"The enemy gets a vote"

Way back in the last millennium when I wrote or helped write operations plans for the US Army, I always remembered a catch phrase we planners had used for a long time: "The enemy gets a vote."

Which is to say that when we acted, the enemy reacted and almost immediately the plan's assumptions would be negated. That's why we also said, "No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy." Dwight D. Eisenhower put it this way: "Planning is absolutely essential, but plans are useless."

And so we come to this administration trying to manage the world's oil supply. Bureaucrats' plans bear all the hallmarks of "static analysis," when planners assume there is only one variable and that they can control it, and nothing else changes and the result is always unicorns and rainbows. This is, ahem, especially true under Democrat administrations, and nowhere more in evidence than the current administration's energy policy, headed by a publicly inept Secretary of Energy who admitted on camera that she has no idea how much oil the United States uses per day.

She also said that the Biden administration cannot do anything to bring oil prices down because oil prices are "controlled" by OPEC.

But don't worry because President Biden has announced that OPEC should increase production and that he is ordering 50 million barrels of oil to be released from the US Strategic Oil Reserves (SPR). That'll show 'em!

Here is an excerpt from the White House press release:

The U.S. Department of Energy will make available releases of 50 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in two ways:

32 million barrels will be an exchange over the next several months, releasing oil that will eventually return to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the years ahead. The exchange is a tool matched to today’s specific economic environment, where markets expect future oil prices to be lower than they are today, and helps provide relief to Americans immediately and bridge to that period of expected lower oil prices. The exchange also automatically provides for re-stocking of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve over time to meet future needs.

18 million barrels will be an acceleration into the next several months of a sale of oil that Congress had previously authorized.

That final graf means that 36 percent of the oil released will be sold to other countries, including China. The 32 million barrels released to US oil companies will take place " over the next several months." Last year, the US used just more than 18 million barrels of oil per day, but that was in a year of low economic activity. This year's figures have not been published but are certain to be significantly higher.

But using only 2020's consumption, what the White House announced is that over the next several MONTHs the administration will add a grand total of 1-2/3 days of oil to the American market. Wow!

But wait! There's more! I gotcher proof that static analysis is useless rat cheer! OPEC decided it gets a vote! Hey, where did they get that idea?

The administration said that it would release 32M barrels to the US economy over time, expecting it to drive down oil prices, then purchase 32M barrels for the SPR at lower prices than today's. (India and Japan also said they would release oil from their national reserves.)

So OPEC plus Russia basically said, "Lower prices later? Nope, not a chance. We will simply cut production by at least an equal amount that you are releasing."

Who could not have seen this coming? Only this White House and its Secretary of Energy.

The coming crash and what it portends

If we continue on the present course, we will enter a depression that might make the 1930s a distant competitor. The number of jobless Americans could reach tens of millions.

WSJ: Rethinking the Coronavirus Shutdown:

Yet the costs of this national shutdown are growing by the hour, and we don’t mean federal spending. We mean a tsunami of economic destruction that will cause tens of millions to lose their jobs as commerce and production simply cease. Many large companies can withstand a few weeks without revenue but that isn’t true of millions of small and mid-sized firms. ...

The deadweight loss in production will be profound and take years to rebuild. In a normal recession the U.S. loses about 5% of national output over the course of a year or so. In this case we may lose that much, or twice as much, in a month.

Our friend Ed Hyman, the Wall Street economist, on Thursday adjusted his estimate for the second quarter to an annual rate loss in GDP of minus-20%. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s assertion on Fox Business Thursday that the economy will power through all this is happy talk if this continues for much longer.

This is the first time ever that the US Government has deliberately shut the economy down, and the idea that it can just be turned back on like flipping a switch is delusional.

Consider: We will never be able to determine how many lives were saved from the virus. But we will easily know how many people died because of the economic crash to come - just count increased suicides and even some homicides, to say nothing of untold numbers of people thrown into permanent poverty.

The lockdowns and stay-at-home orders are saving lives now. But if they continue much longer, they will cost lives later and cause economic, literal suffering for years and years to come.

Also, The Atlantic, "Suicide and the Economy."

On April 12, 1937, the express train to New York roared across the New Jersey countryside. The train, a Pennsy Railroad electric locomotive the color of bull’s blood, usually passed through the station at Elizabeth at about 50 miles per hour. On this particular morning, it came to an unanticipated stop. As the express rounded the curve, my great-grandfather jumped down from the platform, where witnesses reported he had been pacing for 10 minutes, and lay down across the tracks.

When the engineer was finally able to halt the train 100 feet past the platform, Roy Humphrey had disappeared beneath its wheels. His last act: raising his head to look at the oncoming train.

Roy was one of at least 40,000 Americans who took their own lives that year and the next, the two-year span that suicide rate spiked to its highest recorded level ever: more than 150 per 1 million annually. 

Update: "US unemployment could surge to 30% next quarter and GDP might plunge 50%, Fed's Bullard warns"

Also relevant: "The luxury of apocalypticism -- The elites want us to panic about Covid-19 – we must absolutely refuse to do so."

The point is, there is such a thing as doing too little and also such a thing as doing too much. Doing too little against Covid-19 would be perverse and nihilistic. Society ought to devote a huge amount of resources, even if they must be commandeered from the private sector, to the protection of human life. But doing too much, or acting under the pressure to act rather than under the aim of coherently fighting disease and protecting people’s livelihoods, is potentially destructive, too. People need jobs, security, meaning, connection. They need a sense of worth, a sense of social solidarity, a sense of belonging. To threaten those things as part of a performative ‘war’ against what ought to be treated as a health challenge rather than as an End Times event would be self-defeating and utterly antithetical to the broader aim of protecting our societies from this novel new threat. To decimate the stuff of human life in the name of saving human life is a questionable moral approach.

Why we can't afford 99-cent gasoline

If you like the very low gasoline prices, even though we are not supposed to drive anywhere, get used to it. Oil's spot price may drop some more, yes (it plummeted today after Thursday's highest-rate increase ever in one day). But production is going to drop. Usually, that means gas prices rise. Not this time. And that is actually very bad news.

Cheap gas and nowhere to go. That's bad.

American oil frackers operate at a loss much below $60 per barrel (depending where they are located). The largest such operation, the Permian Basin, needs about $65 per barrel to make a profit. It straddles Texas and New Mexico.

The drop in oil price was triggered by Russia's refusal to cut production at the Saudis' request. So the Saudis jacked production up to drive the price down and punish the Russians. Well, good luck with that:

After oil prices collapsed in the worst drop in nearly three decades—courtesy of the renewed Saudi-Russia rivalry on the oil market – Russia’s Finance Ministry said on Monday that Moscow had enough resources to cover budget shortfalls amid oil prices at $25-30 a barrel for six to ten years.  

Not coincidentally, both the Saudis and the Russians would like to see America's frackers permanently closed and the United States to return to a major importer of oil, not net exporters as we are right now.

One way or another oil prices will rise. That seems a cloud but actually it is the silver lining. The cloud is cheap oil. Active-rig counts fell this week in the US by 160, year over year, to 722. On the other hand, US oil production remains near an all-time high at 13.1 million barrels per day. Go figure.

And next month may be even more dramatic.

Analysts say that the month of April could see the largest supply overhang in the history of the oil market.

“We now expect the y/y demand loss to peak in April at 10.4 million barrels per day (mb/d), and annual demand to fall by a record 3.39mb/d in 2020,” Standard Chartered wrote in a note.

In the short run, the oil market surplus could reach a peak of 13.7 mb/d in April, Standard Chartered said, with an average surplus of 12.9 mb/d for the second quarter. The inventory buildup could reach a gargantuan 2.1 billion barrels by the end of the year, “stretching the midstream of the industry to its limits,” the bank wrote. That figure represents an upward revision of 50 percent from the 1.4-billion-barrel inventory surplus the bank predicted…just a week ago.

Other analysts have even more dramatic scenarios. Eurasia Group says demand could fall by as much as 25 mb/d in the next few weeks and months. The historic glut means that the world could run out of storage space. “The combination of weakening demand and excess supply is hardly going to be accommodated by onshore storage,” Giovanni Serio, head of analysis at Vitol, told the FT. “At a certain point…we will need to fill all the boats.”

 So severe is the situation that for practically the first time in long memory, "Texas Weighs Curtailing Oil Production for First Time in Decades."

Texas regulators are considering curtailing oil production in America’s largest oil-producing state, something they haven’t done in decades, people familiar with the matter said.

Several oil executives have reached out to members of the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the industry, requesting relief following an oil-price crash, the people said. U.S. benchmark oil closed around $25 a barrel Thursday.

Texas, which hasn’t limited production since the 1970s, was a model for the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which has sought to control world-wide oil prices in recent decades. OPEC and Russia were unable to reach a deal on reducing output in response to the coronavirus pandemic, which helped trigger the current collapse in prices.

It is unclear whether regulators will ultimately act to curtail production, but staffers are examining what would be required in such an event, the people said.

Oil prices have always been manipulated by producers. Even so, at the end of the day, demand has always been in control. And now the worldwide demand has dropped like an anvil and will continue to do so. The largest users of petro products - shipping and aviation - are harboring vessels and canceling flights. That will likely accelerate.

That said, oil production is going to plummet because, as stated above, we are running out of places to put it. That does not mean that gas prices will suddenly rise. The huge over-supply will see to that. But cheap gas prices are not going to offset the real pain dropping demand will cause: higher unemployment not only of oil-industry workers, but businesses whose revenues depend on customers using oil just to buy or get to their products or locations, such as hotels, tourist attractions, airline workers, dock workers, gas station owners and workers, the list is very long.

I am not an economist by a long shot, but unless we stop our "insane over-reaction," there is going to be a lot of pain to come that 99-cent gasoline will not pay for.

Update: How low can it go? "How Low Can Oil Go? One Forecast Sees $5 a Barrel." Which means that gasoline will be not much higher than free - and yet it will be also more difficult to find because gas stations will be closing at accelerated rates as oil prices plummet.

Recession soon? It can go either way

Forbes: How You Can Financially Prepare Yourself For A Recession. Seems like pretty good advice to me.

I am not forecasting a recession, but I do think it is prudent to hedge one's bets.

Der Link zeug tägliche Post

Hey, ya want ya some Medicare for All? Well, a self-described "left wing liberal" physician who worked for several years in one of the federally-funded test locations says to do this:

OK, actually, she wrote this in I Was a Physician at a Federally Qualified Health Center. Here's Why I No Longer Believe Government Health Care Can Work.:

So, I put my head down. I shut my mouth. I stopped suggesting improvements or changes that might make the system more efficient and improve patient care. I humbled myself before my managers and administrators, saying “yes, sir,” and “no, ma’am.”

This technique worked like a charm. No one screamed at me anymore. I even got a large raise.

But inside I seethed. My blood pressure spiked. My neck ached. I was anxious and depressed.

The day that my government contract expired was one of the happiest days of my life. I was free. Never again would I sell myself into indentured servitude—not to the government or any other agency.

Because doctors bail when they become serfs of the state. Why the UK Suddenly Is Suffering from a Physician Shortage -- If only someone had warned them.

The NHS is in a state of perpetual crisis characterized by doctor shortages, long wait times, and rationing. The UK lost 441 general practitioners last year and had 11,576 unfilled vacancies for doctors as of last June.

But in the last six years, 585 surgical practices have closed down, affecting 1.9 million patients. Last year alone, 138 surgery facilities closed their doors, up from 18 in 2013.

But it's okay, comrades, because fairness!

Speaking of socialism, what this country needs is to make pencil manufacturing great again! Elizabeth Warren's Pitch for 'Economic Patriotism' Is Full of Intellectual Dishonesty and Economic Fallacies

"There are a lot of giant companies who like to call themselves 'American,' but face it: they have no loyalty or allegiance to America," she says in the video.

As proof, Warren points to the "famous no. 2 pencil," which is mostly manufactured in Mexico and China. Her video doesn't make clear why pencils should have to be made in America—or why that lack of good, pencil-making jobs in America is a problem.

That Warren chose to use pencils to illustrate the supposed need for "economic patriotism" is darkly hilarious to anyone familiar with "I, Pencil," Leonard Read's 1958 parable about the merits of free markets and comparative advantage. Reed's lesson is that no one on the planet has the means or knowledge to make an item as mundane and ubiquitous as a simple pencil. A pencil requires wood, graphite, brass, and rubber, but each component part is the result of supply chains that might stretch around the world—from the forests of the Pacific Northwest to the mines of Mexico to the factories of Indonesia.

But what does that have to do with election sound biting? We need a pencil factory here, dang it! And Warren is going to build that!

First thing we do is keep all the poor people poor. If you were a national leader and decided to make sure that poor people stayed that way, what would you do? Well, this, of course: 7 Things I'd Do if I Wanted to Keep Poor People Poor

First on the list? Socialism, baby! Because remember:

Speaking of destruction of the nuclear American family, The tragic — and overlooked — fallout from the ’60s sexual revolution.

The fracturing of the post-1960s family and the flight to collective identities have not only been occurring at the same time. As the timeline and other evidence show, they cannot be understood apart from one another.

Identity politics is also a product of the revolution in another way. Whether one looks left or right, to politics or culture, the question, “Who am I?” has become the most frantic of our time. Traditionally, that question has been answered at least in part via primordial relations: I am a sister, a daughter, a cousin, a mother, a grandmother.

When answers that revert to family identity are more attenuated than ever before, “Who am I?” gets answered in a different way. 

White privilege check!

But s'okay because the Obamas Strike Blow for Economic Justice, Donate Millions in Exchange for Massive Beachfront Estate: Former president conquers ‘wealth anxiety.’ 

What a relief, because for awhile there I was afraid that America was too racist for the Obamas to move to Martha's Vineyard. But I was wrong!

What are the seven deadly sins of progressivism? PEWSLAG, of course.

Long ago, there was a mnemonic for the seven deadly sins, PEWSLAG. In order, it meant Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Lust, Avarice, and Gluttony.  So common have the elements of PEWSLAG become in our time that they can no longer be considered as ‘The 7 Deadly Sins,” but rather as the PPAF, The Progressive Platform for America’s Future.

Let’s review the PPAF in greater detail:

Explained in detailed by the inimitable Gerard Vanderleun, who was a founding member of the SDS at UC-Berkeley back on the 60s and so knows what he is talking about.

Finally, some Truth here by the late Nabeel Qureshi.

Has Google committed treason? No.

"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort" -- US Constitution, Art. III, Section 3.

I have a very narrow view of what constitutes treason - because the Constitution does also. It is the only crime defined in the Constitution, and was done deliberately to narrow what treason means.

"Levying war" means actually bearing arms against the US or taking part in an armed force that is conducting combat against the US. Google is not doing that.

"Adhering to their enemies" is directly related to what it means to levy war. "Enemies" does not mean "economic or military competitor" absent actual use of armed force between that competitor and the US. China is a rotten-to-the-core government and has overtly declared that it is working for superpower status superior to the United States, but it is not legally our enemy.

Google should be brought to rein, very, very sharply. But the Constitution has been more than politically corrupted enough without treating Google as actually treasonous. As Glenn Reynolds commented on my FB post of this story,

Donald, you’re right, but that currency has already been debased by all the bogus talk of treason in connection with the bogus Russian collusion charges.

That is true, and it is all the more reason to call a halt now. Otherwise, any president from now on will use treason as an excuse to go after corporations or groups or persons that s/he just wants to.

James Madison, Federalist 43:

As treason may be committed against the United States, the authority of the United States ought to be enabled to punish it. But as new-fangled and artificial treasons have been the great engines by which violent factions, the natural offspring of free government, have usually wreaked their alternate malignity on each other, the convention have, with great judgment, opposed a barrier to this peculiar danger, by inserting a constitutional definition of the crime, fixing the proof necessary for conviction of it, and restraining the Congress, even in punishing it, from extending the consequences of guilt beyond the person of its author.

I have no doubt that Google is acting contrary to the interests of the United States in its dealing with the Chinese government. But it's not treason and should not be treated as if it is.

The fallacies of soccer pay equality

An overview:

Additional reading:

Forbes: Revenue Disparity Explains Pay Disparity Between Soccer World Cup's Men And Women

The Federalist: Yes, There Is A Soccer Pay Gap: The Women Make More Than The Men Do

Commentary: Women’s Soccer and the Equal Pay Canard

And the hits just keep on coming -- Babylon Bee: Women's Soccer Team Sues To Overturn Unjust Law Of Supply And Demand

Working multiple jobs is suddenly a problem

Here we go again. Naturally, the progressive originally posting this never explains why this is a problem:

According to the BLS, the rate of persons working more than one job from 1995-2000 was more than 6 percent, but I can't recall what party was in the White House then. Had to have been a Republican, though!

Then, 

... the multiple jobholding rate began to recede. By the mid-2000s, the rate had declined to 5.2 percent and remained close to that level from 2006 to 2009. In 2010, the multiple jobholding rate decreased to 4.9 percent and has remained at 4.9 percent or 5.0 percent from 2010 to 2017. (Link).

For 2018, the rate is reported by the BLS as 5 percent. 

Again - why, exactly, is this bad? To that question, only the sound of crickets chirping.

The WSJ wrote about this a year ago: "Does everyone have two jobs?"

Do Americans have too many jobs? Democratic Socialist congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said last week that “unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs” and “people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said people are “working minimum wage jobs that won’t support them or they’re working two, three or four jobs.” But Bureau of Labor Statistics data show only a small minority of Americans work multiple jobs. That percentage has been around 5% of working Americans since 2010, though it was higher before then. ...  Are people working “60, 70, 80 hours a week”? Rarely. But for a brief dip during the recession, private-sector employees have worked an average of 34.2 to 34.6 hours a week since BLS began tracking the data in 2006. The average stood at 34.5 hours in June. BLS considers 35 hours a week “full time,” so working 70 or 80 hours would be equivalent to two full-time jobs. Only 360,000 people worked two full time jobs in June—0.2% of the workforce. There may well be people working 60 hours a week or more on one job—but if that were common, the overall average for hours worked would be well above 34.5.

I can only conclude that in this, as in countless other areas, for Americans to work more than one job at a time when a Democrat is president is morally-commendable industriousness but when a Republican is president is the result of an oppressive, immoral and economically-punitive administration.

When lawyers advertise cinnamon buns

I personally took the photo.

Bill Gates vs. Green New Deal

It's only two minutes long.



HT: Gerard

The killing fields of western civilization

If this is true, there are three broad areas that constitute the killing fields of modern civilization: academia, the churches, and corporate practices.

For academia, read "Decline & fall: classics edition -- On identity politics in classical studies."

Well, this year, [Donna] Zuckerberg noted, the magazine would aim to make sure that “at least [at least] 70 percent of our contributors be women and 20 percent of our writers be poc,” i.e., “people of color,” i.e., not white. (But isn’t race merely a “social construction”? No, silly, that was last year.) And just how are those percentages going to be achieved? Well, going forward, Eidolon will ask people pitching stories for “demographics,” i.e., are you black or white? Male or female? “I have no interest,” Zuckerberg sermonized, “in providing bland and false reassurances that we only care about good ideas and good writing and not who our authors are.” Who would doubt it? And what about merit? “[A]ppeals to merit,” she said, are “often . . . white supremacist dog-whistles.” So: “If you’re white and we publish you, you will know, for maybe the first time in your career, that it was because of the merit of your idea and not because you’re white.”

 We’d like to know if there are any cases of anyone anywhere being published in a classics journal because he (or even she) was white. 

The article's writer, btw, is not white.

For churches, "Why Social Justice Is Killing Synagogues and Churches -- Data suggests that the more a religious movement is concerned with progressive causes, the more likely it is to rapidly lose members."

Ultimately ... religions, including Judaism [and churches - DS], can only hope to thrive if they serve a purpose that is not met elsewhere in society. It is all well and good to perform good deeds, but if religions do not make themselves indispensable to families, their future could be bleak. [boldface added]

For the business world, the account of an information-technology security engineer, no link, this was posted on a closed Facebook group, but I am pasting all of what he wrote (protecting his name).

Fellow Members,

I just experienced a disturbing couple of days with my employer that I would like to share with you.

I work for the security unit of one of the largest consultancies in the world. Essentially, I help companies to secure their websites.

Once a year, our entire organization gets together for teambuilding, planning, networking, and that sort of thing. I went to the same event this time last year, and I found it rewarding and inspiring. I came away with many ideas on how to do my job better, and many new relationships with peers.

This year was different. While there were certainly many of the same networking opportunities, the overriding theme of the two days was inclusion and diversity. Essentially, we just spent thousands of dollars to fly everyone to one place to spend two days learning how to be more inclusive and more diverse.

As I’ve mentioned here before, my organization has a goal of being 50% women by 2025. I can’t imagine how we can reach such a goal, given that university technology programs are not graduating anywhere near 50% women.

Don’t misunderstand me. People want to come and work for us, so we have added some great women to our organization. It’s been a pleasure to work with them. However, it seems obvious to me that we are going to have to begin to forgo some great male talent soon if we hope to reach this 2025 goal.

I shared with you a couple of weeks back that an internal recruiter was complaining to me that she now has a diversity goal for talent which she is struggling to meet. So, again, our goal is no longer to find the right people, but to find the most diverse people. Our company gives referral bonuses if you were for good people who are hired. That number is now doubled if you refer “diverse“ candidates.

I have managed technical people for nearly 30 years. I’ve managed people of different races, nationalities, sexual orientation - whatever. As a manager, if you can help me reach my goals, you can work for me. I have been a popular manager throughout my career, because I take care of my people.

However, this is different than adding people to my team simply because of their gender, nationality, or sexual orientation. Why the hell should I even care about their sexual orientation? What does that have to do with securing some company’s website?

About 50% of the two days was spent on exercises related to inclusion and diversity. I was given a spreadsheet, and asked to fill it in with the names of the six people I trust the most (other than family). I was then asked to check boxes when the attributes of those people were the same as mine. The attributes were age, race, gender, nationality, and sexual orientation. I was then asked to look at all the checkmarks and ask myself if I should “re-think” the list of the people that I trust the most.

My list was filled with my oldest friends in the world – guys I went to high school with. I’ve been lucky enough to maintain those friendships over the years. I value them as much as anything else in my life.

My employer just asked me to re-think those friendships, because my friendships are not inclusive and diverse enough, in their opinion.

The reason they gave me is that we hire people we trust, and we won’t hire with an eye toward inclusion and diversity if we only trust people like ourselves.

Well, I’ve never hired any one of my old friends. They are my friends. These are not professional relationships. I trust many people professionally of many races, genders, national origins, etc. Again, my litmus test is simple. Can you help me sell my software and delight my customers?

I’m proud to be a good mentor of people younger and less experienced than myself. I’ve trained many people to be better technically, and better with soft skills, such as public speaking. The people I have trained have included people of many races, genders, and national origins. Some I know to be gay, simply because I found out somehow. One woman who worked for me shared with me, over a beer, that she was gay. She opened up to me because, she wanted to tell me how comfortable she was working for me, when other male managers were uncomfortable with her. Frankly, I can’t imagine how anybody could be uncomfortable with her. She did a great job, and every customer loved her. It was her choice to open up to me about her sexual orientation, and that’s fine, but it had no bearing on my view of her. Had another event, I met her partner. This woman was as I have it a baseball fan as I am. We hit it off completely.

This person doesn’t work for me today, but we’re still in touch. She reaches out to me sometimes for career advice, and she has used me as a reference.

We had a number of other exercises, such as putting little shapes on our shirts and then grouping ourselves in any way we thought appropriate, to “prove“ that we naturally go toward people like ourselves. What it proved to me what is that, to get done with the exercise, we’ll go stand next to the people who are closest to us.

I had a funny experience right after this exercise. The exercise was right before lunch. There was a woman ahead of me in the lunch line. I had spoken to her for a while in a different breakout session, and I thought she was great. I made a mental note to keep her in mind for a future project.

However, in the lunch line, she suddenly became very angry due to the lack of a vegetarian option. I looked at the lunch selections. There was a large salad, including a great deal of variety, plus carrots, potatoes, and potato pierogies. Weren’t these vegetarian options? This woman threw her tray down in disgust and stormed off.

I couldn’t help but wonder if all of the inclusion and diversity exercises we had just completed pushed her out of her “teambuilding“ mode, and into her “identity” mode. It was night and day. She was like the guy in the Snickers commercial who turns into Betty White when he’s hungry.

Then, the part that really disturbed me. After the exercises were completed, a woman got up and explained that we were going to begin to have Ask Anything webinars. Executives would essentially be put on the hot seat, and lower level employees could ask them anything. Examples cited were sexual orientation and religion.

So, executives in our organization are going to be forced to go on webinars and talk about their sexuality and their religion? Really?

And, while you would not be forced to attend these events, you would get a “flair” on your personal page if you did. Remember Jennifer Aniston in that movie where she was a waitress, and she kept getting in trouble with her boss because she wouldn’t wear enough flair? This is the same idea.

I don’t want to hear about somebody’s sexuality or religion, so I would be unlikely to attend such an event, but now everyone in the company would be aware of my choice, simply due to the lack of flair on my personal page. Will this be career limiting for me?

Of course, I’ve probably reached as high as I’m likely to go in this organization, given that I’m a 55-year-old white guy. I don’t meet the current leadership criteria.

Frankly, I think this whole idea is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

I work with some great people, and we do great work for customers throughout the world. I came away from these two days concerned that leadership is going to destroy the great thing we have by this over the top focus on inclusion and diversity.

Doesn’t it make more sense to grow our organization by bringing in great talent without consideration for all of these other attributes?

Well, I guess that’s my unconscious bias talking.

I posted earlier this excerpt from Victor Davis Hanson's essay, The Return of Ancient Prejudices.

What is behind the rebirth of these old prejudices? In short, new, evolving prejudices.

First, America seemingly no longer believes in striving to achieve a gender-blind, racially and religiously mixed society, but instead is becoming a nation in which tribal identity trumps all other considerations.

Second, such tribal identities are not considered to be equal. Doctrinaire identity politics is predicated on distancing itself from white males, Christians and other groups who traditionally have achieved professional success and therefore enjoyed inordinate “privilege.”

Third, purported victims insist that they themselves cannot be victimizers. So, they are freer to discriminate and stereotype to advance their careers or political interests on the basis of anything they find antithetical to their own ideologies. ...

And what fuels the return of American bias is the new idea that citizens can disparage or discriminate against other groups if they claim victim status and do so for purportedly noble purposes.

Oh, my: "Why Diversity Programs Fail," at Harvard Business Review.

It shouldn’t be surprising that most diversity programs aren’t increasing diversity. ...

In analyzing three decades’ worth of data from more than 800 U.S. firms and interviewing hundreds of line managers and executives at length, we’ve seen that companies get better results when they ease up on the control tactics. It’s more effective to engage managers in solving the problem, increase their on-the-job contact with female and minority workers, and promote social accountability—the desire to look fair-minded. That’s why interventions such as targeted college recruitment, mentoring programs, self-managed teams, and task forces have boosted diversity in businesses. Some of the most effective solutions aren’t even designed with diversity in mind.

To vast swaths of the Political Class, this is a feature, not a bug: "Millennial Males with Degrees are Getting Crushed in the Workplace."

"Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?"

I have only one comment:

Oh, this is a Rolodex, dating from deep into the last century:

"Living wage" is a racist scam to create more serfs of the state

A little history to begin:

In 2013, John Hawkins posted, "20 Questions Liberals Can't Answer." I responded in my own post that of course they can answer them, quite easily - but they won't answer them honestly because the political cost would be too high, so I provided the answers.

Here was question 16:

16) A minimum wage raises salaries for some workers at the cost of putting other workers out of jobs entirely. What's the acceptable ratio for that? For every 10 people who get a higher salary, how many are you willing to see lose their jobs?
It is easy for the media to find and interview someone who is employed at minimum wage and will express gratitude that we pushed through a raise for him/her. It is almost impossible to identify an individual whose job was cut because of the minimum wage increase and the media would not interview such a person anyway. So it's win-win for us all around: We tell low wage earners that only we will protect their new wage level and that the evil Tea Bagger Republicans want to keep them in poverty. So once again your question makes no sense because employment isn't the point; trapping people into voting blocs is the point.

In 2003, I postulated that a mandated minimum wage probably serves to keep wages down, not up.

If the sewers are to be shoveled, and the other necessary but dirty jobs done, it can only be done by compulsion or by offering a reward high enough to make it worth someone’s while. That doesn’t mean that the voluntary worker will be paid a lot; I know that the garbage collectors in my town are not driving new Lincolns. It does mean that a true free-market the wage offered will have to be raised until there are takers.

The Soviet state never eliminated poverty. Until its end enormous numbers of its peasantry, the serfs, lived in conditions barely materially better than under the Czar’s reign. And they were no more free, since the communist government forbade them to leave the land.

The federal minimum wage is $5.15 per hour. Would there be any sewer shovelers who would voluntarily accept that wage if true free-market forces prevailed? I am wondering - and some smart readers please leave a comment - whether the federal min-wage law actually keeps the poor down because it sets a legal wage ceiling, not a floor, above which employers don’t really have to pay.

There was a time (1987) when even the New York Times got it:

The idea of using a minimum wage to overcome poverty is old, honorable - and fundamentally flawed. It's time to put this hoary debate behind us, and find a better way to improve the lives of people who work very hard for very little.

Some states or municipalities are mandating a min-wage of $15 per hour. Since we know, as Leftists do not, that money doesn't grow on trees, where will the money come from to pay for the increase? Service industries will be hardest hit, especially food service and restaurants. San Francisco has seen numerous restaurants close because, as one closing manager said, "There is only so much you can charge for tacos."

Finally, NR explained in 2017 the work of economists at the University of Washington:

The study, commissioned by the city government of Seattle and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that Seattle’s law incrementally raising its minimum wage — to $13 an hour last year, en route to $15 — resulted in low-wage workers’ earning less money rather than more. This surprised many in Seattle, who had been assured by all the best economists, including Paul Krugman, that such a thing would not come to pass.

So, what happened?

The short version is: You can pass a law saying you have to pay low-wage workers more, but you cannot pass a law that says you have to hire them in the first place, or that you cannot cut back on hours when the price of hourly labor goes up. As businesses responded to the new higher labor costs by reorganizing their processes in less labor-intensive ways (the classic examples here are the replacement of wait staff with computer screens in restaurants and the replacement of bank clerks with more sophisticated ATMs), the law that was supposed to increase low-wage workers’ incomes actually reduced them — substantially, by an average of $125 a month.

So why the legislators decide in the first place that a minimum-wage law was desirable, regardless of what wage was set? It was to price blacks and other minorities out of the job market.

Walter Williams, the famous economist and professor at George Mason, looked back on the railroad industry at around the end of the 19th century. Back then, as Dr. Williams points out, non-unionized blacks often had to accept a lower wage than their white counterparts due to racism of employers. So the white union had a plan: raise the minimum wage to price blacks out of work. One member of the racist, Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen union, who called for the minimum wage increase, celebrated the removal of the “incentive for employing the Negro.”

Anyone who has studied the history of progressivism-liberalism-back-to-progressivism is entirely unsurprised by Prof. Williams' work. Read the whole thing. 

Corporate pushback at Gillette

And good on them, too. It is not clear whether Barbasol is the entity that made this video, but if they didn't, they should have.

This is why you can't ban guns

I did not say you should not ban guns. I did not say you must not ban guns. No, this is why you cannot ban guns: it is impossible.

3D printing has been used to manufacture a stainless steel bridge 41 feet long and 18 feet wide. Such technology has already been used to print firearms, and as the technology improves the firearms will become higher quality and have greater capability.

Want to accelerate the process? Just try to ban guns and see what happens. Here's the bridge.



And here is an actual 3d-printed gun:



As I said, "can't."

Vox: Gun bans won't work

What would this accomplish? 

Even Vox points out, "Why an assault weapons ban can’t address America’s gun problem." There is no empirical evidence that banning AR-style, "assault rifles" will reduce deaths from gunfire, although Vox does say that there may be a benefit in reducing the number of deaths in mass shootings, though probably not reducing the number of mass shootings. The reason is (which Vox does not make clear) that the 5.56mm and .223-caliber round typically fired from these guns was designed to be exceptionally lethal against human beings, as I explained in some detail here.

But would such a ban make a dent in lowering America's overall homicide rate? No, and one reason is that almost all gun homicides are done with handguns, not rifles. Another reason is that the rate of gun homicides has been falling for 25 years. Since it will never reach zero, there can come a time when the rate is so low that lowering it further will basically become impossible.

Meanwhile, family members of yesterday's YouTube shooter, Nasim Aghdam, told news media that they had warned police that Nasim was dangerous.

Aghdam's brother told ABC affiliate KGTV that his family reported her missing over the weekend when she disappeared and stopped answering phone calls. The family’s concerns deepened when police said that they had located her vehicle in Mountain View, about 30 miles southeast of YouTube's headquarters, he said.

"I googled 'Mountain View' and it was close to YouTube headquarters. And she had a problem with YouTube," he told KGTV. "So I called that cop again and told him there's a reason she went all the way from San Diego to there, so she might do something. So they didn't do anything, and she got killed ... and three or four more people got hurt."

California has long had a system of Gun Violence Restraining Orders that allow police to seize guns from person after referral from an immediate family member. But there are due-process procedures and I am pretty sure that a phone call from a relative saying "she might so something" is not legally sufficient for the police to take preemptive action, and in this case the warning seems to have come too late, anyway.

Nasim used a pistol, by the way, killing no one but putting three into the hospital, one in critical condition. This datum, IMO, buttresses Vox's claim that banning AR-style rifles would lower the death toll in mass shootings, but the problem with such a ban (which Vox does acknowledge) is that there are untold millions of such rifles already in private hands, so they can't be banned.

Update: A YouTube employee at the scene tells a reporter, "I didn't have a gun on me but I wish I did."

Why Weinstein now?

And the answer is . . .

The NFL and the Wizard of Oz humbug

This was the NFL until last Sunday:

I got to thinking along these lines reading a comment on Glenn Reynold's site left by Thomas Wren in which he, having read my post on the suicide of the NFL, responded,

All Mr. Sensing writes is true but peripheral to the main problem. The NFL is in trouble because its product stinks. Its boring, predictable, violent, almost unwatchable.

To which I replied, "Yeah, you're right, and I kind of added that as an update."  Thomas is right - the games are just boring. In fact, pro football has always been boring - actual playing time barely reaches double-digit minutes, according to the Wall Street Journal.

There are 60 minutes of game clock, split into two section of 30 minutes with about 15 minutes in between. A typical football game lasts, however, about 180 minutes from kickoff to final whistle. And in all that time, we get a mere 11 minutes of actual play.

Buddy, that defines boring.

Even so, Americans in their millions have thought that the NFL was the Wizard of Oz, Great and Powerful! Why? How did the NFL come to be so dominant in both our devotion and our money for half of the year? Why did we think that watching a game in which significant moments last fewer than 10 seconds each, with an average of 16 minutes in between, was exciting?

They were exciting because we looked at them through blinkered eyes. They were exciting because we wanted them to be, and so they were.

It was the mythos. Our imagination was fostered and carefully nurtured by the league and the networks to believe with near-religious fervor that something serious was at stake, that the players were larger than life, different from the rest of us, admirable and good - and most importantly, that the team was actually representing us, the residents of the city the team called home (this was explicitly an appeal made by Tennessee's governor to bring the then-Oilers to Nashville, my hometown).

Now all of that has gone a-glimmering. We now know that the Great and Powerful Oz is a fake, a phony, and behind the curtain is only a curmudgeon kicking dirt onto what we hold dear while demanding that we like it.

The NFL (and most pro sports) have always made money by relying on our willing suspension of disbelief, essential to any fictional story. But we are not willing anymore because last Sunday, they themselves pulled back the curtain. Now you and I can't see them as Oz again because now we know there is no there there. The whole enterprise is just a humbug.


Fans are reconsidering facts they ignored before: they are paying enormous sums to be mocked and scorned - at least $40 for a cheap ticket plus costs of parking and time spent in traffic jams, plus $12 beers, $6 hamburgers and $4 or $5 for a scoop or two of ice cream. And for what? They never really asked that question before very seriously, but now they are.

Television viewers see the games now as played under giant shadow that wasn't there before. The games are now political, amplified by willing accomplices at ESPN and to a lesser but still significant degree, the other networks. That receiver who just made the amazing catch and ran through four defenders into the end zone? While he celebrates like he just found a cure for cancer viewers know that he refused even to take the field to pay respect to the police/military/VFW/first responders honor guard presenting the colors. And I am supposed to cheer him and be happy because hey, he runs fast?

A member of a current-events FB group I read posted this today:

This does it for me. I'm totally through with the NFL. An Army vet who served 3 tours in Afghanistan should not be apologizing for having honored his country, his flag, and the memories of his fallen comrades all to appease his idiotic coach and his teammates who have never sacrificed a thing. I can't take this crap any longer. I've loved my Bears since 1974 and they haven't taken a knee (yet, but it's only a matter of time) but I have to put my country above these ungrateful multimillionaire athletes and coaches, and now ungrateful billionaire owners who are spitting in the faces of their customers. So long, NFL. I wish I could say I'll miss you but I really won't.

So now the games are boring and repulsive. And for enormous numbers of us, that's all they'll ever be.

Endnote: This is an interesting perspective.

The NFL lies down on its deathbed and forbids itself rise

It has been going around the internet that pp. A62-A63 of the NFL's rule book states this:

The problem is that the "league rulebook" (note the imprecision of the term) has zero to say about the anthem - if you are referring to the rule book governing game play. That rule book, available online, never mentions the national anthem and does not have any such pages as A62 or A63.

However, there is another NFL book called the Game Operations Manual, not available to the public, that does have those pages. And according to none other than The Washington Post (!), there is indeed such a rule:

Under the league rule, the failure to be on the field for the anthem may result in discipline such as a fine, suspension or loss of a draft pick. But a league official said the key phrase is “may” result, adding he won’t speculate on whether the Steelers would be disciplined.

The specific rule pertaining to the national anthem is found on pages A62-63 of the league’s game operations manual, according to a league source. 

The WaPo is firewalled (it's owned by Bezos after all), but Time magazine confirms it. At this point, though, I would say that the rule of the Game Operations Manual no longer matters.

Three teams on Sunday stayed inside their locker rooms rather than take the field sidelines for the anthem, the Steelers in Chicago, the Seahawks and Titans both playing in Nashville. Attendance at the Titan's home game yesterday was 69,127, only 16 short of every seat. I'll try to remember to post the next home game's attendance here, too. (I have abandoned the NFL so I do not even know when their next home game is.)

In Chicago, a lone Steeler, former US Army officer and Ranger Alejandro Villanueva, left the locker room and saluted the flag while the anthem was played. His reward was two-fold:

First, he was excoriated by that empty suit of freedom respectfulness, his own head coach, Mike Tomlin.

But the second reward is, well, a reward: Sales Of Alejandro Villanueva Jerseys Skyrocket After Being Only Steeler To Stand For National Anthem

I posted 23 days ago that The NFL continues its slow suicide, with both attendance and TV viewership having declined for a few years in  row now. With this weekend's demonstrations, the NFL has made full transition from an athletic organization to a political one. So what will attendance and viewership do now? Well, Sunday night's game  - after the full afternoon of televised abstentions and kneeling - was down eight percent from just last week and was the worst this year.

LA Times reporter Lindsey Thiry tweeted this shot of last Thursday night's game stadium at kickoff time - this was before the Trump-storm and fury:

Also, remember that the stock market is a futures market: "NFL Broadcasting Stocks Slump As Protests Rise And TV Ratings Fall."

During the past month the overall stock market is up more than 2% but shares of companies that broadcast NFL games--Comcast, Walt Disney, Fox, CBS--are all down between 1% to 8%. ...

Towards the end of last season some felt the NFL's ratings dip would be temporary and therefore would not ultimately hurt the networks by forcing them to reimburse advertisers. Instead, the opposite has happened.

Ratings for the the NFL have been worse this season and attendance for some games has also been disappointing. The networks will pay over $5 billion this season to televise the NFL and were already facing unflattering margins on advertising profits. An article in The Hollywood Reporter reckons the drop in NFL ratings could trim the broadcaster's earnings by $200 million. Disney's ESPN, meanwhile, also continues to get hammered by cord-cutting.

I commented elsewhere that one thing the protesting players have done is lead viewers to look at the game and the league with new eyes and a new perspective. Even before this season, millions of them already concluded that they don't miss watching the games after all. Now with political conventions by disgruntled multi-millionaires being held every Sunday when there used to be football games, how many more millions will decide to use that time for other things?

It might be worth pondering some demographics here. One is that Millennials are not watching the games in anywhere near the same numbers as their parents.

Some observers believe that American football is dying a slow and painful death. ...

The threat to American football is no illusion. In a recent study, four out of five millennials stated that they were less trusting of the NFL than basketball, baseball, hockey or NASCAR. Out of those surveyed in the study, 61% identified the NFL as a “sleazy” Organisation, while 54% saw it as being anti-gay.

In another study, teenage interest in the NFL was found to have fallen from 26% to 19% over the last two decades.

And that was written in February of last year. Another demographic supports the case that the NFL laid down on its death bed long before the kneelers started kneeling.

“Just four years ago, we had so many boys signing up for football, we had five teams at this fourth-grade level,” says John Herrera, a dad, software engineer and football coach of the Wheaton Rams in the Bill George Youth Football League in the western suburbs of Chicago.

“And from five teams of fourth-graders four years ago, what do we have now? One team. Just one.”

Out on the field, the Wheaton Rams and the Lyons Tigers were going at it, having fun. Parents and grandparents watching, sipping lattes, a few dads nervously pacing the sidelines as dads always do, willing prowess on their sons.

But what do the numbers from the hometown of the “Wheaton Ice Man,” the great Red Grange, tell us about football in America?

“If dropping from five teams of fourth-graders to one doesn’t tell you what’s happening, nothing will,” Herrera said. “Football is such a great game, it teaches great lessons to young men. But I’ve got a sense of dread for this game of football that I love.”

But take heart! There is hope that the NFL season may end well after all! Doomsday Rescheduled: ‘Researcher’ Moves End Of The World To October.

And not a moment too soon.

Update:

I do not listen to Rush Limbaugh but I think he nailed it here:

I did not watch the National Football League yesterday, and it was the first time in 45 years that I made an active decision not to watch, including my team, the Pittsburgh Steelers. It was not a decision made in anger. It was genuine sadness. I realized that I can no longer look at this game and watch this game and study this game and pretend, you know, fantasize, everything a fan does. This whole thing has removed for me the ingredients that are in the recipe that make up a fan.

The mystique is gone. That actually started vanishing a while ago. The larger-than-life aspect of it is gone. The belief, the wish, the desire that the people in the game were the best and brightest and special, and that’s why they were there, that’s gone.

Also Law Prof. William A. Jacobson: Dear NFL: I’m not “boycotting” you. I just don’t care anymore, about you.

I’m officially over the Cowboys, the Patriots and the NFL. You were once one of the loves of my life. But now we’re breaking up, and it’s you, not me.

I’m not “boycotting” you. I just don’t care anymore.

You tried to make me care, but now I don’t care at all, about you.

Pretty much, yeah.

Update: Thanks to Donald M. who emailed me to point out that the Steelers played at Chicago's Soldier Field, not Pittsburgh (correction made above). He added, "So effectively, on Gold Star Mother Sunday - a day set aside to honor the families of soldiers who died in battle - at Soldier Field - named such to honor soldiers who died in the field - the Steelers refused to honor the flag and the National Anthem."

Update: My followup is here: "The NFL and the Wizard of Oz humbug"

Update: Well, I have to admit that this never occurred to me:

Peak professional football was probably a dozen years ago. It was around then that white mothers, especially divorced middle-class mothers, started turning against youth football. They did not want their little baby being run over by black kids. That’s why the concussion hysteria gained traction. It’s a ready made excuse for pulling the white kids out of football, that lets white women pretend it is not racism driving their decision. After all, they loved Will Smith in the concussion movie!

It’s why the NFL’s decision to let their blacks kneel during the anthem is going to be a disaster for them. The owners signed off on it thinking it added drama and would therefore draw in girls, because girls and girly-men like drama. Instead, those kneeling black players are a stark reminder to white women that the sport of football is for violent black men, not nice suburban white boys. Youth participation in football is collapsing and this will only serve to accelerate it. The NFL has now made football anti-white and un-American.

Hmm.