Grant Starrett

Christian. Conservative. Capitalist.
Husband. Homeschool Dad x3. Humorist.
Got degrees in history and law, always reading more

[Grant Starrett @GrantforTN]

Only 3 months old and my son already grasps sound money.

[Henry Shevlin @dioscuri]

As a teenager reading about the decline of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, I couldn't understand why they mostly just let it happen. Why not reform urgently, slash the bureaucracy, race to adopt the new technologies?
Much less confused these days.

[Peter Leithart @PLeithart]

Peter Brown's summary of one of the recently-discovered letters of Augustine: "we find Augustine, at the age of seventy-three (only three years before his death), interviewing a terrified country girl who described how her farm had been raided by slave traders. The poor child could not even speak Latin - only Punic. Her older brother translated for her. This was part of a dogged attempt by Augustine and his congregation to break a ring of slave-traders who operated (with the full protection of local bigwigs), out of the port of Hippo."

[Europa.com @europa]

🇧🇷 A Brazilian couple has been sentenced to 50 days in jail for homeschooling their daughters.

The judge reportedly cited a lack of “gender and sex education”, “tolerance and diversity”, and even the girls’ dislike of trap and sertanejo music as evidence of insufficient cultural exposure.

The sentence has been suspended pending appeal.

Follow: @europa

[Grant Starrett @GrantforTN]

"'In the weights' means that a model is able to recall someone without using tools like web search... Being in the weights means your existence was deemed important in the process of creating superhuman artificial intelligence. It's a kind of fame meaning you live on as long as the model does."

[Alex Tabarrok @ATabarrok]

Immortality of a kind.

[Garett Jones @GarettJones]

"[The interest rate] reflects... a people's intelligence and moral strength--the higher these are, the lower will be the rate of interest.

"This is why the rate of interest mirrors the cultural level of a nation..."
--Joseph Schumpeter, "Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk"

[Atlas Press @realAtlasPress]

Samuel Adams, he knew

[History With Jacob @HistoryWJacob]

The Great Seal of the United States could have been this: Moses drowning a king in the Red Sea.

Benjamin Franklin pitched it in the summer of 1776, just weeks after the Declaration of Independence.

His scene: Pharaoh in his chariot, crown on his head and sword in his hand, swallowed by the returning water. Moses standing on the shore, hand outstretched, lit by a pillar of fire to show he acted on the command of God.

The motto read:

Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God

It was the entire Revolution in one image. King George was the Pharaoh. The colonists were Israel walking out of bondage. And rebellion against a tyrant was not a sin. It was obedience to a higher law.

Jefferson loved the line so much he put it on his own personal seal.

Congress set the design aside. Six years and two more committees later, the bald eagle won instead.

[Bonchie @bonchieredstate]

Philadelphia has a Soros-backed DA that is so insane, he’s making up technical errors to free convicted murderers.

Wild.

[litquidity @litcapital]

Everyone saying Elon Musk is the world’s first trillionaire is conveniently ignoring the entire country of Zimbabwe

[Justin Shubow @JustinShubow]

The U.S. government just unveiled the majestic Greco-Deco design for the new federal courthouse in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The building is at once monumental and welcoming, classical and original. The iris capitals are an inspired touch, drawing on Tennessee’s natural beauty and weaving it into the stone of a federal building.

The Chattanooga courthouse is precisely the kind of building that President Trump’s Executive Order on federal architecture—“Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again”—was designed to produce.

When the courthouse is completed, it will stand as the living proof that the Order represents wise and humane public policy—something all Americans, regardless of political party, can and should support. Beautiful public buildings are not a partisan matter; they belong to everyone.

[Eric W. @EWess92]

🔥Hot off the presses: @TheJusticeDept issued an opinion today explaining that disparate-impact liability under federal employment law is *unconstitutional*. This is an earthquake in federal civil rights law. If right, this is the foundation to overturn that pernicious regime.

[Bob Elder @southernphd]

I never met Gordon Wood, but I have a story about him.

In one of my grad school seminars, we read Wood’s Creation of the American Republic. The sheer erudition and evidentiary depth of the book bowled me over.

Back then, before kids and before life accelerated to warp speed, I used to call my mother every Sunday to catch up. Lots of times, we ended up talking about what I was reading that week in my grad seminars or for leisure. Mom had an omnivorous mind, and she was always looking for something else to read. She was a true intellectual—curious about almost everything, always eager to integrate new arguments or ideas into her existing schemas of how the world worked or to have those schemas challenged and changed.

When we talked that particular Sunday, I think I tried to describe to her part of Wood’s argument about the relationship between the state constitutions during the Articles of Confederation era and the federal Constitution. Maybe I was tired, maybe I didn’t completely understand her questions, but the end result of the conversation was that Mom had questions about Wood’s argument that I didn’t answer satisfactorily. I told her that she should probably just read the book, and we said goodbye.

She did eventually read the book, but the next Sunday, Mom started our conversation by saying, “Well, I had a lovely conversation with Gordon Wood this week.” For a split second, I thought she was joking, but then I remembered who I was dealing with. I started to sweat. “How?” I asked. A whole variety of unlikely scenarios in which the foremost historian of the American Revolution and my mother, who lived in Wichita, Kansas, might have met ran through my mind. “Oh, I just looked up his office phone number on Brown’s website and called, and he picked up!” Mom said. I decided I would have to find another profession.

As it ended up, Gordon Wood spent about an hour on the phone with my mother answering her questions about the Constitution. Ever since, I’ve had a soft spot for the man when I imagine him picking up the phone in Providence and finding Becky Elder from Wichita on the other end of the line. His generosity in that moment spoke very well of him.

Rest in peace, professor.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

I'm going to speculate about why von Neumann was omitted from Oppenheimer. Thread🧵

"With the Russians it is not a question of whether but of when."

"If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"

[Liz Ann Sonders @LizAnnSonders]

The most elite undergraduate institution attended by Fortune 500 CEOs is … the University of Figure it Out (UFO)
@StrategasRP

[George Selgin @GeorgeSelgin]

Which explains why in gold standard nations no one bought anything between 1873 and 1896.

[Charles Murray @charlesmurray]

You want a shock of recognition? Read the Anti-Federalists. Again and again, their predictions came true. The Supreme Court, for example. They nailed it.

[Grant Starrett @GrantforTN]

I do have a wonderful life, full of friends and family, but this nevertheless surprised.

[Christina Kopp @christinamkopp]

Having lived and/or worked in DC for over a decade, I can’t believe I’d never heard of this letter from the Duke of Wellington to a bunch of bureaucrats in London during the Napoleonic wars.

If you haven’t either, please enjoy (link below if the font is too small):

[Grant Starrett @GrantforTN]

The correct answer is to give 1,000 votes to Goldwater in the 1964 electoral college.

[Chris @chriswithans]

You can add 1000 votes to any election. You can't subtract or move votes; just add 1000 votes to any election, anywhere, any time.

Where would you add them?

For example, adding 1000 to Coleman's total here would've altered history dramatically. Obamacare wouldn't have passed cloture at any point. Multiple executive appointments could've been filibustered, leading to Reid nuking that much earlier.

[Robin Hanson @robinhanson]

Stats show that your best work is roughly equally likely to happen at any time during your active lifetime. So just keep at it, until you can't.