Replacing MAGA

The MAGA Republican Party is horrifically bad. Weimer Republic Nazi party bad. Cambodian Communist party bad. Iranian government of 1979 bad. George Wallace bad. Less sane than the John Birch society. More criminal and less moral than Al Capone. Proven to be absolutely incapable of governing competently.

While the Democratic Party in the United States is a big tent party, MAGA has left a Democratic Party which was already straining to find common ground for its immensely ideologically diverse coalition ripping at the seams, which has produced a lot of unproductive infighting.

This is not good for America. A country with only one viable political party capable of governing is not a healthy democracy.

In the British Commonwealth, there is a concept called a "loyal opposition". A loyal opposite disagrees on lots of important policy issues with the party or coalition that it opposes, but in not an existential threat to the government it is seeking office in, and shares fundamental process and normative values with the party it opposes that are ultimately more important that its policy disagreements with the other party or coalition that it opposes.

Our current election laws, as a practical matter, lock the U.S. into a system with two dominant political parties in any one political jurisdiction at one time. But that doesn't mean that it isn't possible to have a different pair of political parties in one state from another state, and it doesn't mean that it isn't possible for one of those two dominant political parties to be replaced with a different dominant political party.

This has happened several times in U.S. history, most recently when the Republican Party replaced the Whigs, which collapsed around 1860. It has happened in other countries, like Canada, with similar electoral rules, too.

The U.S. is engaged in an experiment along those lines this year in the Nebraska Senate race, in a deep red state that no Democratic Party candidate had any chance of winning, but which is a state that is also not happy with the way MAGA Republicans are running our country. The Democratic Party declined to field a U.S. Senate candidate in that race to clear the way for a center-right independent candidate, Dan Osborn, to run against a GOP nominee who would toe the MAGA line. 

If he is elected in November, he surely won't be a reliable party line vote for the Democratic Party, but he will also be willing to stand up to the insanity of Trump 2.0 when it goes beyond favoring partisan policy preferences to undermining the previously shared foundations of our political system. He won't embrace blatant corruption. He won't support gross incompetence. He won't be a friend of Putin. He won't agree that pedophiles and fraudsters should be protected. He won't try to undermine the rule of law. He won't lie about things that are obvious lies to everyone who hears them. He will understand that there were no air bases in the Revolutionary War. He will understand that the U.S. did not have diplomatic relations with the classical Roman Empire. He will not try to impose tariffs on islands inhabited entirely by penguins. He won't fall asleep in the middle of important meetings. He won't support the violent overthrow of free and fair U.S. election results. He won't completely disregard science. He will provide people with conservative political views who aren't evil or stupid, and don't want the United States to become a failed dictatorship an alternative that they can stomach.

Will he win? 

Who knows? The polls are all over the place in this race (according to the New York Times):

But the vast majority of candidates running for statewide office without being either major party's nominee has no chance of winning at all and would face a complete blow out. But he's been within the statistical margin of error of the Republican or winning in four of the seven general election polls conducted in the race. The only poll conducted since May (about three weeks ago) put him in a tie with the Republican, when the Republican was favored by 16 percentage points in one poll at the end of May. 

Maybe other deep red states can follow suit. Maybe if enough people like him start winning elections, they can band together and form a new political party that is conservative without sharing the worse vices of MAGA Republicans.

Nebraska might be a special case. Its unicameral state legislature is nominally non-partisan, and that might influence the political attitudes that voters have towards independent candidates.

But it is also possible that a lot of red state voters, despite being poisoned by anti-Democratic party rhetoric so deeply that they can't bring themselves to support a Democrat, and holding only moderate views, would support a center-right party not unlike the one that the GOP used to be, over the far-right party that the GOP has become.

Indeed, the mere existence of a credible threat to their re-election from the center instead of the left could be enough to give the GOP in red states like Nebraska to moderate its positions in a way that they didn't need to when it was certain that a Democrat couldn't win in their state, no matter how despicable the candidate running for the GOP.

And, this isn't just about getting the GOP itself to be more moderate (or better yet, replacing the MAGA GOP with a center-right party that is capable of governing sensibly and supports some shared fundamental values that used to be shared across the political spectrum).

It is also about making the Democratic party less of a herd of cats in places where it does have a chance of electing people to public office.

There are lots of pretty conservative people who hold their noses and vote Democratic, and try to influence the Democratic party in their direction, because the MAGA GOP is an existential threat to them personally, or because the MAGA GOP is not a recipe for securing a tolerably functional government.

There are cattle ranchers and food company executives out there who recognize that a healthy food inspection system is good for business, and that high tariffs, sky high diesel and fertilizer prices, and buying tainted meat from Argentina in deals that even the Secretary of Agriculture knows nothing about, are not good for business. So, MAGA may not be right for them. But that doesn't mean that the agree with much of the Democratic Party platform, and trying to make everyone happy just isn't possible.

There are wealthy doctors out there who are economically conservative and socially moderate rather than liberal, who still have no patience for a MAGA regime that is anti-vax, that votes to shut down rural hospitals, that orders the CDC to fake data on measles deaths, and encourages people to eat beef tallow to be more healthy.

There are cold war veterans out there who don't like having a President who cozies up to Russia and North Korea and China. They aren't impressed with a President who runs such a loose ship that destroyers go a week without power in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, that sailors on aircraft carriers don't have adequate food or working toilets, that commissaries on military bases have spoiled food because their freezers don't work, that military family members and people who risked their lives to be translators for U.S. troops are being deported for no fault of their own to places where they face serious risks of harm, that service members are being ordered to commit war crimes, and that sycophants are promoted while seasoned generals and admirals are purged. Those things don't make you proud of your country.

There are probably plenty of god and country conservatives who are absolute disgusted with the way that Trump has held cage fights on the White House lawn, demolished half the White House, put his scowling image on everything like some third-world dictator, told obvious lies to their face, disrespected veterans, shown not a scintilla of understanding of the Bible, blasphemously portrayed himself as Jesus, mocked disabled people, engaged in rampant infidelity with multiple wives and mistresses, corruptly enriched himself and his family, engaged in insider trading, been convicted of crimes, raped children, paved over the White House rose garden, shown utter ignorance of basic facts in his public speeches, encouraged and promoted immoral aides, and been embarrassed by him falling asleep at important meetings and shitting his pants at public functions, even if they agree with him of many economic and social issues.

There are states like New Mexico which by all race neutral economic and social indicators looks like a red state, where a lot of people are very conservative in their political views, but where they won't support Republicans for office, because MAGA Republicans show open contempt and hate for Hispanics and Native Americans who make up a huge share of the state's voters, President Trump demonizes them, and MAGA thinks that Native Americans and partially Native American mestizos should be deported despite having ancestors who have lived there since long before their land was part of the United States.

There are plenty of Muslim voters who are as socially conservative as the average Evangelical Christian and who are economically moderate at most, who can't in good conscience vote for the GOP because Republicans consider them terrorists and want to actively persecute them, so their stuck in the big tent Democratic Party instead. Many Black Evangelical Christian voters are in a similar boat.

The far right extremism and just plain mendacity and incompetence of MAGA Republicans is probably going to get a lot of Democratic candidates who wouldn't have a chance running against a center-right GOP elected to Congress in two months, in what is likely to be a blue wave election (knock on wood). But a country with only one functional major political party isn't a healthy democracy.

If someone launched a center-right party in the U.S. called, for example, the "Conservative party", it could and should have a good shot at replacing the MAGA Republican party in the U.S. And, that may be the only solution, because the MAGA Republican party may at this point, after more than a decade under Donald Trump's thumb as a cult of personality for him, be beyond saving as an institution.

I'd rather live in a country with two viable reasonably functional political parties than one that's a lost cause and the other that's become a tent where it is very hard for everyone to fit comfortably. But until MAGA is replaced, or the election system is reformed to be a proportional representation system, this is the situation we have to live with and try to make work as best we can.

Fossil Fuels And The Bulk Freight Market (And More)

Executive Summary

Fossil fuels account for 40% of ocean freight, 51% of train freight, and 56% of barge freight. 

New technologies in renewable energy, nuclear energy, electric vehicles, batteries, and heat pumps, could dramatically reduce the importance of fossil fuels in the global economy, eliminating the need for this bulk freight. 

This shift away from fossil fuels would also greatly reduce pollution, slow or stop climate change, improve workplace and transportation safety, strengthen democracy in the world's most authoritarian states and far-right domestic politics, and reduce economic vulnerability and military logistics vulnerability to unrest and military activity in countries that produce oil and gas.

How Are Fossil Fuels Used? What Substitutes Are Available?

The predominant use of coal is to generate electricity and its market share of electricity generation is plummeting, mostly to renewables like solar power and wind power, and to a lesser extent to tidal, geothermal, hydropower, and biofuels like corn based ethanol and biodiesel made mostly from restaurant waste fats. Nuclear power provides a significant share of non-fossil fuel electricity and has been pretty stagnant, neither growing nor shrinking in market share much for decades, although new advances are poised to tweak up nuclear power use in some niche applications. A very small share of coal is used for making steel, for purifying water, and in other industrial applications. Coal can also be industrially transformed into a liquid petroleum fuel substitute or a natural gas substitute when oil and gas prices are high enough for this to make economic sense, which is rarely and too briefly to justify building the infrastructure to do it.

The increasing affordability of renewables combined with environmental regulation are making coal obsolete for electrical power generation which is its predominant use.

The predominant use of oil is as a transportation fuel and its market share of vehicle fuel types is also steadily losing ground to electric vehicles (and to a tiny extent, other non-fossil fuel powered transportation modes). 

Oil is used for electricity generation in Alaska, in Hawaii (which has fairly low per capita electricity demand), during disasters and at construction sites, for heating oils (mostly in the Northeast U.S.), for fertilizers, for lubricants, and to make plastics. But all of these non-transportation fuel uses collectively are a much smaller share of oil consumption than as transportation fuels. 

There are good alternatives to oil to generate electricity in Alaska and Hawaii. Better batteries can limit the need to fossil fuel electricity generation in natural  disasters, in remote locations, and at construction sites. Organic farming and eliminate the need for petroleum based fertilizers (and pesticides). Non-plastic materials can be substituted for plastics in many cases. Heating oils can be replaced by natural gas furnaces or heat pumps (which are powered by electricity).

Natural gas (and other gas state hydrocarbons like propane) is predominantly used for space heating and water heating and as a greener alternative for generating electricity on demand at power plants compared to coal or oil. But very small shares of natural gas use are also used for cooking, ornamental lighting, and as a niche transportation fuel (especially for United Parcel Service trucks, and to a lesser extent, other fleet vehicles). Electrically powered heat pumps, electrically powered evaporative coolers, electric cooking appliances, electric water heaters, and electric vehicles are the main alternatives to direct natural gas use, and renewables (paired with utility scale batteries) and nuclear power are the main alternatives to natural gas for electricity generation.

Fossil Fuels And The Bulk Freight Market

 

The 40% breaks down as roughy 7-8% of total global ocean-going deadweight tonnage and vessel count (there are about 770 active LNG carriers in the world, which are specialized ships necessary to carry liquid natural gas) and about 32%-33% of total global ocean-going deadweight tonnage for coal and oil.[1] Natural gas is primarily transported on intra-continental pipelines, however, with some last mile transportation by truck, rather than by ships, trains or barges.

The numbers are similar for freight transported by freight train (51% of train freight is coal and oil) and over rivers and lakes by barges (56% of barge freight is coal and oil).

As of December 2009: "About 49% of rail freight is coal and another 2% is oil. About 10% consists of grain and grain products. Wood and paper account for 4%. About 10% of loads are non-petroleum chemicals. Stones, gravel, sand, clay and glass account for about 10% Most of the rest (13%) consists of other food products, metals and metal products, motor vehicles, waste and scrap materials."

As of September 2024: "In 2007, coal was the primary commodity moved by barge, accounting for 29% of all tonnages. Petroleum was the second largest commodity group in 2007, accounting for 27% of all tonnages. Crude materials, such as forest products, sand, gravel, ores, scrap, and salt, were the third largest commodity group in 2007, accounting for 18% of all tonnages. Food and farm products were the fourth largest commodity group in 2007, accounting for 12% of all tonnages."

Oil and gas firms accounted for 13.3% of U.S. capital expenditures in 2015, but only about 0.13% of U.S. employment (about 180,000 people); while in the same year the coal industry accounted for 0.16% of U.S. capital expenditures and 0.05% of U.S. employment (about 68,000 people) (and the coal industry has significantly contracted by more than 20% since 2015). By comparison, the retail trade industry accounts for 5.2% of U.S. capital expenditures in 2015 but 11.3% of U.S. employment. Wal-Mart alone employs about six times as many people as the entire oil and gas and coal industries combined. The U.S. oil and gas industry is important to Wall Street, but accounts for less than one in 500 U.S. jobs.

Fossil Fuels and Democracy

The share of an economy that comes from oil, gas, and coal is a good indicator of how authoritarian and far-right wing its politics are likely to be. The absence of production of these fuels in an economy, or reduced reliance of fossil fuel production, favors more democratic and more liberal government.

All of the world's remaining absolute monarchies (as opposed to merely symbolic constitutional monarchies) are in economies dominated by oil and gas revenues. Just one of the 36 countries with oil revenues as more than 2% or more of GDP has a healthy democracy (the outlier is Norway at #28 with 4.8% of its GDP from oil revenues is Norway). Norway's relatively healthy non-fossil fuel economy and democracy is in part due to the fact that it developed its oil and gas resources (mostly in the North Sea) fairly late in the history of these industries.

Among U.S. states ranked by fossil fuel production per capita, the only blue state in the top 8, is New Mexico (where it is 21% of GDP and which at #4 has all sorts of demographic and economic characteristics typical of red states, but votes blue because New Mexico has large Hispanic and Native American populations who are not welcome in the Republican party). Purple Pennsylvania at #9 and Colorado at #10 (each at about 5-6% of per capita GDP) are the only other blue states in the top 18 by fossil fuel production per capita. California at #19 has only $323 per capital of fossil fuel production (about 0.5% of per  capita GDP) and 17 states have no appreciable fossil fuel production per capita.

Environmental and Climate Harm

Coal and oil are probably the biggest drivers of air pollution and global climate change. They are also responsible for the workplace and transportation accidents associated with their extraction, delivery, and use. They are a very significant source of water pollution (including ground water pollution) and a major source of toxic and radioactive waste (coal has somewhat more than trace levels of radioactive elements in it). And, the extraction process destroys otherwise pristine open space and agricultural land, with coal being particularly damaging.

National Military and Economic Security

Reliance on fossil fuels, especially oil in the U.S., and both oil and natural gas in Europe, is also a major national security and economic stability risk, that subjecting economies that consume them to supply interruptions and risks caused by global military unrest associated with the authoritarian regimes that oil production based economies are so prone to be (e.g. unrest in the Middle East, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Russia). 

The Ukraine War has illustrated how vulnerable Russia has been to attacks on its oil and gas industry, which is not easy to defend, how dependent modern militaries are logistically on oil, and how dependent Europe and other world economies are on Russian oil and gas.

Reduced reliance of ocean shipping of fossil fuels also makes naval warfare and military control of seaways at choke points like the Red Sea, the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, the Bight of Benin, the Panama Canal, the Strait of Malacca, the Bosporus Strait, the Strait of Gibraltar, and the Baltic Sea much less important and much less tempting for states that want to flex their military power and pirates.

References

[1] According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) in an entry about Liquefied natural gas made on June 21, 2024, and a report by Fortune Business Insights, Report ID: FBI103940 updated August 17, 2026 entitled "LNG Bunkering Market Size, Share & Industry Analysis, By End-User (Tanker Fleet, Bulk and General Cargo, Offshore Support Vessels and Ferries, Other) and regional Forecast, 2026-2034.

The Trump Executive Order Renaming Lake Ontario Is Illegal

Trump has claimed that he can rename Lake Ontario unilaterally with an Executive Order. Google Maps is obeying it. But, of course, like so many of his other Executive Orders, this one is illegal because it contradicts a binding treaty with Canada.

Standing Law Still Broken

The U.S. law of standing basically states that even if the government or a government official is blatantly violating a law that benefits everyone, that unless someone can show how the violation of the law affects them in a way distinct from the way if affects taxpayers or voters or citizens, in general, that no one can enforce the law.

Most mainstream jurists manage to find a way to find standing in cases of clear violations of the law, but the ultraconservatives in the U.S. Supreme Court have used this doctrine to allow Trump to keep building the White House Ballroom in gross violation of the relevant law. The Chief Justice and the three liberal justices voted to prevent him from his clearly illegal actions, but were outvoted 5-4 on a standing argument.

No other sensible system of public law takes this approach. Standing was a rule invented for litigation between private parties that has never worked well in the public law setting.

The Executive-Judiciary Interface In Undermining The Rule Of Law

One of the most distinctive features of Trump 2.0 has been the breakdown of the rule of law. The administration has routinely ignored the law and settled interpretation of existing law in a wide variety of domains.

It has enacted illegal tariffs, it has denied due process to immigrants, it has deported immigrants to countries to which they have no connection, it has illegally impounded Congressionally appropriated funds, it has conducted the Iran war without complying with the war powers act, it has illegally and in violation of international law bombed suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific and killed survivors of its attacks, it has unlawfully meddled in state election processes, it has fired government officials whom Congressionally enacted statutes don't allow it to fire, it has pardoned January 6 insurrectionists, it has corruptly allowed officials to benefit personally in monetary terms from their offices, it has openly admitted to denying FEMA disaster relief based upon how states have voted in recent elections, it has brought sham criminal prosecutions of political opponents, and so on.

Trump 1.0 was odious, incompetent, dishonest, and violated some political norms and legal rules, but shows much less disregard for the rule of law and for well-established political and legal norms.

What changed? How will that affect future administrations?

A lot of the change can be fairly attributed to the courts, especially lower court judges appointed by Trump and the U.S. Supreme Court, which attained a conservative majority and an ultra-conservative plurality under Trump 1.0, consistently letting Trump circumvent rulings against him personally, and against his administration, made by lower courts and non-Trump appointed judges (including many judges appointed by Republican Presidents in prior administrations).

The U.S. Supreme Court's decisions to grant Trump expansively Presidential immunity from criminal liability for his official or arguably official acts (even if they are clearly ultra vires), and to interpret the insurrection clause out of the 14th Amendment, were some of the earliest and most damaging of its steps down this path.

Yes, the U.S. Supreme Court hasn't given Trump a complete blank check in Trump 2.0 to be a dictator, largely because the non-ultra conservative justices and the liberal justices on the Court has sometimes formed coalitions to block the ultra-conservative agenda. But this hasn't been consistent enough to discourage mischief in the executive branch.

Of course, the Republican controlled Congress also hasn't pro-actively intervened, but as some justices on the Supreme Court such as Gorsuch are starting to acknowledge, while Congress has significant power to deny funds to the President, Congress has very little capacity to pro-actively contradict or restrain a President inclined to ignore it.

The relative irrelevance of Congress has also been illustrated by Trump 2.0's heavy reliance on executive orders to act, rather than Congressional legislation, despite the fact that Republicans hold majorities in both the House and the Senate, and despite the fact that past precedents have pretty well established that the filibuster in the Senate is a voluntary restraint that the Republican Senate majority has afforded to the minority, and not a legally binding barrier to action, and despite the tight hold that Trump has acquired over the Republican party, effectively turning it into a MAGA party.

So, the existence of a GOP trifecta has, in practice, been less important to the disappearance of the rule of law than judicial and especially U.S. Supreme Court, connivance in facilitating unilateral illegal actions by President Trump (in a highly partisan fashion that it did not afford to President Biden).

Indeed, if anything, the Republican majorities in Congress have been more even handed in protecting the limited rights of the minority Democrats in Congress on a non-partisan basis, than SCOTUS has been in its rulings, many of which simply can't be explained by anything but partisan bias.

Popular Things That I Don’t Like

Christmas
Easter
Christianity
Baseball
Dogs
Sitcoms
Peanut butter
Olives
Olive oil
Grass lawns
Whiskey
Gin
Muscle cars
Audience participation
Karaoke
Pro wrestling
Peppermint
Ginger beer
The movie "Remains of the Day"
Live action adaptations of animation
Country western music
Sunrises
Anchovies
Oak barrel aged wine
Adele
Talk radio
Anything midcentury modern
Texas
Multi-factor authentication
MS Word auto-formatting
Suburban street layouts
Suburban zoning
HOAs
Golf
Slot machines
Soft mattresses
Astroturf
Vinyl
Gazpacho
Iced coffee
Wheat germ
Cottage cheese
Time shares
Sequins
Guns

Quote Of The Day

If this kingdom is led by the corrupt, it will be doomed to fall.

- The Frontier Lord Begins With Zero Subjects (2026) (Episode 7).

What Is True And What Is False About Literacy?

Jared Henderson has a thoughtful Substack post about literacy statistics and the "literacy crisis." Many statistics thrown around in the public square about this issue are misleading or ill-sourced. 

Henderson spends a lot of time revisiting his prior commentary on the issue, acknowledging that some of what he said previously was probably wrong or overstated, and sourcing the common misleading statistics. I'll skip that here.

The most essential point is that there are different levels of literacy and commonly cited statistics on point frequently don't disclose what level of literacy they are talking about. They also often cite statistics about literacy in the English language, which is appropriate for many purposes, but neglect to mention that many people in the U.S. who are not literate in English are literate in another language.

"Could not participate" is a mix of non-English language speakers, and people who have physical or cognitive disabilities too serve to interview, two very distinct populations.

Level 1 is minimal basic literacy, and about 8.1% of adults in the U.S. either could not participate in the survey or can't attain this basic level of literacy, although even some people below Level 1 literacy might be able to read a simple story to their children, recite the alphabet, or read a street sign. Many people with Level 1 literacy would struggle to graduate from high school at all.

Level 2 is the literacy level of typical non-college bound high school graduates.

Level 3 is the literacy level of a college bound high school graduate and about 57.5% of Americans have that level of literacy (other sources have put this figure as low as 46%).

Levels 4 and 5 are the literacy levels, roughly speaking, of above average college graduates and people who have graduate degrees.

An OECD report puts the United States in the middle of developed countries for literacy levels:

The United States does have a very high level of disparity between the 90th percentile and the 10th percentile in literacy (and numeracy and problem solving) compared to other developed countries, which is to say crudely that we have very literate smart people and very illiterate dumb people (using the same scale as the mean literacy levels in the chart above).

Prior to COVID, the U.S. was seeing a very gradual trend of improvement in reading and math among school children, but it took a dip (hopefully temporary and due to disrupted educational programs) in the year 2020 from which it had not yet recovered in the most recent available data.

The author describes as a separate matter the decline in the extent to which adults who used demographically used to read books do so now, but attributes this to a disinclination to read rather than a decline in the ability to read long form books. But he makes a point of distinguishing this issue from adult literacy from childhood literacy, each of which are distinct issues with distinct workable responses.

Colorado Ballot Issues In 2026

There will be up to 15 state ballot issues in November in Colorado.

Citizen initiatives that have qualified for the ballot propose changes to state law that include: 

BAD. Increased criminal penalties for the possession or sale of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. 

A LITTLE BAD. Life in prison for the human trafficking of a minor. 

BAD. A ban on transgender youth from playing on sports teams not aligned with their biological sex. 

BAD. A ban on gender-affirming surgery for people younger than 18.

Proposed constitutional changes that have qualified for the ballot include: 

BAD. A requirement that law enforcement notify federal immigration officials when an immigrant without proper legal status is charged with a violent crime. 

BAD. The establishment of a right to use natural gas for cooking and heating. 

BAD. A mandate that all taxes and fees collected for motor vehicles and gas be spent on roads.

Other measures are still awaiting final approval by the secretary of state: 

GOOD. A proposal that would move Colorado to a graduated income tax system in which high earners pay a higher tax rate, marking a big change in tax policy. 

BAD. A cap on the state’s income tax rate. 

BAD. A requirement that sales taxes on sporting goods be earmarked for conservation efforts. 

BAD. A mandate for additional voter verification for mail-in ballots. 

A LITTLE BAD. A ban on congressional redistricting outside the typical once-a-decade census cycle. 

BAD. The creation of a constitutional right to hunt and fish. 

A LITTLE BAD. A requirement that ballot questions be written at an 8th grade reading level.

GOOD. A proposal that would raise the amount of tax money the state can keep under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights — known as raising the TABOR cap — was placed on the ballot by legislators last spring. That extra money, which normally would be returned through refunds or another way, would be mandated to go to education.

World Religions In A Nutshell

About 55% of the people in the world worship the god of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims (a little less than 30% are Christian, a little less than 25% are Muslim, and about 0.2% are Jews). Jews live predominantly in the U.S. and Israel. All of these religions originated in the Middle East. 

A little less than 15% of the people in the world are Hindus. Hindus live predominantly in India.

About 4% of the people in the world are Buddhists. They live predominately in Asia.

Both Hinduism and Buddhist originated in India.

A little more than 1% of the people in the world are adherents of another religion.

About 25% of the people in the world are non-religious.

Homicide Rates Around The World

 

FWIW, the United Kingdom's homicide rates (1.17 per 100,000) are much lower than the U.S., with gun death rates that are some of the lowest in the world other than Japan (although Japan has high rates of non-gun suicides). Almost all of the excess homicides in the U.S. relative to the U.K. and Japan are committed with firearms.

Canada's homicide rates, by province, are mostly lower than comparable U.S. states, outside of its Arctic territories. 

Latin America's homicide rates are very high for the most part (mostly due to organized crime cartels using U.S. sourced guns), even though U.S. Hispanics commit crimes (including homicide) at a rate lower than native born Americans. Mexico, however, has dramatically reduced homicide rates under its current President.

U.S. Energy Efficiency Over Time

Progress is a real thing.

 

21st Century Life Skills

Basic life skills that every middle class adult is expected to know in the 21st century in the United States:

1. How to type well and reasonably quickly.

2. Moderate proficiency with Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook, and Microsoft Windows.

3. How to drive an automobile (unless physically impaired from doing so) and how to refuel it and what routine maintenance is necessary.

4. Knowing what to do in a car accident.

5. How to use a web browser.

6. How to call and text message and use other basic features (including the app store) of a smart phone.

7. How to tie a necktie (men only, although there are probably parallel female garments that women have to understand how to wear such as earrings and bras).

8. How to tie your shoes.

9. How to use Google maps and do Google searches.

10. Understanding of basic emojis and internet acronyms.

11. Understanding the organizational chart at a basic level, of all levels of government in the U.S.

12. Understanding of time zones and daylight savings time and leap days.

13. An ability to book a commercial airline ticket for yourself and to rent a car and book a hotel/motel.

14. An understanding of how credit cards and debit cards work.

15. A basic understanding of residential leases and mortgages.

16. A basic understanding of the financial markets.

17. An understanding of the main taxes applicable to you (retail sales, federal income, state income, property taxes) that aren't "invisible" (like gasoline taxes).

18. An understanding of basic accounting and finance concepts.

19. How to videoconference in one of several possible tools (Face time, Zoom, MS Teams, Webex, etc.).

20. A rudimentary understanding of the legal process in civil and criminal cases.

21. Knowing how to cross the street as a pedestrian.

22. Knowing how to handle weather conditions and natural disasters in your area.

23. Knowing the threats posed by wildlife and plants in your area.

24. How to read and speak in English.

25. How to use elevators and escalators.

Progress On Hunger

Progress is a thing. A smaller share of people go hungry now than they did in the past, and that share is falling rapidly in South America in particular. 

The share of people who are hungry has been decreasing faster in South America than anywhere else in the world. It is down by one-third since 2020, according to a report published on July 21st by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Just 3.5% of people in the region consume insufficient calories, the lowest level recorded. Eliminating hunger by 2030 is one of the UN’s “sustainable development” goals. “If there is a region in the world that can potentially achieve that, it’s South America,” says Máximo Torero, the FAO’s chief economist.

Lula, as the president is commonly known, made food security a priority when he returned to office in 2023. By 2025 Brazil had made it off the UN’s Hunger Map, which tracks countries where more than 2.5% of the population suffers from chronic hunger. Chile and oil-rich Guyana were also removed. Argentina is almost there at under 3%. Colombia and Paraguay are approaching at 4%, while Peru and crisis-battered Venezuela are making inroads near 5%. Even Ecuador and Bolivia have improved a tad, to 11% and 20% respectively. Only Suriname is moving in the wrong direction.

From The Economist. 

Things To Research About CEOs

This information probably exists in the academic literature, but I don't know the answers, even though I've read a lot of the "power elite" literature in sociology and economics and political science

* How long does a typical CEO serve in that position?

* How often are CEOs previously CEOs elsewhere, and how often do CEOs leave a position for another CEO position?

* Does the tenure of a typical CEO vary between publicly held companies and large privately held companies?

* How does CEO tenure differ between company founders and successor CEOs?

* How often are CEOs removed by a board of directors, both eventually and at some point? This may be complicated to discern as many CEOs who are forced out try to frame the event as a voluntary retirement. Does this differ for company founders and successor CEOs?

* What are the circumstances that most frequently cause a board of directors to fire a CEO?

* What are the circumstances that most frequently cause a CEO to leave a position as CEO unilaterally?

* How do CEO and top level politician career patterns differ between the for profit sector and the non-profit and government sector?  Term limits and lots of study make this clear for U.S. Presidents and U.S. Governors. But what about members of Congress, Mayors, City Managers, County Managers, County elected officials, college presidents and chancellors, school superintendents and principals, football coaches, and other state and local elected officials and senior executives? What about non-profits and cooperatives?

* What are the statistics on the ages at which people become and cease to serve as CEOs and how does that differ by subtypes of CEOs?

* What characteristics of CEOs (age, education, experience, gender, etc.) differ between founders and successor CEOs, between publicly held and privately held company and non-profit CEOs, between elected officials and top appointed officials in government service, between private sector and elected top officials? 

Another Quote

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.

- Frank Herbert (author of "Dune," 1965).

Another view, which is that "acting" and "deception" are part of the skill set of a politician.

Quote Of The Day

I'll pray that every time that landlord goes out somewhere, he accidentally steps in dog poop. 

- Victoria of Many Faces, Episode 1 (after "that landlord" refused to rent a place to her because she recently adopted a child).

Reducing Respiratory Diseases

Major progress on reducing respiratory diseases is possible and is both technologically and economically feasible.

A century ago, waterborne diseases levied similar costs to those posed by respiratory viruses like colds and influenza today: endemic, periodically epidemic, and widely accepted as an inevitable feature of human life. Then, at the turn of the twentieth century, we decided they didn’t have to be. Pharmaceutical advances and clean water infrastructure made cholera, typhoid, and dysentery rare across much of the world within a matter of decades.

Why haven’t we already seen the same kind of transformation with respiratory viruses? Last August we hosted a symposium at Stripe with ~40 leading scientists, pharma R&D leaders, biotech venture capitalists, and regulatory experts to better understand if this is technically possible and, if so, why it hasn’t happened yet.

We heard two main reasons. First, it’s just technically very challenging: respiratory viruses represent hundreds of distinct, mutating strains across several families. Fortunately, new platform technologies, advances in our understanding of human immunology, biological data sets, and protein design tools mean we have our strongest ever suite of approaches for tackling it.

Second, the development of the broad-spectrum solutions needed to solve the first problem has historically been underfunded, neither a great fit for philanthropic nor commercial funding. While COVID generated a burst of activity around preventing and understanding respiratory infections through an influx of new funding, that hasn’t been sustained.

We believe that with enough focus and funding, these problems are tractable. Intercept is a $500 million philanthropic initiative that will take advantage of these new tools to catalyze the development of two types of products: broad-spectrum preventatives and air cleaning technologies. Together, these technologies can radically reduce the burden of respiratory infections, and can eventually help eliminate them altogether. 

Why this matters

Today, we treat respiratory infections like the cold and influenza as a minor nuisance. The evidence increasingly suggests otherwise.

* Healthy people spend roughly 15-25 days each year—about 5% of their lives—sick with respiratory infections like the common cold and influenza.1

* Common respiratory infections can lead to severe outcomes. In 2021 alone, there were 12.8 billion infections globally, mostly caused by viruses.2 Annually, over 65 million3 4 of these progress to serious lower respiratory disease and account for around 7% of deaths from major causes in the U.S.5 6 7

* Respiratory infections raise our risk of serious illness, often years later. While researchers are still early in establishing these connections, it seems plausible that society has meaningfully underestimated the significance of seemingly benign infections on short and long-term health, e.g.:

** 9.8x asthma risk by age 6 if infected with HRV between birth and age 3 in a high-risk cohort8

** 6.1x heart attack risk for 7 days after influenza infection9

** 4.5-5x dementia risk after severe influenza10

** 2.6-4.1x Alzheimer’s risk after severe influenza and pneumonia11

** 2.2-3x schizophrenia potential risk for infant if mother is infected by influenza during pregnancy12 13

** 1.3x risk of heart failure after RSV infection compared to influenza14

* Routine respiratory illness imposes a massive, persistent economic burden, driving 1–1.5% annual productivity losses—roughly $600B globally, or ~0.6% of global GDP—in non-pandemic years.15

* Emerging evidence suggests that severe prenatal16 17 and early postnatal18 respiratory infections might lead to reduced adult earnings and educational attainment later in life.

* Achieving broad protection against respiratory pathogens would meaningfully reduce pandemic risk, serving as a critical first line of defense—alongside air disinfection—against both natural outbreaks and increasingly accessible engineered biological threats. 

Two technologies, working together

No single technology can accomplish population-level infection reduction across all of these pathogens. A shot or pill that provided >90% protection against >90% of respiratory viruses (we’ll call these broad-spectrum preventatives or BSPs), but achieved ~60% uptake (a realistic ceiling based on existing vaccine uptake), would still fall short of of the population immunity required to dramatically reduce sustained transmissions.

This is because there are so many different kinds of respiratory viruses, many of which are highly contagious. It’s helpful to revisit the concept of R0 from the COVID pandemic: the number of people an infected person will infect in a fully unprotected population. While we can’t change the intrinsic R0 of a given virus, we can reduce any given virus’s effective reproduction number (Re): how infective a virus is in a given environment inclusive of interventions. To eliminate a virus, its Re needs to drop below 1. The vast majority of seasonal respiratory viruses have an R0 between 1 and 3. To eliminate an R3.0 virus, you need roughly 67% of the population to be protected.

So, to get closer to elimination, we also need a way to reduce the virions circulating in high density environments. During COVID the world experimented with various interventions like social distancing and personal protective equipment. But to reduce transmission durably for a large number of common respiratory viruses that are perennially circulating, we need solutions that are convenient and minimally disruptive.

We think the most promising category of products that accomplish these goals are those that remove pathogens from the air, particularly in high-density environments like offices, schools, and public transit. We’ll call these air cleaning technologies (ACTs) like air filtration and far-UVC antimicrobial light.

The uptake required for BSPs or for ACTs to be effective by themselves is extremely high. As a benchmark, commercial fire sprinkler penetration is about 40% in the US. Getting to 100% uptake would be extremely difficult. But when deployed together at realistic levels, BSPs and ACTs could achieve our goals.

From the Intercept blog which estimates that breakthroughs can be made with half a billion dollars. 

U.K. Navy Makes Smarter Decision Than U.S. Navy

The U.K.'s Navy, unlike the U.S. Navy, understands that building more 1980s era concept destroyers no longer makes sense. They've been paying attention to the Ukraine War in the Black Sea in which traditional surface combatants are being felled by drones. 

The U.S. hasn't been and instead is working on a "Trump-class Battleship" which is precisely the wrong direction, and more Arleigh Burke class destroyers.

Navy to build drone-equipped warships instead of replacing ageing destroyers

PA Media

Plans to replace ageing warships will be scrapped in favour of building at least six new modern "hybrid" vessels equipped to deploy drones as part of the UK's upcoming defence strategy.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) said the new vessels would be more suited to the "pace and nature of modern warfare", and a better investment than a "small number of large expensive ships".

Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis said the new equipment would be "designed and built for the increasing threats we face".

Outgoing Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has committed to publishing the long-delayed defence investment plan (DIP) before the Nato summit in Turkey on 7 July after months of talks over how to fund it.

The MoD had been exploring options to replace the Type 45, the Navy's fleet of destroyers, with the Type 83, a concept vessel which was at an early design phase.

Instead, investment will now go towards six new Common Combat Vessels, which the department said would be capable of "coordinating uncrewed systems in the air, on the surface and under the sea to deliver more resilient air defence".

It said the change in approach would extend "the Navy's reach, resilience and firepower without a proportional increase in crew or cost".

From the BBC. 

Stocks

From here.

It is an open secret that the stock market in the U.S. is currently being driven by fewer than a dozen wildly overvalued tech stocks that account for the lion's share of it's growth (like the ones shown above, particularly Tesla and SpaceX).

The stock market is not particularly good at accurately estimating the true value of public held companies.

Inaccurate stock prices are an objectively bad thing at the level of the aggregate economy, because they cause investment capital to be misallocated. Too much money is allocated to investments that don't have as good of a likely return on investment, while too little money is allocated to investments that could produce better returns. And, since the stock market is huge, the economic consequences of these misallocations of investment capital on the economy are huge and negative.

Inaccurate asset prices also allocate personal wealth to people who hype their stocks to be worth more than they really are to stupid investors, basically, systemically creating immense returns to dishonesty.

Asset price bubbles aren't bad for everyone. There are two basic ways you can profit from them. One is to invest in the bubble asset despite knowing that it is overvalued, to ride its irrational surge in price, and to get out before the bubble pops. The other is to short the bubble asset and profit when the bubble pops, but this requires your short to be timed for when the bubble pops.

Why is the stock market so bad at pricing these stocks despite the fact that some of the smartest people in the country are employed to analyze and act on this data, and despite the fact that there is a lot of very good quality data about publicly held companies that can be used to value them accurately that is available?

One possibility is that a lot of investors in the stock market are on autopilot trading schemes, like index funds, that are free riding off the people who are actively trading individual stocks, that increasing numbers of ill-informed investors are actively trading individuals stocks as it has become easier to do so, and that the bad decisions of this dumb money is being amplified by autopilot trading.

Another explanation, not necessarily inconsistent with the first, is that this is a generational effect. Baby boomers are moving into their final years of employment and into retirement. They have immense stock market wealth. They are retired and bored, so they try actively trading individual stocks, and they are pouring money into the stock market that exceeds the extent to which stocks have reasonable values (as are individuals who save for retirement believing Social Security to be in peril and knowing that unlike Boomers, they have no defined benefit pensions). Due to the geriatric character of people with power who know what is going on, this is not a problem that they want to solve because they benefit from overvalued stocks in their retirement when they are living off of their investments. Political momentum for reform will come when the Boomers retire or when the bubble collapses, whichever comes first (and asset price bubbles inevitably collapse sooner or later even though the timing of when the bubble pops is notoriously difficult to estimate).

If the bubble sustains itself until the Boomers are mostly dead, the pain will be felt by Generation X and to a lesser extent Millennials (who will at least have more time to recover), in other words, by people like me.