A calendar-appropriate repost.

It was nearly 42 years ago, Sunday evening, May 16, 1982 when an officer at Chase Manhattan Bank took a phone call from a small brokerage house, an event that sent shudders through the nation’s financial community and nearly crashed the government securities market.   On the phone was an official of Drysdale Government Securities Inc., with which the bank did business. He told the Chase officer that the company ”may have a problem” meeting a $200 million interest payment owed to Chase and due the next day on some $3.2 billion of government securities.   Could the Chase, then the nation’s third-largest bank,  see its way clear to lending Drysdale $200 million to tide Drysdale over and allow it to not default on the $200 million already due?     It was really just a way to paper over the impending default and kick the can down the road.    If Chase could help Drysdale hang on just a little longer ….

(AP Newswire) The country and the world are still reeling from last night’s Presidential television address, which is quoted here in its entirety:

“My fellow Americans:

“Good evening. I would like to speak briefly about an issue that has caused great concern for years, and especially since the tragic events of last October 7.

Another day, another gaffe. Such is the state of the American presidency. If one is young enough, they would find this entirely ordinary. While there are many faults to find with the kids these days, they oughtn’t be blamed for this aspect of their sorry attitudes. However, Joe Biden’s latest slip, at a campaign event in Detroit with the NAACP on Sunday, is something else.

“When I was vice president, things were kind of bad during the pandemic and what happened was, Barack said to me, ‘Go to Detroit! Help fix it,” Biden said. He was not, in fact, vice president during any portion of the pandemic…

Currently a fellow at the Hoover Institution, Paul Wolfowitz previously served as director of policy planning at the State Department, as US ambassador to Indonesia, as under secretary of defense for policy, as dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, as deputy secretary of defense, and as president of the World Bank. He is perhaps best known as a policymaker during the war in Afghanistan and the first and second wars in Iraq, and that is what we delve into in great detail in this episode. Wolfowitz gives his views on what the United States got right and got wrong in both Iraq and Afghanistan, recounting the data available to decision makers at the time and the decision-making processes. He also gives new details on why the Bush administration believed Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and determined an invasion of Afghanistan was necessary after 9/11, and how the idea for the surge in Iraq was conceived and executed.

In something of a shocker, a seven-two majority of the US Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, has approved of the novel funding methods that Congress devised, largely under the guidance of Senator Elizabeth Warren, for one of her favorite agencies created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank legislation: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB’s stated mission is “to make consumer financial markets work for consumers, responsible providers, and the economy as a whole” by protecting the public from unfair, deceptive, and abusive business practices. As constituted, the CFPB has little interest in combating or limiting any potential abuses of its own administrative powers.

As the federal government candidly acknowledges in its petition for certiorari, the distinctive mission of the CFPB led Congress to endow the agency with special powers that insulate it from annual oversight by Congress. The first is that it has a sole director, not the usual set of five commissioners, who serves a term of five years, under which he is removable only “for cause,” defined as “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” which is operable in few if any cases. The Supreme Court invalidated the CFPB director’s “for cause” removal protections in 2020. Second, the work of the CFPB was funded solely by a partial transfer of the revenues generated by the Federal Reserve System, in the amount that the CFPB director deems “reasonably necessary to carry out” the agency’s duties, subject only to an inflation-adjusted financial cap, equal to 12 percent of the Federal Reserve’s total operating expenses. Note that, given these two combined layers of insulation, neither the Congress nor the Federal Reserve can block the appropriations, and the moneys so appropriated in one year, if not used, can be carried over to future years in perpetuity.

Let’s say you are an acknowledged thought-leader. You might be a religious authority or a scientist or a popular academic. People listen to you, and they tend to repeat what you have said. You have influence. Your ideas can change the world, even if you are otherwise a total nobody.

This is the opposite of power, which is coercive, and scales with money and government. Big Men have power. But men like Moses and Plato and Aristotle have influence. The latter are far more important to our lives today than the most powerful men of their ages – Pharaohs and Alexanders and Caesars.

Karim Khan (Wikimedia Commons)

The International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants from the court’s pretrial chamber for leaders of both Hamas and Israel for war crimes committed on October 7th and in the resultant war in Gaza.

My weekly routine involves watching Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi on their Friday podcast, America This Week. Appended to their commentary and observations about the events that make up the most current news cycle are short stories of timeless application to the human condition. This week the story was It’s Christmas Not Just Once a Year by Heinrich Böll:

Among our relatives, symptoms of disintegration are beginning to show up that for a while we tried silently to ignore but the threat of which we are now determined to face squarely. I do not yet dare use the word “collapse,” but the alarming facts are accumulating to the point where they represent a threat and compel me to speak of things that may sound strange to the ears of my contemporaries but whose reality no one can dispute. The mildew of decay has obtained a foothold under the thick, hard veneer of respectability, colonies of deadly parasites heralding the end of the integrity of an entire clan. Today we must regret having ignored the voice of our cousin Franz, who long ago began to draw attention to the terrible consequences of what was on the face of it a harmless event.

FJ spent the weekend making the campaign pitch to Black voters … accompanied by a giant pile of cash for Historically Black  Colleges.   The full frontal assault on what should be his core supporters speaks volumes.    The most recent polling numbers I have seen indicated that Trump’s support among Black voters was about 20% and going up.   It’s no surprise.    The weaponization of the legal system against Trump is the causal factor mentioned by the talking heads.   But there’s more than psychology at play.   There is a stark economic case for Trump.    In contrast to the MSM narrative of Trump-as-racist, the data show something very different …

Let’s look at real (inflation adjusted) wages:

Here’s a little game we played at the staff meeting at our Mission this week. Three questions about people, objects and events from the Bible that you would happily bring into the world today to make it a better place. I was curious how the fine people of Ricochet would answer these questions, so here goes:

1. If you could bring any person from the Bible into the world (your personal life, the political world, anywhere else), who would it be? (Sorry, excluding Jesus, God the Father, and the Holy Spirit because I believe they are still around.)
2.  If you could bring any object or animal from the Bible into the world, what would it be?
3. If you could perform any miracle from Scripture today, what would it be? (At the Mission we had to exclude the water into wine as we are a Recovery site, not that’s not a problem here.)

A few weeks ago, I was at a lunch with a number of very wealthy men. And, as seems to happen in non-religious circles, the wealthy men brought their trophies with them. These particular trophies were lovely and intelligent – for actresses and supermodels. Which made me realize that, in the minds of these men, the young ladies were, in fact, not different from wives. The arrangements seemed to be mutually satisfying: each party was trading one thing for another.

From an economic or contractual basis, there is really no difference between prostitution and marriage. Once you strip out the time horizon – the length – of the relationship, then the arrangement seems to essentially have the same core elements, whether it lasts for a night or for decades.  I am quite sure this is how those men (and probably those women) see it.  It seems likely to me that they have seen no convincing counterargument.

Your enjoyment of this film will likely depend on whether you were listening to Christian pop music three decades ago. I was a youth pastor at the time, so, sure, I took students to see Michael W. Smith in concert introducing DC Talk as his opening act. Unsung Hero features actors playing performers central to the world of Christian music in the 1990s. Rachel Hendrix plays a kind and gracious Amy Grant. Jonathan Jackson plays Eddie Degarmo (of Degarmo and Key), a benefactor of the film’s family. Joe Chambrello plays Carmen who isn’t very helpful. There’s serious nostalgia cred as the film opens, with Christian hair band Stryper playing at the Sydney Opera House.

That’s when we meet the central figure in the film: Christian music promoter David Smallbone (played by David’s son, Joel Smallbone). His promotion of Stryper’s Australia tour led him to believe he was set on a path to fame and fortune, so he invested everything the family had in his next venture: Amy Grant’s Australian, Lead Me On, tour. His wife is unsure about this venture; he ultimately loses their savings and their house. He pins his career hopes on a deal with Christian mega-star Carmen in America. At his wife’s insistence, they pack up their six (with one on the way) children and move to Nashville, Tennessee.

With his family in an unfurnished rental house, no car, and little cash, David’s deal with Carmen falls through. He falls into a deep depression.

David Chalmers, a leading philosopher of mind and consciousness, tells us that the “hard” problem is qualia, that is, explaining the subjective experience of experience.  Explaining the sensation of seeing the color red, for example. How do we explain the subjective internal experience of seeing the color red?

The philosophers always seem to choose the color red, for unclear reasons. First of all, I object, because I am partially red/green color blind. I can’t see any numbers in those Ishihara plates with all the colored dots. So my experience of red is not exactly the same as that of other people. In medical school, when we had to identify gram-negative organisms under the microscopic, I saw grey. My classmates saw vivid bright red. I aced the exams because the gram-positive organisms that we had to distinguish from the gram-negative organisms was easy: distinguish grey from blue. No problem.