick’s original 1965 novel and in particular his interest in what gangs offer the alienated and alone. (Yurick drew on his experience working for the city’s welfare department.) A majestic-sounding Lauryn Hill’s solo as Cyrus, If You Can Count, uses several of the character’s rallying lines from the screenplay but builds them into something much more resonant. “Nobody’s wasting nobody” becomes a call not just for laying down arms but for recognising the collective potential of every member in this posited gang of gangs. […]

One of the album’s joys is its unexpected pairings, especially how musical theatre stars are matched with acts from other genres. Broadway’s Alex Boniello teams up with Australian metalcore artist Kim Dracula as the Rogues on a rat-a-tat-tat duet, Going Down, that manages to veer from monstrous destruction to soaring anthem and back again. Dracula channels the toddler rage of the film’s arch-villain Luther (original star David Patrick Kelly gets an album cameo as a cop), and as you’d expect his taunt “come out to play” becomes a thunderous hook.