But let's not fail to remember the Reason For The Season. I won't beat you over the head with it, but… come on.
Also too easy to forget to appreciate: what makes America's generosity possible. Fortunately, Veronique de Rugy writes In Appreciation of What Makes America's Generosity Possible.
The Christmas season is a time to reflect on what we have, which includes the kind of society that has made countless blessings possible. The warmth, security and generosity that many Americans experience during the holidays are not accidents or pure gifts of nature. In their tangible sense, they are the products of a long and extraordinary period of economic growth — one that has expanded opportunity, reduced hardship and given moral ideals room to breathe.
History shows quite clearly that the societies most capable of generosity and liberalism are not those trapped in poverty but those that have escaped it. An abundance of wealth does not corrupt moral life; it enables it. Economic growth is not a rival to our highest values. It's a precondition to their most vigorous pursuit.
This truth is easy to forget precisely because modern growth has been so successful. We take for granted the material abundance that allows us to debate its spiritual costs. For most of human existence, life was defined by constant vulnerability. Hunger, disease and early death were ever-present. The idea that ordinary people could expect anything different — let alone genuine comfort or opportunity — would sound fantastical to our preindustrial ancestors.
It is, in fact, fantastical. Something to remember as I wolf down my freshly-microwaved InnovAsian Chinese-Style BBQ Pork Fried Rice this evening while watching last night's TiVo'd Jeopardy! I might not even bother to skip over commercials!
Also of note:
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Another year, another reminder that we are in big fiscal trouble. The National Review newshounds bring it: Rand Paul Highlights Wild Government Waste in Annual 'Festivus' Report.
Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) released a report Tuesday detailing $1.6 trillion in government waste, in keeping with his annual “Festivus” tradition of airing grievances against wasteful federal spending.
A whopping $1.2 trillion of that wasteful spending is interest payments on the ballooning national debt, according to the report, which contains numerous examples of government programs Paul considers to be useless and fiscally irresponsible.
“Last Festivus, we clamored over the national debt reaching over an astronomical $36 trillion. Shockingly, in one short year, the career politicians and bureaucrats in Washington have managed to reach nearly $40 trillion in debt, without so much as a second thought. When asked who’s to blame for our crushing level of debt, the answer is ‘Everyone.’ This year, Congress voted to raise the debt ceiling by $5 trillion, the most we ever have,” Paul’s report reads.
Many of Rand's grievances are relative lost-in-the-sofa small change to Uncle Stupid. But to pick one at random from the report:
Woke U: HHS gave $3.3 million to Northwestern University so they can hire 15 people, erect “scientific neighborhoods,” install “safe space ambassadors,” and form endless committees to “dismantle systemic racism.”
Whoa. That can't be right, can it? I thought all that woke stuff was over!
But no. An excerpt from the report's citation of the grant summary:
NURTURE: NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY RECRUITMENT TO TRANSFORM UNDER-REPRESENTATION AND ACHIEVE EQUITY - MODIFIED PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT SECTION WE ARE UNYIELDING IN OUR SUPPORT OF THE PRINCIPLES DRIVING THE NIH FIRST PROGRAM IN PROPOSING NURTURE: NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY RECRUITMENT TO TRANSFORM UNDER-REPRESENTATION AND ACHIEVE EQUITY. NURTURE WILL EMPLOY A FACULTY COHORT MODEL, INNOVATIONS IN FACULTY SUPPORT, AND MECHANISMS TO DRIVE INSTITUTIONAL TRANSFORMATION TO SUBSTANTIVELY ADD TO OUR UNIVERSITY’S OWN INITIATIVES TO BUILD A SUSTAINABLE CULTURE OF FACULTY DIVERSITY AND INCLUSIVE EXCELLENCE. CENTERED WITHIN NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY’S WORLD CLASS RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT, NURTURE AIMS TO DISRUPT SYSTEMIC BARRIERS THAT IMPEDE FULL PARTICIPATION OF BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH SCIENTISTS FROM UNDERREPRESENTED GROUPS (URG) BY INVESTING IN INCLUSIVE CULTURAL CHANGE WITHIN OUR INSTITUTION. WE ACKNOWLEDGE THAT SYSTEMIC RACISM HAS PERSISTED IN BIOMEDICAL SCIENCE, INCLUDING AT NORTHWESTERN. WE ARE COMMITTED TO DISMANTLING THE STRUCTURES THAT HAVE ALLOWED RACISM AND BIAS TO PERSIST AND IMPEDED THE SCIENTIFIC CAREERS OF TOO MANY URG SCHOLARS. NURTURE PROPOSES TO TRANSFORM SILOED FIEFDOM STRUCTURES TO TRANSDISCIPLINARY SCIENTIFIC NEIGHBORHOODS THAT WILL FOSTER GROWTH AND ACCOMPLISHMENT IN THE RESEARCH, CAREER, AND PERSONAL TRAJECTORIES OF URG FACULTY. NURTURE IS SUPPORTED BY AN ADMINISTRATIVE CORE, A FACULTY DEVELOPMENT CORE, AND AN EVALUATION CORE THAT WILL WORK SYNERGISTICALLY, AND WITH NIH AND THE FIRST COORDINATION AND EVALUATION CENTER (CEC), TO ACHIEVE PROGRAM GOALS. NURTURE WILL DRIVE SUCCESS THROUGH SEVERAL INNOVATIONS. OUR DIVERSE MPI AND SENIOR LEADERSHIP TEAM HAS A LONGSTANDING COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY, EQUITY, INCLUSION, COMMUNITY BUILDING, AND FACULTY CAREER DEVELOPMENT. THEY WILL LEVERAGE STRONG INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT TO IMPLEMENT SYSTEMIC INNOVATIONS TOWARD A MORE INCLUSIVE AND SUSTAINED CULTURE OF EXCELLENCE (AIM 1). NURTURE IS CENTERED ON A SPECTRUM OF RESEARCH FROM CELLS TO COMMUNITY IN EACH OF THREE CROSS-DEPARTMENTAL SCIENTIFIC NEIGHBORHOODS ALIGNED WITH NIH MISSION AREAS: CANCER, CARDIOVASCULAR, AND BRAIN, MIND AND BEHAVIOR. SCIENTIFIC NEIGHBORHOODS WILL WELCOME 15 NEW URG FACULTY (THE NURTURE COHORT) (AIM 2), IN A CULTURE OF SCIENTIFIC EXCELLENCE AND INCLUSION. RUNWAYS TO THESE NEW FACULTY POSITIONS WILL BE BUILT FROM A FOUNDATION OF LONG-STANDING TRAINING PROGRAMS, WELL-ESTABLISHED LOCAL RELATIONSHIPS, AND A NEW INITIATIVE ON POSTDOCTORAL TRAINING. AIM 3 ESTABLISHES EVIDENCE-INFORMED INNOVATIVE ADVANCEMENT PROGRAMS THAT INCLUDE PROFESSIONAL COACHING, A TEAM OF SAFE SPACE AMBASSADORS, AND COMPREHENSIVE MENTORING AND SPONSORSHIP FOR NURTURE COHORT MEMBERS TO EMPOWER SELF-EFFICACY AND COMBAT ISOLATION THROUGHOUT THEIR NORTHWESTERN ONBOARDING AND PROMOTION JOURNEY. AIM 4 IS DRIVEN BY AN EXPERT EVALUATION TEAM THAT WILL EMPLOY STATE-OF-THE-ART APPROACHES TO GUIDE REAL-TIME IMPROVEMENT TOWARD SUCCESS. FINALLY, A ROBUST INSTITUTIONAL TRANSFORMATION AND ACCOUNTABILITY COMMITTEE WILL BOLSTER INSTITUTIONAL CONNECTIVITY AND ACCELERATE SCALED IMPLEMENTATION OF NURTURE FINDINGS BY NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY LEADERS TO SUSTAINABLY TRANSFORM OUR INSTITUTIONAL CULTURE TOWARD INCLUSIVE EXCELLENCE.
Yikes!
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Scrooge got a bad rap. But John Tierney would like you to know about The Scrooges of 2025. And their names are …
We still have Scrooges this holiday season, and the wealthiest of them—George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, and Tom Steyer—have inflicted far more suffering on the poor than Scrooge ever did to Bob Cratchit and the working class of his day. These billionaires may not seem like Scrooges, given their extensive philanthropy, but that’s only because most readers today don’t understand exactly where the original Scrooge went wrong.
We think him of a greedy miser—a “clutching, covetous, old sinner,” in Dickens’s words—whose wealth came at the expense of the adults and children forced to live in squalid flats and toil at grueling jobs for meager pay. Dickens was inspired to write the story by a government report on child labor in mines and factories, and by the living conditions he had witnessed among workers at textile mills in Manchester and in Lowell, Massachusetts. Like the poet William Blake, who famously lamented the “dark Satanic mills” of the Industrial Revolution, Dickens clearly saw the downside of nineteenth-century capitalism.
But there was an upside, too, which was why workers kept leaving their farms and other jobs to work in those mills. In the centuries before the Industrial Revolution, illiteracy was widespread in England (especially among women), life expectancy, was less than 40, and per-capita income remained stagnant. But during the nineteenth century, literacy rates, life expectancy, and incomes rose at unprecedented rates.
Specifically, John calls out Soros for his lawbreaker-leniency; Bloomberg for his nanny-state jihad against vaping; Gates for his keep-the-kiddos-masked COVID policy; Steyer for his "green" energy demands. All with obvious damages inflicted on the most vulnerable.
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Unexpected application of past insights. Via Instapundit, Rachel Lomasky presents Hayek’s Rules for AI. Yes, Hayek's been dead for 33 years. But:
Hayek's Complexity Theory can provide essential frameworks for understanding the emergent systems we are building with LLMs, enabling us to solve novel, challenging problems that neither humans nor computers could address alone.
Hayek was famed for emphasizing the brand of knowledge consisting of a "complex, emergent, spontaneous, and functional order that arises from decentralized interactions and vast, unstructured data." I.e., just the kind of thing generated by AI's Large Language Models.
But I also wanted to steal and share the illustration generated by Instapundit's Ed Driscoll:
Merry Christmas to Salma, and also any reader who made it down this far. ("My eyes are up here!")
![[The Blogger]](/ps/images/barred.jpg)
