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We have a lot for you this week! Covering everything from atoms to commodities and precivilization to our indictmentpalooza. James, Rob and Steve discuss the latest from Mar-a-Lago; Hunter’s crumbled plea deal; and the disengenous reaction to Florida’s African American History curriculum .
They also enjoy some good news with guest Marian Tupy, whose latest book Superabundance reminds us of mankind’s still-favorable prospects for grow and flourish in the years to come. The guys consider the difference between the environmentalists who’ve spent years predicting doom and the economists who bet on progress.
Song of the Week:
- Soundbites for the opening music from Kamala Harris’ comments in Jacksonville on Florida’s curriculum and William Allen’s response.
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I enjoyed listening to Mr. Tupy. It was all very sensible. I might buy the book. I would really like to have a little library of all the authors Mr.Hayward listed. Did he include Indur Goklany? My first revelation on this subject was, of course, Julian Simon. However, he was not enough. We need many more, an overwhelming tsunami of such thought and research. Thanks for the interview.
What a terrific episode! Quite encouraging.
Also very amusing, hearing Mr. Tupy’s description of today’s “elite” class as — I am paraphrasing, of course — angry that the unwashed masses (that’d be us) don’t automatically do what our “betters” 🙄 think needs to be done for the Earth to thrive.
BTW, that does not include us thriving. 🤨
Really may need to get that book.
I’m all in favor of eating plankton, but I’m also in favor of letting planktivorous fish do the hard work of gathering them up and concentrating them in the form of fish muscle to eat.
I can’t stand any kind of fish/seafood.
That can design is real, by the way. MGM sent out press kits for the movie that contained green crackers.
My daughter has a degree in economics and knows nothing about capitalism. I learned nothing about capitalism in my econ classes. It is shameful that econ 101 does not explain capitalism. Conversely students in Florida will be taught a little something.
In the long run, the Austrians are right about everything.
https://vblgoldfix.substack.com/p/must-read-russell-napier-interview?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2FRussell%2520Napier&utm_medium=reader2
AOC was an econ major as well
Yes, I did run through several names quickly, though not Goklany, who I should have mentioned as I know “Goks” (as his friends call him) quite well. The other people I mentioned were Max Roser, who runs Our World in Data at Oxford; Hans Rosling, the late Swedish demographer (look up his terrific YouTube videos), and Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist among other books.
I knew Julian Simon pretty well. Can’t believe it’s been 25 years now since he left us.
Paul Erlich is real, too, btw. A former boss of mine is a good friend of his, or so I heard from several sources. It was nothing he ever told me about, or talked about in my presence, even though he did tend to be talkative and open about many subjects.
It is getting harder and harder to listen to these Ricochet podcasts, as guests all too often make truly offensive and supremely ignorant comments. The comment here was Tupy’s comment that James Watson shouldn’t be censored, just because he made some offensive comments, as his discovery of the structure of DNA was such a great and fundamental discovery (or something to that effect). Mr Tupy appears oblivious to the history. James Watson discovered the structure of DNA precisely BECAUSE of his bigotry. And his disdain for ordinary people. Ironic that Tupy so completely contradicts himself (likely unawares, as he appears entirely oblivious to the history of Eugenics, which was the driving force–and money, mainly from the very progressive Rockefeller Foundation, the focus of which was to control the quality of human beings through Eugenics–unless Tupy agrees with Eugenics?). From his comments, I would put him in the category of persons who don’t like their lessers, such as myself, to have ideas or information of which they don’t approve.
To rehash again, as I have done before, sounding like a broken record: Watson was a protege of Linus Pauling, who was a vile Eugenicist. He worked at Cal Tech, the foremost and most vile Eugenics institution in the nation, where more people were forcibly sterilized than at any other institution in the nation (some 16,000 individuals) for being genetically ‘unfit’ (according to Paul Popenoe, David Star Jordan, Ezra Gosney, Harry Chandler, and all of the board members of Cal Tech, and pretty much all of the faculty, including Robert Milliken, Nobel Laureate, whose name was removed from a building at Cal Tech in 2021 due to his Eugenic ideas). Linus Pauling sent Watson to England to work with Crick once he realized that the key to heredity was most likely to be found in nucleic acids rather than proteins. Pauling authored a preface to an issue of the UCLA Law Review in 1968 (not 1928, not 1938, not even 1948, but 1968) wherein he extolled Eugenics and advocated for his “yellow star” program of placing a visible physical brand on anyone carrying sickle cell trait, to dissuade such a person from marrying another person with sickle trait and thereby incurring a 25% chance of having offspring with Sickle Cell disease. His backup position was abortion to avoid persons with sickle cell disease from being born. Mr Tupy should read Leonard Thomas’s book, “Illiberal Reformers” about the Economists that were at the forefront of Eugenics, including Ira Fisher at Yale. But perhaps Mr Tupy, in his enthusiasm for so called “good ideas” agrees with the idea of genetically improving the human species by genetic manipulation Perhaps he agrees with Yuval Harari that we should make gods out of ourselves with our capacity to manipulate the human genome.
Of course no one called him on that statement. Too polite. Steve tried to walk it back, without succeeding, it seems to me. Shame on Ricochet.
In general, the hosts probably don’t know enough themselves about many subjects, to be good effective interviewers on them.
Although it may simply be that they had him on the show just to talk about refuting the ideas of limited resources etc, as propounded by the Left, and weren’t interested in getting into the weeds regarding eugenics etc.
You are right. My soapbox is that that should change. Particularly as Eugenics remains front and center in our “Science” and underpins the transhumance thinkers like Harare that are currently ascendant in our “civilization”. Malthusian ideas continue to dominate exacerbated by climate change religion as Mr Tupy points out, and James Watson’s thinking continues to predominate as well. He was retired from the directorship of the Cold Spring Harbor lab (an appropriate position for him as that lab housed the Eugenics Records Office under Harry Laughlin and Charles Davenport, Ureugenecists) because he kept letting the cat out of the bag. You are not allowed to do that now, lo these 70 years later. These things have to be kept under wraps, and the public kept unaware.
Which country (culture) is leading on eugenics today? Is it the USA with our spaying and neutering kids? Is it Canada with euthanasia for the poor? Is it Germany, for whatever they are doing? Is it the Slavs that are sending all their prisoners to fight and die in the muddy fields? Or, is it Sri Lanka for abandoning modern farming and starving their poor?
That would be correct. I have a scant smattering of knowledge on the topic.
Who does?
That’s why talk-show hosts/interviewers might do some advance research, or just ask the members. :-)
But you may not have wanted to ask Marian Tupy about eugenics anyway, even if you’d known about it.
Jonah mentioned Tupy in a “Remnant” podcast back in 2018 (March 15) and didn’t mention eugenics then either. It was also just about the ridiculousness of “peak resources” or whatever.
I don’t think that Tupy knows much of anything about eugenics. That was the error of his comment, to the effect that Watson’s bigotry had nothing to do with his great scientific discovery. It had everything to do with it. That was the prevailing perspective of Watson’s milieu. Which has been airbrushed out of our history, with malice aforethought.Tupy should know that. If he does, he is contributing to the falsification of that history. If he does not, he is misleading us with his ignorance. Either way he is an unreliable interlocutor, particularly on progress and innovation. He’s got the climate religion pegged. Alas Eugenics was of the same ilk. It was directly and intentionally followed by abortion, which was Eugenics by other means.
I somehow missed the reference to James Watson in the interview, but I have found the subsequent discussion very informative. I somehow missed Cal Tech as Center of eugenics activity. This leads to my current soapbox, the humanized mouse. I claim this whole Covid thing can be traced to the development of the humanized mouse. A humanized mouse is a mouse with the lung tissue of an aborted baby surgically attached to its body. This development allowed rapid testing for engineering viruses. It is relatively new, and our exportation of this innovation to Chinese labs was very important. As I understand it, each new humanized mouse needs aborted fetal tissue, and the world uses thousands upon thousands of these mice. The aborted fetuses must be old enough to have the properly developed tissue, around three months or more I think. It is s huge business. I would like to know how many are made every year, how many fetuses are used, and who is doing it. I suspect that pharmaceutical testing in all its forms is using lots of humanized mice, and the use stretches beyond virus engineering. You don’t hear much about it.
That’s interesting.
Civil society is organically eugenic. Top down government appropriation of civil society prerogatives is always destructive. Government eugenics degenerates into ethnic score-settling among other problems.
Where is Peter, anyway?
It is an interview and it was lively and informative. I don’t expect debate club.
That’s a broad statement. Could you be more specific as to which things were connected and how they were connected?
I could never come up with this articulation, but it’s perfect. I love this podcast and this is exactly why. Rob is not that great at promoting his political views, but it doesn’t affect me at all. I want to hear what he says.
As a producer, I don’t want know-it-all hosts. I want hosts with curiosity and just enough knowledge to make them dangerous.
The biggest change I’ve seen during my four decades in the media (outside of technical changes) is that your average host/anchor/reporter has embraced political wisdom at the expense of curiosity.
It is kept under wraps. You may remember the undercover tapes that came out several years ago about trafficking in aborted fetal tissues. The makers of those tapes are still under prosecution in California, to my awareness. All of that fetal tissue is moved through clearing houses at Universities, such as the U of Washington in Seattle. There are NIH guidelines on this but there is no enforcement. I sent an email to the then president (Henry Kronenberg, head of Endocrinology at Harvard) of my professional organization, the Endocrine Society, about the use of such tissues by members of that organization. He refused to address my question. Fauci was a great funder of those humanized mouse models. Not all require fetal tissue however. The Endocrine society is awash in all of the woke ideology.
All of the above. Include Bill Gates, who has always been an avid eugenicist and malthusian, after his father. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., appears to have been right about Gates’ efforts to create sterility in Africa through one of his charities by lacing Tetanus toxoid with HCG and ordering monthly shots for girls (tetanus boosters are given once every 10 years). The Catholic organizations that were providing the healthcare services apparently got suspicious of the protocol and had the vaccine tested, and, if news reports are accurate, the vaccine did contain HCG. The idea, to induce an antibody response to HCG to impair fertility, was hair-brained, and didn’t work, but then Bill Gates has had more than one completely harebrained, literally insane, idea that, given his wealth and influence, he might actually carry out–a real threat to the planet he is. Out elites and not so elites from around the world appear to have gone all in on population control and by extension eugenics. As Tupy said, this is a religion, and there are many fanatics in power around the world, both public and private. All this is connected with the Harari-style transhuman agenda to create “superior” human beings through genetic engineering. The assumption of course is that we can do this ad libitum without horrendous consequences, which we cannot. WE may be able to blunt or prevent some specific genetic diseases, but we won’t be able to engineer superior human beings. That is of a complexity that is so far beyond our understanding and capacity, that any effort is almost certain to create monsters. That won’t stop the effort. I would suspect that China is likely leading on this. One project that I suspect they are undertaking is to produce humans with single allele mutations (heterozygous) in the myostatin gene, which will create marvelously muscled humans suitable for warfare. Others may be working on this as well (the US?). At a minimum, they may get an unbeatable Olympics team. Once you see China completely dominating in the Olympics, you’ll know what as afoot.
The debt to GDP is too high for any of this. Take any figure you want that is debt to GDP. All of that that is going to implode if people don’t keep having more babies and we don’t figure out how to keep the GDP up. Literally 2/3 of GDP growth is population growth. Doing this with the lying illegal immigrants is insane, but that is what they are doing.
The system is too reliant on credit growth because of excessive inflationism. You get a continual decrease in GDP stimulation from debt growth over time. Then the whole system falls apart. Throw in the unfunded liabilities and you have a real disaster. Government has no foresight.
https://vblgoldfix.substack.com/p/must-read-russell-napier-interview?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2FRussell%2520Napier&utm_medium=reader2
We should have switched to deflation after the Soviet Union fell.