Gongol.com Archives: September 2018
September 26, 2018
Charlie Munger once advised that "Your competitors will keep learning, so you have to go to bed smarter than you woke up." Seeing America (and the ideas upon which it is founded) in the context of global competition -- for the obvious things, like military power and economic strength, but more importantly for the ultimate objective, which is the predominance of the idea of ordered liberty in the world -- a question is in order: Is America going to bed tonight smarter than it woke up?
We have a leading contender for "Stupidest Person of 2018", and it's a musician who not only went to the ER after overdosing on snack foods, he went on to tell the world about it on social media. This medical oddity deserves further study, because surely anyone this stupid lacks a functioning cerebral cortex.
CDC says flu killed 80,000 Americans last winter
That's an extremely high number -- the worst in 40 years, and likely twice as many as the number of Americans killed in car crashes (40,100 in 2017). Infectious diseases are still very much a threat to us all, and fighting them requires a spectrum of public-health responses that face a lot more resistance than they should. Social media in particular encourages people to share really stupid opinions -- particularly on the anti-vaccination front -- and those bad opinions, paradoxically, spread virally. Real leadership would ask the public-health sector "What resources do you need to drive this number of preventable deaths as close to zero as possible?", and would then seek to marshal public opinion behind making that happen.
A question for the Show-Me State
Why does Missouri have a river named the "One Hundred and Two"?
