Category Archives: Social Commentary

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The American Dream

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How Utah keeps it alive.

I think that Mormonism is the most American of religions, being home grown. I also think that they’re most likely to be successful space colonists.

[Update a few minutes later]

I hadn’t RTWT when I posted the link, but there are very interesting points in it:

Utah has not entirely escaped the change, but it is relatively insulated; the state leads the nation for marriage and for children with married parents. How do we get Utah’s results without marriage?

“Why don’t we use what we have?” Price asked. “You’ve got this institution that has worked for thousands of years.” And yet, he said, “there’s a reluctance to use the word ‘marriage’ in public policy.”

People who don’t see why you need a marriage certificate to make a stable home for a child may be skewed by their own social position, Price said: “We’re always looking at the wrong group — the high-income group.” He added: “The people who are doing the research are the people who don’t need marriage.”

Utah’s unique religious history not only democratized the relationships between the affluent and the struggling; it also democratized marriage, at a time when elsewhere in the U.S., marriage seems to be morphing into an elite institution. Price thinks that gives the state a huge boost in launching kids into the middle class, and Chetty et al’s data back that up.

This does raise some questions about the viability of Utah’s “compassionate conservative” model outside the state. The vast welfare infrastructure from the Mormon Church naturally makes it easier to have smaller government. Perhaps that could be replicated by other communities. But the values of the Mormon Church may create a public that simply needs less help. That’s harder for another community to imitate. I’m not sure this key ingredient is available in a secular version; I think religion might only come in religion flavor.

How the heck is some state government supposed to get people to marry, and stay married?

Another argument to get government out of the marriage business (and a lot of other businesses).

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Persecuting The Heretics

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It’s crazy that a bill like this should even be necessary:

Lockman, however, wants to protect all people with opinions on global warming and prevent a Republican attorney general from conducting a similar investigation.

“I don’t want to see a Republican state attorney general issuing subpoenas for the records of progressive or liberal think tanks or public policy groups to chill their free speech,” Lockman told AP.

“It’s about Citizens United and the government abridging speech,” Lockman said. “It’s not about climate science. It’s about climate policy.”

Maine Democrats and environmentalists oppose Lockman’s bill, so it doesn’t have much hope of passing. Some environmentalists apparently want state prosecutors to be able to investigate “climate deniers.”

“Clearly an attempt to provide cover for climate deniers,” Dylan Voorhees, with the Natural Resources Council of Maine, told AP. “I see a trickle down from the Trump administration that has emboldened some folks to make climate denial statements.”

Calling skeptics “deniers” is slanderous, unscientific, and trivializes the Holocaust.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Living In Space

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Things you’re not allowed to do.

a) I find it difficult to believe that no one in the past several decades, especially with women in the mix since the early 80s, has not joined the 150-mile club. They even flew a married couple in the early 90s. Shuttle had very sensitive accelerometers, and I imagine ISS does too. Mission control knows what’s going on.

b) I also find it difficult to believe that anyplace with engineers and scientists and sugar doesn’t have hooch in short order. The free fall might make the fermentation an interesting process, but I’ll bet it’s been happening.

These are things that are against the rules, but that doesn’t mean they don’t happen.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Confession Of A “Climate-Change Denier”

Yes:

There are two things necessary for a mass movement to succeed: true believers and a well-defined enemy. The enemy of the climate change mass movement is fossil fuels and the Industrial Age, with the “deniers” being the enablers of planetary destruction.

In the past, the term “denier” has been associated with that extreme group who denies the existence of the horrible, tragic historical fact, the Holocaust. Many climate change true believers want the public to put anyone who questions or disagrees with climate change projections in the same category as the Holocaust deniers. But one is a fact, the other a contested projection. Nevertheless, they have been quite successful.

Here is one of the definitions of “denier” found on the Internet: “a person who denies something, especially someone who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of the scientific or historical evidence: a prominent denier of global warming.”

Here is Hoffer’s warning on the role of the true believer: “where mass movements can either persuade or coerce, it usually chooses the latter.”

Something we are seeing in spades.

It’s demagoguery. And it trivializes the Holocaust itself, in the service of a(nother) collectivist political agenda.