"In a recent issue of Imprimis—Hillsdale College’s digest of liberty—author Michael Rectenwald described the economic goal of the Great Reset as “‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’—a two-tiered economy, with profitable monopolies and the state on top and socialism for the majority below."
"Draconian government lockdown measures destroyed businesses and eliminated competitors of corporate monopolists. These policies were a dream come true for corporate socialists."
Both of these quotes exist simultaneously within the same email.
Is it socialism for the poor or socialism for the corporate overlords? Doesn't that make it socialism for everyone?
"At the same time, too many young Americans have not been taught what socialism really means."
That's true. No one at Hillsdale, for instance, is learning what socialism is. They're learning socialism is "government does thing" or "capitalist monopolies buy influence in the government through lobbyists and use their money and influence to squash smaller competitors. They're certainly not learning that socialism is "the workers owning the means of production", better known as "what socialism actually is".
"Or the dismal history of its failures wherever it has been tried."
If socialism fails every time it's tried then why does the US have to spend trillions of dollars starting proxy wars all over the planet and embargoing other countries to kill socialism every time?
Now mention China (which is capitalist imperialism per Lenin's definition) or North Korea (which is an explicitly capitalist, hereditary absolute monarchy with an economy 100% geared toward making as much money for the Kim family as possible through legal and illegal means). Also Nazi Germany (which was a kleptocracy where high ranking Nazi officials did all they can to loot the countries they invaded and secure as much for themselves at the expense of fellow party members as possible).
That's why I say I'm not a socialist. Socialism doesn't mean anything. Everyone is a socialist, they're just socialist for different people. The right wants socialism for billionaires and the left wants socialism for the winners of the intersectional oppression olympics. Me, I'm not a socialist, I'm a communist.
You have to be a realist, I think. 1. I'm not going to vote against my own best interests. I'm not going to vote to make some rich asshole richer at my expense. A rising tide does not raise all ships when 99.99% of ships are owned by poor people and are full of holes and are taking on more water than they can pump out. I'm not going to vote to make rich people richer, I'm going to vote to take money from rich people and give it to myself because fuck you, that's why. And 2. with increasing automation and outsourcing we're going to end up with a situation where half the jobs, or more, no longer exist (we're already living in a world where there are more people than jobs, and the existence of bullshit jobs is proof of that) and at that point you have two options, you can either let the majority of the population starve to death while the 20 billionaires who own half the planet's wealth get richer, or you can pay people for existing because there are no jobs. That's it. Automation makes communism inevitable, so I might as well get in on the ground floor.
Let's not forget that while Hillsdale may not take "one penny of government money", Larry Arnn's other business took a $700,000 loan from the government that was later forgiven and he didn't complain and call it socialism and say that it rewarded irresponsible people. That's disgusting hypocrisy and I won't countenance that.
Showing posts with label Capitalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Capitalism. Show all posts
Friday, February 3, 2023
Tuesday, May 29, 2018
Milton Friedman's Basic Income
It's as Moses says in The Ten Commandments: "A city is made from brick. The strong make many, the weak make few, the dead make none."
We've known about this for how long? People on the left like to have a permanent underclass from whom to extract votes and people on the right believe the asinine notion that starvation is a good motivation to make people work. No, it's not, it's a shitty motivation. People who have all their basic needs met work harder, have more enthusiasm to work, and reinvest more into the economy. That's not me saying it, that's Adam Smith saying it. That's Milton Friedman saying it. I don't care what Rust Lumbar or Sean Hannity, who owns Section 8 housing yet pretends to be a regular blue collar guy, think. They're snakes and vermin.
Friedman suggested something he called a "negative income tax". Anyone making below what was at the time a living wage ($3,000 a year, or $21,000 a year today) would be given the difference up to half ($1,500 or $10,600). The minimum amount never changes. With welfare today if you're collecting and you have a job you're penalised, which disincentivises people on welfare to work. On Friedman's plan the minimum amount is guaranteed, so you can work and earn more and never have to worry about having money taken away from you.
We've known about this for how long? People on the left like to have a permanent underclass from whom to extract votes and people on the right believe the asinine notion that starvation is a good motivation to make people work. No, it's not, it's a shitty motivation. People who have all their basic needs met work harder, have more enthusiasm to work, and reinvest more into the economy. That's not me saying it, that's Adam Smith saying it. That's Milton Friedman saying it. I don't care what Rust Lumbar or Sean Hannity, who owns Section 8 housing yet pretends to be a regular blue collar guy, think. They're snakes and vermin.
Friedman suggested something he called a "negative income tax". Anyone making below what was at the time a living wage ($3,000 a year, or $21,000 a year today) would be given the difference up to half ($1,500 or $10,600). The minimum amount never changes. With welfare today if you're collecting and you have a job you're penalised, which disincentivises people on welfare to work. On Friedman's plan the minimum amount is guaranteed, so you can work and earn more and never have to worry about having money taken away from you.
Wednesday, May 9, 2018
The Future Requires Universal Basic Income
Technology is advancing to the point where it will be necessary to do one of two things:
1. Kill billions of people who will have no jobs
or
2. Pay people to live
Universal basic income is opposed by the left because they won't be able to use welfare to bribe voters, and it's opposed by the right because poor people can go die in a gutter. UBI can be instituted by redirecting current government spending toward helping people instead of turning politicians and executives into royalty and demigods, and it will solve many many problems that fall under the broad category of "human suffering". We've reached a point as a species where we have the technology to eliminate most human suffering, we just refuse to do so because of the two reasons stated above.
1. Kill billions of people who will have no jobs
or
2. Pay people to live
Universal basic income is opposed by the left because they won't be able to use welfare to bribe voters, and it's opposed by the right because poor people can go die in a gutter. UBI can be instituted by redirecting current government spending toward helping people instead of turning politicians and executives into royalty and demigods, and it will solve many many problems that fall under the broad category of "human suffering". We've reached a point as a species where we have the technology to eliminate most human suffering, we just refuse to do so because of the two reasons stated above.
Wednesday, March 7, 2018
The Failure of Economics
The problem with all economic systems is money. There's not enough of it. Alternately you could say there are too many people, but I'm not going to go down the path of suggesting genocide, so let's say the problem is not enough money. I read somewhere that even if all the money in the world was divided equally among everyone that would mean everyone only gets about $5,000. And no new money would be made because everyone would be too poor to do anything. There's just not enough money in the world for 8 billion people.
You look at all the times when there was a spectacular economic situation for some people and you see the reason is always because the world has become hell on earth for others. The US prospered like no country before or since during the 50s-70s because WW2 destroyed all possible competition and lead to the deaths of 50-100 million people. Even the paupers in America lived as kings because there were jobs galore and they paid unbelievable wages. Once the rest of the world rebuilt then the wealth of America vanished, it spread around elsewhere.
What else do you see? Places like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where the native population does not work, at all. They can pull unlimited money out of the ground and they import basically slaves ("sponsored workers") to do all the labour for the native population who all live like kings off welfare. But that's ending too. They realise that oil is not infinite so they are desperately trying to diversify their economies so as to avoid what would inevitably be the devolution of their crapulent societies into Somalia.
I've read the literature, methane, created by bacteria in the deep ocean vents, is transformed into butane and propane under heat, and has been shown to turn into crude oil in laboratory conditions mimicking the upper mantle. Oil is not a fossil fuel, but it's not inexhaustible, just like ground water. We're extracting it faster than it's being replenished. I don't care if the Earth is "9,000 miles deep" as one Youtube commentator has expressed, you can see that technology is not advancing anywhere near fast enough to make up for the decreasing supply of available resources, be they ground water, oil, gold, or anything else. The thickness of the Earth is the problem, not the solution. It's just not possible to drill that deep, and gold or oil or whatever just isn't worth nearly enough to justify developing drilling technologies further. There's not enough money.
The only way to fix the global economic disaster that is looming fast, without starting another world war, is to discover some previously unknown magic resource to take the place of oil. There needs to be something super abundant that is extremely valuable and extremely useful as a resource and it needs to be extremely easy to attain and we need to find it soon or all hell will break loose.
Communism, socialism, capitalism, corporatism, "social democracy", they don't work because of human nature and because of the nature of the world itself.
Communism bullshit.
First of all, Marx was a hypocrite who understood nothing about human nature. "When a people's basic needs are met then people will work for free. Work will be its own reward." Bullshit. Bullshit. People will not work for free, even if all their basic needs are met. People will only work for money or for a cause to which they are totally devoted (like family or religion). People will not work for nothing if they don't have to, and they will not work if there is no correlation between work and reward.
Second, planned economies don't work because it's impossible to predict the future to that degree of specificity. That's why planned economies always have shortages. A grocery store in a communist country might have one salami hanging up and you're not allowed to have it, but the party bosses can have mansions and limousines and caviar.
"But that's not real communism."
Bullshit, but let's indulge your fantasy.
"Communism works perfectly on paper but the problem is that real communism has never been implemented."
No. If by "real communism" you mean a stateless, classless society then you have to admit that "real communism" is a utopian fantasy that can never ever be realised ever in this or any world. The second you get two people together you have a hierarchy, because people have different degrees of competence so someone will always be better than someone else, and a hierarchy on the scale of a society is a class structure. You also develop a state structure, even in hunter-gatherer societies (so called "primitive communism"). This is "our" land, as opposed to "their" land. And tribes went to war with each other constantly because humans are territorial animals, just like chimpanzees. So if you're definition of "real communism" is a utopian fantasy than you might as well admit to being wrong from the start.
"Real communism" also doesn't work well "on paper" because humans won't work for free. Work is not its own reward, if it was people wouldn't need to be paid to work, and of the thousands of experiments that have been done to disprove this basic reality of human nature none has ever succeeded. No hippie commune or Marxist revolutionary vanguard has ever produced a system where people will work for free because "Well isn't that swell, I might as well help my neighbors out. And work is just so gosh darn fun too." If you worked all the time and got nothing out of it then you wouldn't keep working. That's not even a human trait, that's true of all animals. Unless you're getting more than you put in then the activity isn't worth the caloric output.
Socialism is bullshit too. Unless you have a very small, ethnically homogenous population that can pull wealth out of the ground there's no incentive to sacrifice for others in society. That's just human nature too. In-group preference. Four million Norwegians floating on an ocean of oil might pay 70% income tax to give all their fellow Norwegians "free" healthcare, but that will never work in a place like the United States where there are 350 million people of every ethnic group who don't trust each other and are unwilling to sacrifice for members of different tribes.
What happens when you have bureaucrats divvying up handouts supposedly to the people most in need? What happens every single time? They give handouts to the people who will vote them into office. Politicians buy votes by giving away "free" shit to people with low IQs who breed like rabbits because, surprise, selfishness is another part of human nature.
Maybe robots might be able to work out the system of handouts perfectly. Robots, who were deemed the overlords of humanity and had unchallengeable might, and who acted out of pure rationality and followed routines by rote without any outside factors influencing their judgment might be able to make a social welfare state work. Robots would be dispassionate enough not to be bought off by special interest groups, and if they were willing to let humans live (as pets, say), then, and only then, could socialism work. Or you might get a system where the machines decide we all must be plugged into the Matrix because humans are self-destructive by nature.
And capitalism bullshit.
The US economy is worth $18 trillion. There are 350 million people (50 million of whom are illegal). Divide the two up and you get $51,000 per person per year.
So why are there people with $100 billion and other people struggling to survive on less than $20,000?
You'll see corporations with big CEOs who make $100 million bonuses on top of the money they already make sitting on the boards of directors of six other corporations, yet they won't pay their workers a living wage. Pundits always say that the profit margins are razor thin. Well if the profit margins are so thin that the company can't pay a living wage yet the CEO can make $100 million, or with smaller businesses where the bosses can hire and promote their incompetent friends at outrageous salaries, then those businesses have very shitty business models and deserve to go out of business. If carpetbaggers can exploit their workers to make millions and not even give those workers enough to live then those people should be put in jail. It's like Citi Group or the AIG or the Goldman Sachs. Everyone in upper and middle management of those corporations should be in jail for life.
So what's left? Could post-economics work, or is it too doomed by the flaws in human nature?
You look at all the times when there was a spectacular economic situation for some people and you see the reason is always because the world has become hell on earth for others. The US prospered like no country before or since during the 50s-70s because WW2 destroyed all possible competition and lead to the deaths of 50-100 million people. Even the paupers in America lived as kings because there were jobs galore and they paid unbelievable wages. Once the rest of the world rebuilt then the wealth of America vanished, it spread around elsewhere.
What else do you see? Places like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where the native population does not work, at all. They can pull unlimited money out of the ground and they import basically slaves ("sponsored workers") to do all the labour for the native population who all live like kings off welfare. But that's ending too. They realise that oil is not infinite so they are desperately trying to diversify their economies so as to avoid what would inevitably be the devolution of their crapulent societies into Somalia.
I've read the literature, methane, created by bacteria in the deep ocean vents, is transformed into butane and propane under heat, and has been shown to turn into crude oil in laboratory conditions mimicking the upper mantle. Oil is not a fossil fuel, but it's not inexhaustible, just like ground water. We're extracting it faster than it's being replenished. I don't care if the Earth is "9,000 miles deep" as one Youtube commentator has expressed, you can see that technology is not advancing anywhere near fast enough to make up for the decreasing supply of available resources, be they ground water, oil, gold, or anything else. The thickness of the Earth is the problem, not the solution. It's just not possible to drill that deep, and gold or oil or whatever just isn't worth nearly enough to justify developing drilling technologies further. There's not enough money.
The only way to fix the global economic disaster that is looming fast, without starting another world war, is to discover some previously unknown magic resource to take the place of oil. There needs to be something super abundant that is extremely valuable and extremely useful as a resource and it needs to be extremely easy to attain and we need to find it soon or all hell will break loose.
Communism, socialism, capitalism, corporatism, "social democracy", they don't work because of human nature and because of the nature of the world itself.
Communism bullshit.
First of all, Marx was a hypocrite who understood nothing about human nature. "When a people's basic needs are met then people will work for free. Work will be its own reward." Bullshit. Bullshit. People will not work for free, even if all their basic needs are met. People will only work for money or for a cause to which they are totally devoted (like family or religion). People will not work for nothing if they don't have to, and they will not work if there is no correlation between work and reward.
Second, planned economies don't work because it's impossible to predict the future to that degree of specificity. That's why planned economies always have shortages. A grocery store in a communist country might have one salami hanging up and you're not allowed to have it, but the party bosses can have mansions and limousines and caviar.
"But that's not real communism."
Bullshit, but let's indulge your fantasy.
"Communism works perfectly on paper but the problem is that real communism has never been implemented."
No. If by "real communism" you mean a stateless, classless society then you have to admit that "real communism" is a utopian fantasy that can never ever be realised ever in this or any world. The second you get two people together you have a hierarchy, because people have different degrees of competence so someone will always be better than someone else, and a hierarchy on the scale of a society is a class structure. You also develop a state structure, even in hunter-gatherer societies (so called "primitive communism"). This is "our" land, as opposed to "their" land. And tribes went to war with each other constantly because humans are territorial animals, just like chimpanzees. So if you're definition of "real communism" is a utopian fantasy than you might as well admit to being wrong from the start.
"Real communism" also doesn't work well "on paper" because humans won't work for free. Work is not its own reward, if it was people wouldn't need to be paid to work, and of the thousands of experiments that have been done to disprove this basic reality of human nature none has ever succeeded. No hippie commune or Marxist revolutionary vanguard has ever produced a system where people will work for free because "Well isn't that swell, I might as well help my neighbors out. And work is just so gosh darn fun too." If you worked all the time and got nothing out of it then you wouldn't keep working. That's not even a human trait, that's true of all animals. Unless you're getting more than you put in then the activity isn't worth the caloric output.
Socialism is bullshit too. Unless you have a very small, ethnically homogenous population that can pull wealth out of the ground there's no incentive to sacrifice for others in society. That's just human nature too. In-group preference. Four million Norwegians floating on an ocean of oil might pay 70% income tax to give all their fellow Norwegians "free" healthcare, but that will never work in a place like the United States where there are 350 million people of every ethnic group who don't trust each other and are unwilling to sacrifice for members of different tribes.
What happens when you have bureaucrats divvying up handouts supposedly to the people most in need? What happens every single time? They give handouts to the people who will vote them into office. Politicians buy votes by giving away "free" shit to people with low IQs who breed like rabbits because, surprise, selfishness is another part of human nature.
Maybe robots might be able to work out the system of handouts perfectly. Robots, who were deemed the overlords of humanity and had unchallengeable might, and who acted out of pure rationality and followed routines by rote without any outside factors influencing their judgment might be able to make a social welfare state work. Robots would be dispassionate enough not to be bought off by special interest groups, and if they were willing to let humans live (as pets, say), then, and only then, could socialism work. Or you might get a system where the machines decide we all must be plugged into the Matrix because humans are self-destructive by nature.
And capitalism bullshit.
The US economy is worth $18 trillion. There are 350 million people (50 million of whom are illegal). Divide the two up and you get $51,000 per person per year.
So why are there people with $100 billion and other people struggling to survive on less than $20,000?
You'll see corporations with big CEOs who make $100 million bonuses on top of the money they already make sitting on the boards of directors of six other corporations, yet they won't pay their workers a living wage. Pundits always say that the profit margins are razor thin. Well if the profit margins are so thin that the company can't pay a living wage yet the CEO can make $100 million, or with smaller businesses where the bosses can hire and promote their incompetent friends at outrageous salaries, then those businesses have very shitty business models and deserve to go out of business. If carpetbaggers can exploit their workers to make millions and not even give those workers enough to live then those people should be put in jail. It's like Citi Group or the AIG or the Goldman Sachs. Everyone in upper and middle management of those corporations should be in jail for life.
So what's left? Could post-economics work, or is it too doomed by the flaws in human nature?
Sunday, August 6, 2017
Why the US Wastes So Much Food
We already know why Europe wastes so much food. We've all heard of the butter mountains and wine lakes. The EU's socialistic Common Agricultural Policy demands that farmers produce hundreds of millions of Euros worth of surpluss goods, that the government buys with confiscated taxpayer money, in order to keep the paper lantern economy afloat. But the United States is different. Except with corn production, which is wasted to make horribly inefficient E85 gasoline, the US does not have anywhere the same level of central planning when it comes to agriculture as the EU (thank God). So why does the US waste enough food to feed an extra billion people? It turns out that capitalism (or crapitalism when it fails like this) can be just as destructive as socialism.
Thursday, June 8, 2017
The Long, Slow Decline
How much computing power would be needed to simulate the Matrix? A whole lot more than every computer combined. Unless there's some quantum leap in computing it may even be impossible.
That's just like a realisation I had a few years back. I wrote a piece called "Dreams of Foreign Suns" (it was all the way back in 2013, was it?) and again in "A Future I Did Nazi Coming".
At least three factors seem to be working together against creating the science fiction future:
1. Declining rate of technological advancement.
We've already seen the decline in shrinking processors. Processor speed is able to increase because we're adding multiple cores to processors, but the miniaturisation of transistors will reach a hard limit very very soon due to the quantum effects on individual silicon atoms.
At the same time we're seeing decline in advancement in other technologies. It's been decades since new antibiotics have been developed, and with the disaster of antibiotic resistance, the age of wonder drugs will also reach a hard limit probably over the next generation. We'll once again return to the era where a papercut could be life threatening.
There's also a decline in new energy technologies. I did a study in 2004 for a landscaper about the cost effectiveness of solar power. Scanning the literature last year I discovered, to my dismay, that the efficiency of photovoltaics has not increased at all in 12 years. Not to mention the fact that to manufacture solar cells requires an input of more energy than the cells will produce in their entire lifetime and creates tons of toxic waste, the whole technology is a bust. Add to that the reality that acquiring energy basically means pumping water into low pressure gas wells to re-vitalise them, and the endless political hurdles facing thorium power, our future energy prospects seem grim.
We're also running out of key resources like phosphate and potable water. There's likely another two centuries of "fossil" fuels remaining, even at the current rate of consumption, but ground water will definitely be gone in the next 50 years (and probably sooner) unless some drastic change is made. Once water and phosphate are depleted the Earth's population drops from 8 billion to 1 billion, because that's how much food traditional agriculture can produce.
2. I'm going to call this the "Energy Cliff".
The amount of energy it takes to become a spacefaring civilisation is absolutely astronomical. It's possible, as I've pointed out before, we've known how to travel to at least the nearest stars within a single human lifetime using technology that is reasonably within our capability, it's just not very practical. We could use nuclear pulse propulsion, such as Orion, and even though the fallout would likely only kill three or four people, the EMPs produced by the 800 nuclear explosions needed just to reach orbit would destroy the technology that's keeping billions of people alive. To say nothing of the tens of thousands of new nuclear warheads that would have to be produced to fuel the rockets.
It doesn't seem likely that we'll find the power to keep China's endless construction of ghost cities afloat, let alone colonising say just the Moon and Mars. If we're going to do this in human time scales (one month to Mars instead of 14, 50 years to Alpha Centauri instead of 40,000) there is going to have to be a quantum leap in the ability to produce energy to get the damn rockets into space. Kerosene and liquid oxygen just won't cut it, and neither will setting off a ton of nukes.
3. Humans are becoming more anti-social.
Call it "affluenza", or vermin paradise*, or whatever you like. The more people move to cities the more anti-social they become. Anti-social humans are the perfect useful idiots for gigantic, bloated bureaucratic governments that either don't want to or are unable to tackle problems 1 and 2. The European Union passed a law regulating the acceptable degree of bend in bananas, thousands and thousands of tons of fish are caught and thrown away, lakes of wine and mountains of butter are destroyed to meet arbitrary quotas set by bureaucrats. And the rapefugees. Millions of rapefugees are imported to keep the criminal debt-based banking system solvent.
The more people move to cities the more they become anti-social and the more likely they are to vote for these kinds of obstructionist governments that, ironically, call themselves "progressive" while stonewalling any real technological, economic, scientific, or cultural progress. The more "progressive" human society becomes the less actual progress humans will make toward developing new energy, medicine, and aerospace technologies.
And there doesn't seem to be a way out.
By the way, I'm not suggesting going back to the 1950s. I'm not suggesting that radical "off the grid" "rugged individualism" or just becoming more like redneck 'muricans is the solution either. It's not. That's the problem that I've been trying to point out for several years now. Neither the "right" or the "left" has the solution to these problems. They both seem to be in a state of arrested development.
Drilling into Mt. Rushmore to get more oil won't solve any of these problems. Neither will driving gas-guzzling tanks just to piss off environmentalists, nor will wind turbines and solar panels.
The "free market" or anarcho-capitalism won't solve these problems.
Communism, socialism, or "social democratism" won't solve these problems.
Feminism, MIGTOW, transhumanism, AI, the "singularity", or any other utopian visionary bullshit won't solve these problems.
None of these positions will be able to solve these problems because they can't even see the problems. The very existence of these -isms is the heart of the problem.
A dramatic quantum leap in human psychosocial and technological evolution is required. And I don't think that's possible. I think humans are just too damn stupid. You can graph the ability of an animal to socialise by brain size, and even though human intelligence affords 10,000 times less interpersonal conflict than is seen in chimpanzees, it's just not enough. The upper limit on any totally cohesive human society is 5,000 individuals. Unless the fundamental limitations of the human brain are either transcended or global society itself is radically altered to accomidate those limitations, there can be no solution.
And that's very depressing if you think about it.
*There was an experiment with rats or hamsters or something (vermin) where their every need was instantly met. The population exploded until a certain population density was reached, then the rats became anti-social, stopped breeding, and they all died out.
That's just like a realisation I had a few years back. I wrote a piece called "Dreams of Foreign Suns" (it was all the way back in 2013, was it?) and again in "A Future I Did Nazi Coming".
At least three factors seem to be working together against creating the science fiction future:
1. Declining rate of technological advancement.
We've already seen the decline in shrinking processors. Processor speed is able to increase because we're adding multiple cores to processors, but the miniaturisation of transistors will reach a hard limit very very soon due to the quantum effects on individual silicon atoms.
At the same time we're seeing decline in advancement in other technologies. It's been decades since new antibiotics have been developed, and with the disaster of antibiotic resistance, the age of wonder drugs will also reach a hard limit probably over the next generation. We'll once again return to the era where a papercut could be life threatening.
There's also a decline in new energy technologies. I did a study in 2004 for a landscaper about the cost effectiveness of solar power. Scanning the literature last year I discovered, to my dismay, that the efficiency of photovoltaics has not increased at all in 12 years. Not to mention the fact that to manufacture solar cells requires an input of more energy than the cells will produce in their entire lifetime and creates tons of toxic waste, the whole technology is a bust. Add to that the reality that acquiring energy basically means pumping water into low pressure gas wells to re-vitalise them, and the endless political hurdles facing thorium power, our future energy prospects seem grim.
We're also running out of key resources like phosphate and potable water. There's likely another two centuries of "fossil" fuels remaining, even at the current rate of consumption, but ground water will definitely be gone in the next 50 years (and probably sooner) unless some drastic change is made. Once water and phosphate are depleted the Earth's population drops from 8 billion to 1 billion, because that's how much food traditional agriculture can produce.
2. I'm going to call this the "Energy Cliff".
The amount of energy it takes to become a spacefaring civilisation is absolutely astronomical. It's possible, as I've pointed out before, we've known how to travel to at least the nearest stars within a single human lifetime using technology that is reasonably within our capability, it's just not very practical. We could use nuclear pulse propulsion, such as Orion, and even though the fallout would likely only kill three or four people, the EMPs produced by the 800 nuclear explosions needed just to reach orbit would destroy the technology that's keeping billions of people alive. To say nothing of the tens of thousands of new nuclear warheads that would have to be produced to fuel the rockets.
It doesn't seem likely that we'll find the power to keep China's endless construction of ghost cities afloat, let alone colonising say just the Moon and Mars. If we're going to do this in human time scales (one month to Mars instead of 14, 50 years to Alpha Centauri instead of 40,000) there is going to have to be a quantum leap in the ability to produce energy to get the damn rockets into space. Kerosene and liquid oxygen just won't cut it, and neither will setting off a ton of nukes.
3. Humans are becoming more anti-social.
Call it "affluenza", or vermin paradise*, or whatever you like. The more people move to cities the more anti-social they become. Anti-social humans are the perfect useful idiots for gigantic, bloated bureaucratic governments that either don't want to or are unable to tackle problems 1 and 2. The European Union passed a law regulating the acceptable degree of bend in bananas, thousands and thousands of tons of fish are caught and thrown away, lakes of wine and mountains of butter are destroyed to meet arbitrary quotas set by bureaucrats. And the rapefugees. Millions of rapefugees are imported to keep the criminal debt-based banking system solvent.
The more people move to cities the more they become anti-social and the more likely they are to vote for these kinds of obstructionist governments that, ironically, call themselves "progressive" while stonewalling any real technological, economic, scientific, or cultural progress. The more "progressive" human society becomes the less actual progress humans will make toward developing new energy, medicine, and aerospace technologies.
And there doesn't seem to be a way out.
By the way, I'm not suggesting going back to the 1950s. I'm not suggesting that radical "off the grid" "rugged individualism" or just becoming more like redneck 'muricans is the solution either. It's not. That's the problem that I've been trying to point out for several years now. Neither the "right" or the "left" has the solution to these problems. They both seem to be in a state of arrested development.
Drilling into Mt. Rushmore to get more oil won't solve any of these problems. Neither will driving gas-guzzling tanks just to piss off environmentalists, nor will wind turbines and solar panels.
The "free market" or anarcho-capitalism won't solve these problems.
Communism, socialism, or "social democratism" won't solve these problems.
Feminism, MIGTOW, transhumanism, AI, the "singularity", or any other utopian visionary bullshit won't solve these problems.
None of these positions will be able to solve these problems because they can't even see the problems. The very existence of these -isms is the heart of the problem.
A dramatic quantum leap in human psychosocial and technological evolution is required. And I don't think that's possible. I think humans are just too damn stupid. You can graph the ability of an animal to socialise by brain size, and even though human intelligence affords 10,000 times less interpersonal conflict than is seen in chimpanzees, it's just not enough. The upper limit on any totally cohesive human society is 5,000 individuals. Unless the fundamental limitations of the human brain are either transcended or global society itself is radically altered to accomidate those limitations, there can be no solution.
And that's very depressing if you think about it.
*There was an experiment with rats or hamsters or something (vermin) where their every need was instantly met. The population exploded until a certain population density was reached, then the rats became anti-social, stopped breeding, and they all died out.
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Post Economics
Here's my take on the issue of capitalism versus socialism. Neither of these systems are ends in themselves, only means to an end, and that end is what I'll call "Post Economics". Post economics is a social order that has no economic system at all because people have evolved beyond the need for one. That may sound like fantasy, but there are examples of post economic societies that have existed for thousands of years. They are called monasteries.
The monastery is an enclosed society with very little contact with the outside world. Many are completely self-sufficient. They may start out with donations from outside, from a parent monastery or whatever, of things like building supplies and tools, but from then on everything they need is manufactured within the monastery itself. Food is grown, sheep might be raised for wool to make clothing, trees planted to supply wood, and so on.
Some people might fear losing things they value in a monastic society, but nothing of any value is lost.
Ambition. Monks have no ambition! Yes, yes they do, otherwise they would have never joined the monastery in the first place. The ambition of the monk is the supreme ambition of enlightenment (Kenosis in the Christian tradition, Moksha in Vedanta, Nirvana in Buddhism). All earthly ambitions are but pale reflections of the supreme ambition. On the relative side there is the fulfillment of perfect morality. What is missing is the ambition to collect stuff. Instead of buying new chrome hubcaps or building a gazebo or whatever, you would rather spend that energy helping the less fortunate, the sick, the disabled, the homeless.
Individuality. Well, certainly monks lack individuality! Not true. They may dress the same, and eat the same food, but they do that by choice. Individual monks still possess their individual talents, and it is part of the perfection of morality to develop those talents to their utmost for the benefit of others. If someone is good at medicine that person serves as the doctor. If someone is good at smithing that person maintains the metal tools, monks who can sing serve in the choir, scholars can become experts in particular fields.
Science is not lost in the monastery. The opposite is true, monasteries saved science from being destroyed in the West, and most of the great scientists of the past 500 years started out as monks. It is only very recently that the religious institutions of higher learning have secularised and a small group of atheist scientists have began saying science and religion are incompatible.
Neither is art, or music, or literature lost in a monastic society. Monks still produce great art and great music, they just don't put on a concert to get a lot of money, score some coke, and bang some groupies in a different city every night.
Hedonistic pursuits are lost, but they are also lost in communism since communism sees work as its own reward and wanton sex and drug use as a waste of energy that could be used to work, so the loss of hedonism would only be a problem as far as capitalism and European socialism are concerned.
The primary thing that is lost is selfishness. The thought "What's in it for me?" is the primary casualty of the monastic system. Monks don't ask "What's in it for me?" they do their work out of a sense of duty, to help others and to glorify God. If it's your time to scrub the floors or wash the dishes you don't complain how you would rather listen to Metallica or chopping fire wood. Monks do not act to see what they can gain, they act to see what they can give. Farmers grow crops, doctors heal people, tailors sew robes, and carpenters build things not because they can get money to buy a new Lamborghini (or Toyota), or ridiculous outfits that will be worn once and then put in the back of a closet, monks work because it is what is right.
For most humans, throughout history, this is a truly alien concept, but it is a human concept that has been embraced voluntarily by millions of people over thousands of years.
So about capitalism and socialism? We need to view the debate about reaching the ultimate goal of post economics. Which system will bring more people to eliminating selfishness within themselves? Which system will bring about the desire to glorify God and serve our fellow man? It is a decision that cannot be forced upon anyone. Coercion won't lead anyone beyond economics. Right off the bat we can eliminate European socialism, which is cultural Marxism or social justice warriorism or whatever you want to call it. That's the exact opposite of morality and enlightenment. Soviet socialism is a lot closer to post economics, but it is also entirely authoritarian and centrally planned, so there's that whole issue of coercion. The bad form of capitalism, that I call crapitalism, with billionaire CEOs who run AIG into the ground and get golden parachutes, and celebrities making obscene amounts of money and buying fleets of Maybachs and chopping down a whole acre of mahogany to put in the mansion you never live in, or that allows Apple or KFC to carve their logo on the Moon because "They paid for it," that's pure selfishness, so that's no good either. There has to be something, a healthy, gradual system that will take us to post economics eventually, but we'll never figure it out if we're arguing about economic systems as the end and not the means.
I suspect that that system lies somewhere in a much smaller state, with more freedoms, where like-minded people come together to achieve a common goal. Big huge states of tens or hundreds of millions of people must be broken up into much smaller poleis, because if there is one thing that kills compassion and breeds selfishness and indifference, it is large agglomerations of people. The brain can only associate with so many people, and only so many groups of people can associate with one another before groups of total strangers no one cares about start appearing. Plato said that 5,000 was the ideal number of people for a city-state, and research from modern neuroscience and sociology tells us he was right. Now, that's not a first step, but it is an intermediary goal to work toward. The first step, I would say, would be reducing the size of government, because the present system is not only unsustainable, it was known to be unsustainable 80 years ago. Now it is rapidly collapsing. We must begin to act, and we must keep the ultimate goal of the post economic system in mind when we act so we know which direction to go.
The monastery is an enclosed society with very little contact with the outside world. Many are completely self-sufficient. They may start out with donations from outside, from a parent monastery or whatever, of things like building supplies and tools, but from then on everything they need is manufactured within the monastery itself. Food is grown, sheep might be raised for wool to make clothing, trees planted to supply wood, and so on.
Some people might fear losing things they value in a monastic society, but nothing of any value is lost.
Ambition. Monks have no ambition! Yes, yes they do, otherwise they would have never joined the monastery in the first place. The ambition of the monk is the supreme ambition of enlightenment (Kenosis in the Christian tradition, Moksha in Vedanta, Nirvana in Buddhism). All earthly ambitions are but pale reflections of the supreme ambition. On the relative side there is the fulfillment of perfect morality. What is missing is the ambition to collect stuff. Instead of buying new chrome hubcaps or building a gazebo or whatever, you would rather spend that energy helping the less fortunate, the sick, the disabled, the homeless.
Individuality. Well, certainly monks lack individuality! Not true. They may dress the same, and eat the same food, but they do that by choice. Individual monks still possess their individual talents, and it is part of the perfection of morality to develop those talents to their utmost for the benefit of others. If someone is good at medicine that person serves as the doctor. If someone is good at smithing that person maintains the metal tools, monks who can sing serve in the choir, scholars can become experts in particular fields.
Science is not lost in the monastery. The opposite is true, monasteries saved science from being destroyed in the West, and most of the great scientists of the past 500 years started out as monks. It is only very recently that the religious institutions of higher learning have secularised and a small group of atheist scientists have began saying science and religion are incompatible.
Neither is art, or music, or literature lost in a monastic society. Monks still produce great art and great music, they just don't put on a concert to get a lot of money, score some coke, and bang some groupies in a different city every night.
Hedonistic pursuits are lost, but they are also lost in communism since communism sees work as its own reward and wanton sex and drug use as a waste of energy that could be used to work, so the loss of hedonism would only be a problem as far as capitalism and European socialism are concerned.
The primary thing that is lost is selfishness. The thought "What's in it for me?" is the primary casualty of the monastic system. Monks don't ask "What's in it for me?" they do their work out of a sense of duty, to help others and to glorify God. If it's your time to scrub the floors or wash the dishes you don't complain how you would rather listen to Metallica or chopping fire wood. Monks do not act to see what they can gain, they act to see what they can give. Farmers grow crops, doctors heal people, tailors sew robes, and carpenters build things not because they can get money to buy a new Lamborghini (or Toyota), or ridiculous outfits that will be worn once and then put in the back of a closet, monks work because it is what is right.
For most humans, throughout history, this is a truly alien concept, but it is a human concept that has been embraced voluntarily by millions of people over thousands of years.
So about capitalism and socialism? We need to view the debate about reaching the ultimate goal of post economics. Which system will bring more people to eliminating selfishness within themselves? Which system will bring about the desire to glorify God and serve our fellow man? It is a decision that cannot be forced upon anyone. Coercion won't lead anyone beyond economics. Right off the bat we can eliminate European socialism, which is cultural Marxism or social justice warriorism or whatever you want to call it. That's the exact opposite of morality and enlightenment. Soviet socialism is a lot closer to post economics, but it is also entirely authoritarian and centrally planned, so there's that whole issue of coercion. The bad form of capitalism, that I call crapitalism, with billionaire CEOs who run AIG into the ground and get golden parachutes, and celebrities making obscene amounts of money and buying fleets of Maybachs and chopping down a whole acre of mahogany to put in the mansion you never live in, or that allows Apple or KFC to carve their logo on the Moon because "They paid for it," that's pure selfishness, so that's no good either. There has to be something, a healthy, gradual system that will take us to post economics eventually, but we'll never figure it out if we're arguing about economic systems as the end and not the means.
I suspect that that system lies somewhere in a much smaller state, with more freedoms, where like-minded people come together to achieve a common goal. Big huge states of tens or hundreds of millions of people must be broken up into much smaller poleis, because if there is one thing that kills compassion and breeds selfishness and indifference, it is large agglomerations of people. The brain can only associate with so many people, and only so many groups of people can associate with one another before groups of total strangers no one cares about start appearing. Plato said that 5,000 was the ideal number of people for a city-state, and research from modern neuroscience and sociology tells us he was right. Now, that's not a first step, but it is an intermediary goal to work toward. The first step, I would say, would be reducing the size of government, because the present system is not only unsustainable, it was known to be unsustainable 80 years ago. Now it is rapidly collapsing. We must begin to act, and we must keep the ultimate goal of the post economic system in mind when we act so we know which direction to go.
Friday, August 23, 2013
Untitled Rush Limbaugh Rant #2
Didn't I just write about Rush Limbaugh? Well he's been ragging on the same exact topic the whole week and it feels like time wasted. He's talking about "Millennials," also known as the "ME ME ME!!!" generation or the worst generation ever, whom TIME calls "lazy, entitled narcissists."
Limbaugh brings up how they should not lose faith in the country but instead lose faith in the Democrat Party, seemingly ignoring the fact that politicians don't elect themselves, instead it is the people who put them in power (theoretically). The Democrat Party would not have any power if the people stood up to them.
And just what is a country? That is a difficult question to answer. While there is no ambiguity as to what the term "sovereign state" refers, and relatively little ambiguity as to what the term "nation" refers, a "country" is a bit of a head scratcher that occupies the grey area between the two. The United States is the state and "We the people" are the nation (discounting racist supremacist groups like La Raza and the Nation of Islam, as well as legitimate "sovereign" nations such as the Navajo, Blackfeet, and others), but as to what entity is the country is dependent upon who is speaking. Just for the sake of this article I will give a nod to the Greek idea of a polis and show preference for "country" and "nation" being largely synonymous.
If the country is the people of the United States then absolutely the country (in all its laziness or selfishness or whatever reason) is to blame for putting the people in power who have led to the destruction of the US economy and way of life. People get what they vote for, or don't vote for in the case of the millions who decided to stay home, permitting Zero from taking office a second time. America was not conquered by an outside force, it was taken over from within.
But that's not what I wanted to write about.
"I have it hear, folks, right here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers. This is an article from NPR. And I would think a lot of Millennials listen to NPR."
Interesting side note: I first heard of NPR during my time behind enemy lines, getting expensive wallpaper at university. I was in an African history class (very disappointing, it was pretty much a sub-Saharan African colonial history class and didn't focus on the thousands of years of history that took place before the arrival of Europeans in the southern two thirds of the continent), and the professor mentioned how he was listening to NPR in his car on the way to class. Having never heard that word before I looked it up on the Internet later that day and discovered it was an unsuccessful radio news agency.
Rush continues "In fact, when I was in my twenties, nobody was even willing to take you seriously until you were 40. You hadn't lived long enough to know enough to be trusted with enough when I grew up."
He spends maybe 15 minutes every day this week glorifying that disgustingly backward practice because it is familiar to him and therefor comfortable. For most of history societies were set up so people were ready for adulthood when they actually became adults, somewhere around age 15. Every social institution prepared people for the privileges and responsibilities of adulthood at the age when nature dictated, and people were expected to act like adults when nature dropped the bomb and said "you're an adult now, deal with it."
Then around the time when the Romantics came along and ruined absolutely everything, this thing called "adolescence" was invented where people who are adults are treated like children and made to endure many years of mandatory, mostly useless schooling (indoctrination). Now, I'm not suggesting the Romantics are directly responsible, but I've never let them off the hook for anything so I will implicate them in this fiasco as well (since it is familiar to me and therefor comfortable). Since then the age at which one becomes an adult in the eyes of society has run away from the age at which biology dictates, until now when someone age 26 is considered a "child" and can be covered under one's parent's health care.
I contend – and this is so important I think it warrants its own paragraph – that the invention of adolescence is responsible for the problems of the modern world. The longer you tell people they are children, the longer you treat people like children, the longer their minds will remain immature, hence the lazy, entitled narcissism of today's adults.
Remember, Alexander the Great conquered Persia at age 25 and became Lord of Asia before age 30, Jesus completed his entire ministry and was crucified before he was 40, and Ben Franklin retired at age 41 having made the equivalent of $3 billion in today's money. Steve Jobs started Apple at age 21, left fantastically wealthy in 1985 at age 30, before returning in 1996. Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft at about the same age Jobs started Apple and both were fantastically wealthy before Rush's magic age of 40.
And by this point I am approaching 1000 words and I have not even gotten to my main point (or out of the first paragraph of the story linked at the top of this page). If you have stuck with me this far, my valued couple of readers, you have my thanks.
Rush continues "My generation, we were inspired. We were pushed.... I couldn't wait to get out of home. I wanted my own apartment. I wanted my own car. I wanted all that."
"You know, when I was growing up, all the things I was told about
America and about myself, hard work, prosperity, success, whatever that
meant to people. For some people it means material things. Other
people it means being the best at what they do. You know, everybody
defines happiness a different way. But whatever it was, it was a given
that it was possible. It was up to you to get there. Today, they're
not being told that it's possible. They're being taught that it isn't."
That's very good, having inspiration, drive, and a society which encourages (and expects) it. And I agree that the current generation is not being inspired by the power elite. Academia, the media, the whole establishment, are telling young people to keep their heads down, that success is bad, that achievement is impossible, that America will never be great again. This is all true.
I also want to point out here that Rush is saying that different people can define success in different ways, and that as long as they work toward achieving their own standards of success that it is all good. This is important because in a minute Rush will go in the opposite direction and say that success is all about how much stuff you can accumulate before you die (conspicuous consumption).
Rush begins to read from the NPR article (which I will write about in my next piece). He weaves a yarn about a 27 year old man named Zach Brown who lives in LA:
"Brown is friends with Rosenthal," somebody mentioned earlier in the piece, "who finds herself spending her spare cash less on things and more on experiences. 'I love going to the movies and I like going to concerts a lot,' she says, 'and I like listening to music. I use Spotify and I listen to Pandora and things like that, but as far as purchasing those things I don't typically do it.'" Because that's been stigmatized, 'cause it's material, it's right out of the communist manifesto. It's stigmatized. It's filthy. It's selfish. It's destroying the earth to own things. If I buy a car I have to buy gasoline. It means I'm a polluter. These people are being told they are virtuous living lives of literal averageness and no remarkability about them, no risk-taking, no fun. There's virtue in all this. It's just 180 degrees out of phase.
Now, here's the final line in the piece at NPR. "The simple pleasures
and the bare necessities. Perhaps Millennials are on to something."
"Living lives of no fun." Yes, "I love going to movies and concerts" really sounds like the words of someone who is not having one tiny iota of fun. No risk taking, no remarkability? It is impossible to draw those conclusions from that quote, or from the article for that matter. I won't go into too much detail because it will be the subject of the next post and I don't want this one to get too long and confusing, jumping all over the place, what the article actually says (versus Rush's straw man version) is that, instead of accepting the cultural stories that are "a given" as Rush says, Millennials actually think "what do I want for me instead of what society tells me I should want?" Consumption is no longer a knee-jerk reaction, Millennials are actually thinking whether they need something to be happy before shelling out their hard to come by money to fill their homes (or parents' homes) with useless crap.
Well, I'm sorry, folks, that's how they live. Those kinds of low expectations are why around the world so many people are trying to get here.... They're being told that there's virtue in not distinguishing themselves. There's virtue in not accomplishing anything. There's no stigma attached to that. Achievement, success, those things are not fair because not everybody is. In LA a grown man doesn't want to have a car. Do you think that has any roots in traditional America? A grown man. In New York, it's another thing. A grown man, 27 years old, in LA, an actor, what's he gonna pick up on his bicycle? A makeup artist?
What's wrong with an actor picking up a makeup artist? "This guy ain't gonna pick up chicks with a bike!" Says the man who rushed into three marriages that failed because he was more interested in spending his spare time after work staying home tinkering with ham radios and watching football on TV than spending time with his wives going out to shows or hiking or other activities that involved the outdoors and other people. Not the kind of guy to get dating tips from.
A grown man, not only does he not want a car, he thinks there's virtue in not wanting one and not having one. "That's right, Mr. Limbaugh, that's the way we all should be thinking now. This is how we will save the planet from global warming and reduce our dependence on foreign oil." And this is how these New Castrati little sissies think. Well, I don't know, folks. All I know is that this kind of stuff is not what built a great country. A 27-year-old kid who doesn't want a car, we're not talking about John Wayne there. We're not talking Hercules. Who are we talking about?
"A grown man who not only does not want a car but thinks it is a virtue not wanting a car." Nowhere in the article does it say Zach Brown does not want a car, and nowhere does it say he thinks people who want cars are reprobates. Rush is just making shit up here. If you read the article, instead of imagining naked ladies, you'll see it talks about being optimistic even if the economy has been destroyed and you can't find a job that pays enough to buy a fleet of black Maybachs, or a giant mansion that you only use four rooms of, or an acre of mahogany wood paneling in your library, or a private jet with your brand logo on the tail. Millennials don't think owning stuff is evil, they think, according to the article, that times are tough but we'll get through it and we should look toward the positive aspects of life instead of dwelling on the negative.
He goes on to imply that a grown man who does not want a car (nowhere does it say in the article that Zach doesn't want a car) is a homosexual and a weakling. I don't think I've been this turned off by listening to Rush Limbaugh since he praised the AIG executives for running the company into the ground and taking their golden parachutes.
What happened to "everybody
defines happiness a different way"? All of a sudden everyone who uses a different definition from Rush Limbaugh is a deviant, a dirtbag, a loser. Everyone who does not want to buy things they cannot afford is crazy. You know what is 180 degrees out of phase? It's not Millennials not wanting to buy cars, it's Rush Limbaugh saying one thing and then five minutes later saying the exact opposite thing all the while blowing over a strawman argument and acting like anyone who is different from an insecure introverted techie radio show host is a fruitcake failure.
My mother, who's getting up there in years, told me "what matters in life isn't a bunch of stuff on a shelf collecting dust, it's people." She's absolutely right, and I take the time to remind myself that every day. If Zach is focusing on enjoying the little time he has on this Earth with his friends instead of buying a car and driving around thinking about being Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate banging some chick and her mother, then Zach definitely has his head on straighter than the average person and his heart is certainly pointing in the right direction.
Toward the end of his monologue Rush makes a cursory promise "I'm not gonna keep on with this Millennial stuff." I sure hope so, because it's annoying the hell out of me.
Limbaugh brings up how they should not lose faith in the country but instead lose faith in the Democrat Party, seemingly ignoring the fact that politicians don't elect themselves, instead it is the people who put them in power (theoretically). The Democrat Party would not have any power if the people stood up to them.
And just what is a country? That is a difficult question to answer. While there is no ambiguity as to what the term "sovereign state" refers, and relatively little ambiguity as to what the term "nation" refers, a "country" is a bit of a head scratcher that occupies the grey area between the two. The United States is the state and "We the people" are the nation (discounting racist supremacist groups like La Raza and the Nation of Islam, as well as legitimate "sovereign" nations such as the Navajo, Blackfeet, and others), but as to what entity is the country is dependent upon who is speaking. Just for the sake of this article I will give a nod to the Greek idea of a polis and show preference for "country" and "nation" being largely synonymous.
If the country is the people of the United States then absolutely the country (in all its laziness or selfishness or whatever reason) is to blame for putting the people in power who have led to the destruction of the US economy and way of life. People get what they vote for, or don't vote for in the case of the millions who decided to stay home, permitting Zero from taking office a second time. America was not conquered by an outside force, it was taken over from within.
But that's not what I wanted to write about.
"I have it hear, folks, right here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers. This is an article from NPR. And I would think a lot of Millennials listen to NPR."
Interesting side note: I first heard of NPR during my time behind enemy lines, getting expensive wallpaper at university. I was in an African history class (very disappointing, it was pretty much a sub-Saharan African colonial history class and didn't focus on the thousands of years of history that took place before the arrival of Europeans in the southern two thirds of the continent), and the professor mentioned how he was listening to NPR in his car on the way to class. Having never heard that word before I looked it up on the Internet later that day and discovered it was an unsuccessful radio news agency.
Rush continues "In fact, when I was in my twenties, nobody was even willing to take you seriously until you were 40. You hadn't lived long enough to know enough to be trusted with enough when I grew up."
He spends maybe 15 minutes every day this week glorifying that disgustingly backward practice because it is familiar to him and therefor comfortable. For most of history societies were set up so people were ready for adulthood when they actually became adults, somewhere around age 15. Every social institution prepared people for the privileges and responsibilities of adulthood at the age when nature dictated, and people were expected to act like adults when nature dropped the bomb and said "you're an adult now, deal with it."
Then around the time when the Romantics came along and ruined absolutely everything, this thing called "adolescence" was invented where people who are adults are treated like children and made to endure many years of mandatory, mostly useless schooling (indoctrination). Now, I'm not suggesting the Romantics are directly responsible, but I've never let them off the hook for anything so I will implicate them in this fiasco as well (since it is familiar to me and therefor comfortable). Since then the age at which one becomes an adult in the eyes of society has run away from the age at which biology dictates, until now when someone age 26 is considered a "child" and can be covered under one's parent's health care.
I contend – and this is so important I think it warrants its own paragraph – that the invention of adolescence is responsible for the problems of the modern world. The longer you tell people they are children, the longer you treat people like children, the longer their minds will remain immature, hence the lazy, entitled narcissism of today's adults.
Remember, Alexander the Great conquered Persia at age 25 and became Lord of Asia before age 30, Jesus completed his entire ministry and was crucified before he was 40, and Ben Franklin retired at age 41 having made the equivalent of $3 billion in today's money. Steve Jobs started Apple at age 21, left fantastically wealthy in 1985 at age 30, before returning in 1996. Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft at about the same age Jobs started Apple and both were fantastically wealthy before Rush's magic age of 40.
And by this point I am approaching 1000 words and I have not even gotten to my main point (or out of the first paragraph of the story linked at the top of this page). If you have stuck with me this far, my valued couple of readers, you have my thanks.
Rush continues "My generation, we were inspired. We were pushed.... I couldn't wait to get out of home. I wanted my own apartment. I wanted my own car. I wanted all that."
"You know, when I was growing up, all the things I was told about
America and about myself, hard work, prosperity, success, whatever that
meant to people. For some people it means material things. Other
people it means being the best at what they do. You know, everybody
defines happiness a different way. But whatever it was, it was a given
that it was possible. It was up to you to get there. Today, they're
not being told that it's possible. They're being taught that it isn't."
That's very good, having inspiration, drive, and a society which encourages (and expects) it. And I agree that the current generation is not being inspired by the power elite. Academia, the media, the whole establishment, are telling young people to keep their heads down, that success is bad, that achievement is impossible, that America will never be great again. This is all true.
I also want to point out here that Rush is saying that different people can define success in different ways, and that as long as they work toward achieving their own standards of success that it is all good. This is important because in a minute Rush will go in the opposite direction and say that success is all about how much stuff you can accumulate before you die (conspicuous consumption).
Rush begins to read from the NPR article (which I will write about in my next piece). He weaves a yarn about a 27 year old man named Zach Brown who lives in LA:
"Brown is friends with Rosenthal," somebody mentioned earlier in the piece, "who finds herself spending her spare cash less on things and more on experiences. 'I love going to the movies and I like going to concerts a lot,' she says, 'and I like listening to music. I use Spotify and I listen to Pandora and things like that, but as far as purchasing those things I don't typically do it.'" Because that's been stigmatized, 'cause it's material, it's right out of the communist manifesto. It's stigmatized. It's filthy. It's selfish. It's destroying the earth to own things. If I buy a car I have to buy gasoline. It means I'm a polluter. These people are being told they are virtuous living lives of literal averageness and no remarkability about them, no risk-taking, no fun. There's virtue in all this. It's just 180 degrees out of phase.
Now, here's the final line in the piece at NPR. "The simple pleasures
and the bare necessities. Perhaps Millennials are on to something."
"Living lives of no fun." Yes, "I love going to movies and concerts" really sounds like the words of someone who is not having one tiny iota of fun. No risk taking, no remarkability? It is impossible to draw those conclusions from that quote, or from the article for that matter. I won't go into too much detail because it will be the subject of the next post and I don't want this one to get too long and confusing, jumping all over the place, what the article actually says (versus Rush's straw man version) is that, instead of accepting the cultural stories that are "a given" as Rush says, Millennials actually think "what do I want for me instead of what society tells me I should want?" Consumption is no longer a knee-jerk reaction, Millennials are actually thinking whether they need something to be happy before shelling out their hard to come by money to fill their homes (or parents' homes) with useless crap.
Well, I'm sorry, folks, that's how they live. Those kinds of low expectations are why around the world so many people are trying to get here.... They're being told that there's virtue in not distinguishing themselves. There's virtue in not accomplishing anything. There's no stigma attached to that. Achievement, success, those things are not fair because not everybody is. In LA a grown man doesn't want to have a car. Do you think that has any roots in traditional America? A grown man. In New York, it's another thing. A grown man, 27 years old, in LA, an actor, what's he gonna pick up on his bicycle? A makeup artist?
What's wrong with an actor picking up a makeup artist? "This guy ain't gonna pick up chicks with a bike!" Says the man who rushed into three marriages that failed because he was more interested in spending his spare time after work staying home tinkering with ham radios and watching football on TV than spending time with his wives going out to shows or hiking or other activities that involved the outdoors and other people. Not the kind of guy to get dating tips from.
A grown man, not only does he not want a car, he thinks there's virtue in not wanting one and not having one. "That's right, Mr. Limbaugh, that's the way we all should be thinking now. This is how we will save the planet from global warming and reduce our dependence on foreign oil." And this is how these New Castrati little sissies think. Well, I don't know, folks. All I know is that this kind of stuff is not what built a great country. A 27-year-old kid who doesn't want a car, we're not talking about John Wayne there. We're not talking Hercules. Who are we talking about?
"A grown man who not only does not want a car but thinks it is a virtue not wanting a car." Nowhere in the article does it say Zach Brown does not want a car, and nowhere does it say he thinks people who want cars are reprobates. Rush is just making shit up here. If you read the article, instead of imagining naked ladies, you'll see it talks about being optimistic even if the economy has been destroyed and you can't find a job that pays enough to buy a fleet of black Maybachs, or a giant mansion that you only use four rooms of, or an acre of mahogany wood paneling in your library, or a private jet with your brand logo on the tail. Millennials don't think owning stuff is evil, they think, according to the article, that times are tough but we'll get through it and we should look toward the positive aspects of life instead of dwelling on the negative.
He goes on to imply that a grown man who does not want a car (nowhere does it say in the article that Zach doesn't want a car) is a homosexual and a weakling. I don't think I've been this turned off by listening to Rush Limbaugh since he praised the AIG executives for running the company into the ground and taking their golden parachutes.
What happened to "everybody
defines happiness a different way"? All of a sudden everyone who uses a different definition from Rush Limbaugh is a deviant, a dirtbag, a loser. Everyone who does not want to buy things they cannot afford is crazy. You know what is 180 degrees out of phase? It's not Millennials not wanting to buy cars, it's Rush Limbaugh saying one thing and then five minutes later saying the exact opposite thing all the while blowing over a strawman argument and acting like anyone who is different from an insecure introverted techie radio show host is a fruitcake failure.
My mother, who's getting up there in years, told me "what matters in life isn't a bunch of stuff on a shelf collecting dust, it's people." She's absolutely right, and I take the time to remind myself that every day. If Zach is focusing on enjoying the little time he has on this Earth with his friends instead of buying a car and driving around thinking about being Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate banging some chick and her mother, then Zach definitely has his head on straighter than the average person and his heart is certainly pointing in the right direction.
Toward the end of his monologue Rush makes a cursory promise "I'm not gonna keep on with this Millennial stuff." I sure hope so, because it's annoying the hell out of me.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Nigel Farage Was Right!
Nigel Farage, UK MEP, predicted a lot of things in 2010 and 2011, about the bailouts, about the collapse of Greece and Portugal, about the end of the European Union and the rise of nationalism in member states who are fed up with the debt crisis. He was right. The political party that shows the fastest growth in Greece is the ultra far right nationalist party the Golden Dawn (the website is in Greek). Didn't we see this happen before, 80 years ago? People are pushed to the breaking point by a golbal debt crisis and demand new leadership to rise from within their own people. History is repeating itself, again, all because people are too stupid, to naive, or too lazy to actually learn from the mistakes their ancestors made.
THIS is why you should study history (that project I was working on that was lost with my old computer). You should study history so you can see what is coming in the future if you keep doing the same things and expecting different outcomes. You should study history to avoid the collapse of civilisations and the deaths of millions in unnecessary wars brought on by failed policies.
Watch 14 minutes of Nigel Farage demonstrait why you should study history.
THIS is why you should study history (that project I was working on that was lost with my old computer). You should study history so you can see what is coming in the future if you keep doing the same things and expecting different outcomes. You should study history to avoid the collapse of civilisations and the deaths of millions in unnecessary wars brought on by failed policies.
Watch 14 minutes of Nigel Farage demonstrait why you should study history.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Pissgate, King of Bain, & Obama's Dirty Little Secret
Pissgate
Remember the LiveLeak (very appropriate) video of four Marines pissing on dead Taliban? Here's the video in case you don't (contains real dead bodies):
Representative Allen West (a combat veteran) commented on the incident:
"I do not recall any self-righteous indignation when our Delta snipers Shugart and Gordon had their bodies dragged through Mogadishu. Neither do I recall media outrage and condemnation of our Blackwater security contractors being killed, their bodies burned, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah."
"The Marines were wrong. Give them a maximum punishment under field grade level Article 15 (non-judicial punishment)..."
"As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell."
(follow the link for his full statement)
Obama's Dirty Little Secret
A new book out by Rolling Stone editor Michael Hastings, The Operators, talks about how Hastings was disappointed and disgusted by Zero's behaviour in Baghdad:
Newton Gingrich might be right about Israel, but his super PAC (Political Action Committee) Winning Our Future is Republicans for Obama. They produced a video called "King of Bain" about Mitt Romney's time at Bain Capital, a company that acquired other companies on the verge of bankruptcy and turned them around (and a few went under, which happens, and isn't all that bad considering just how many successes Bain had). The King of Bain video is the worst, most lie-filled, dirty, underhanded, scathing attack against capitalism since the "Story of Crap" put out by the Tides Foundation (run by New World Order top leader George Soros) and hosted by some fat ugly woman. The Obama campaign couldn't come up with anything worse than this.
The short video portrays greedy Wall Street "corporate raiders" smoking huge stogies in star chambers and plotting the downfall of the world while their faces rot away from an outbreak of liver spots and ground down teeth. Of course no mention is made that Fannie and Freddie were behind it all and the government allowed and even encouraged the greed of Wall Street similar to how someone might throw a child to a lion and then turn around and blame the lion for eating the child when eating children is the lion's nature and it was the human who threw the child over the fence in the first place!
Did you know that when Mitt Romney became CEO of Bain Capital his primary objective was to make money for the company!? He's evil! Companies don't exist to make money! He fired people, cut benefits, and sold assets!
Hold on, didn't I learn in econ class that that's what companies do? Don't all companies exist to make money? Isn't firing employees and selling assets part of taking the necessary steps to keep a firm from going bankrupt?
Bain acquired risky start ups and companies that were going to fail and lose all their jobs anyway, so when a handful turn south and jobs are lost that's not Bain's fault, that's harvesting*. The video was so vile that Newt himself scolded Winning Our Future, telling them to remove all the lies.
If the Pubs are going to act like this they might as well just hand the reelection over to Zero.
*The harvesting effect is a theory in epidemiology. From UD: "It occurs when an agent causes death in an individual who would die or enter a hospital in any case within a few days of exposure to the agent. The idea is that the agent - the assigned determining factor in death - is irrelevant. Had the patient been generally healthier they would not have succumbed to the agent. Again, had they not been exposed to the agent they would have been dead anyway within a short time. Therefore, assigning the agent as the cause of death is not truly correct."
Someone who was going to die anyway gets a disease (say Swine Flu) and dies. People falsly attribute the person's death to Swine Flu and create a public scare even though the person would have died even if they didn't get sick. The same is true of Bain Capital. Those jobs would have been lost anyway. The companies would definitely have gone under had Bain not acquired them, but Bain was not some magic wand that could solve all their problems, it was a gamble, and gambles don't always pay off, and when they don't that doesn't mean that Bain was to blame.
Remember the LiveLeak (very appropriate) video of four Marines pissing on dead Taliban? Here's the video in case you don't (contains real dead bodies):
Representative Allen West (a combat veteran) commented on the incident:
"I do not recall any self-righteous indignation when our Delta snipers Shugart and Gordon had their bodies dragged through Mogadishu. Neither do I recall media outrage and condemnation of our Blackwater security contractors being killed, their bodies burned, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah."
"The Marines were wrong. Give them a maximum punishment under field grade level Article 15 (non-judicial punishment)..."
"As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell."
(follow the link for his full statement)
Obama's Dirty Little Secret
A new book out by Rolling Stone editor Michael Hastings, The Operators, talks about how Hastings was disappointed and disgusted by Zero's behaviour in Baghdad:
King of BainAfter the talk, out of earshot from the soldiers and diplomats, he starts to complain. He starts to act very un-Obamalike, according to a U.S. embassy official
who helped organize the trip in Baghdad.He’s asked to go out to take a few more pictures with soldiers and embassy staffers. He’s asked to sign copies of his book. “He didn’t want to take pictures with any more soldiers; he was complaining about it,” a State Department official tells me. “Look, I was excited to meet him. I wanted to like him. Let’s just say the scales fell from my
eyes after I did. These are people over here who’ve been fighting the war, or working every day for the war effort, and he didn’t want to take fucking pictures with them?"
Newton Gingrich might be right about Israel, but his super PAC (Political Action Committee) Winning Our Future is Republicans for Obama. They produced a video called "King of Bain" about Mitt Romney's time at Bain Capital, a company that acquired other companies on the verge of bankruptcy and turned them around (and a few went under, which happens, and isn't all that bad considering just how many successes Bain had). The King of Bain video is the worst, most lie-filled, dirty, underhanded, scathing attack against capitalism since the "Story of Crap" put out by the Tides Foundation (run by New World Order top leader George Soros) and hosted by some fat ugly woman. The Obama campaign couldn't come up with anything worse than this.
The short video portrays greedy Wall Street "corporate raiders" smoking huge stogies in star chambers and plotting the downfall of the world while their faces rot away from an outbreak of liver spots and ground down teeth. Of course no mention is made that Fannie and Freddie were behind it all and the government allowed and even encouraged the greed of Wall Street similar to how someone might throw a child to a lion and then turn around and blame the lion for eating the child when eating children is the lion's nature and it was the human who threw the child over the fence in the first place!
Did you know that when Mitt Romney became CEO of Bain Capital his primary objective was to make money for the company!? He's evil! Companies don't exist to make money! He fired people, cut benefits, and sold assets!
Hold on, didn't I learn in econ class that that's what companies do? Don't all companies exist to make money? Isn't firing employees and selling assets part of taking the necessary steps to keep a firm from going bankrupt?
Bain acquired risky start ups and companies that were going to fail and lose all their jobs anyway, so when a handful turn south and jobs are lost that's not Bain's fault, that's harvesting*. The video was so vile that Newt himself scolded Winning Our Future, telling them to remove all the lies.
If the Pubs are going to act like this they might as well just hand the reelection over to Zero.
*The harvesting effect is a theory in epidemiology. From UD: "It occurs when an agent causes death in an individual who would die or enter a hospital in any case within a few days of exposure to the agent. The idea is that the agent - the assigned determining factor in death - is irrelevant. Had the patient been generally healthier they would not have succumbed to the agent. Again, had they not been exposed to the agent they would have been dead anyway within a short time. Therefore, assigning the agent as the cause of death is not truly correct."
Someone who was going to die anyway gets a disease (say Swine Flu) and dies. People falsly attribute the person's death to Swine Flu and create a public scare even though the person would have died even if they didn't get sick. The same is true of Bain Capital. Those jobs would have been lost anyway. The companies would definitely have gone under had Bain not acquired them, but Bain was not some magic wand that could solve all their problems, it was a gamble, and gambles don't always pay off, and when they don't that doesn't mean that Bain was to blame.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
The Pussification of America
George Carlin did a routine on what he called "the pussification of America," a condition brought on by too much politically correct BS. I got to thinking in the shower, where I do most of my thinking. It started with the obvious paradox: nearly everyone in the country is on some diet all of the time and is more "health-conscious" than ever, yet a full third of all our citizens are obese. Never have I seen this many fat people in my life, and this is in spite of the fact that no one is allowed to eat salt or trans fats, or carbs, or meat, or whole milk. How the hell are they getting that fat then? Do people assume that since food is now low fat that they can eat ten times more?
This reminded me of something in the book Generation Kill. One of the Marines was a Mexican who liked to go off about how he disliked white people even though all his friends were white. He made a good point when he said that being poor in America was different than being poor elsewhere. Poor people in America have a house, or at least an apartment, a car or two, plasma TV, high-speed Internet, iPhone, iPod, i-whatever else, HD digital camera, etc. Also, poor people in America are obese. Poor people elsewhere are walking skeletons, like in Ethiopia on those Feed the Children commercials, but poor people in America are obese! How does that happen?
When you think about it, for 99% of human history only the tippity top of society could afford to get obese; less than 1%. The poorest people in America are obese, which puts them at the top richest 1% of all people in all of human history. Think about this: Louis XIV of France, the God-Emperor of all the world who built the largest palace on the continent and bathed in champaign and dressed in solid gold never used a toilet. His entire life, Louis XIV, the richest, most powerful man in all of Europe never used a toilet. He had to shit in a box and have someone dump it out a window. Louis XIV didn't have refrigiration in the summer, he didn't have heat in the winter, he didn't have a cure for measles. He had no electricity or motor vehicles. He had no means of keeping famine or war or plague from devastating his country. Louis XIV, the absolute ruler over millions, didn't live as well as poor people do in 21st Century America!
In spite of all this, the pussies at Occupy Wall Street* are still complaining! They claim to be the voice of the 99% against the top 1%, yet they are the top 1%! The people occupying Wall Street are among the top 1% of richest people in all of human history! They got used to getting a free ride from their bottomless mommy-government and when the tap got turned down slightly they started throwing a tantrum. They all have iPhones and iPads and HD digital cameras. They all have adequate nutrition (weren't they eating smoked salmon in their tents?). They have one of the best sanitation systems in human history, no threat of war now that there's an all volunteer military defending a nation protected on two sides by oceans. They have the best healthcare system on the planet, the one responsible for every last major medical advancement in the past thirty years. Think about it. The OWS pussies have it better than my ancestors did when they came to this country 100 years ago to escape being peasant farmers in Italy. There's child labour laws, civil rights, gay rights, womens' rights, free education till your 18th birthday, food stamps so poor people don't go hungry, indoor flush toilets, vaccines that save millions of children from previously fatal diseases that have vanished in the Western world. Hundreds of pages can be written about all the blessings these pussies have and only a couple on the troubles they face, yet they still are not satisfied! The selfishness of these people, shitting in police cars, mating under tarps, trying to keep a third of all employed New Yorkers from working**, assaulting the police to provoke retaliation and win sympathy like wife-beater Rodney King. The selfishness of the OWS pussies is disgusting.
*A group of activists believing that by yelling loudly enough some slogans they don't fully understand about some economic concepts they don't even begin to comprehend, they can change an economic situation they don't really like into a better one that they haven't quite defined yet.
**A third of all people in NYC are employed in some fashion by Wall Street.
This reminded me of something in the book Generation Kill. One of the Marines was a Mexican who liked to go off about how he disliked white people even though all his friends were white. He made a good point when he said that being poor in America was different than being poor elsewhere. Poor people in America have a house, or at least an apartment, a car or two, plasma TV, high-speed Internet, iPhone, iPod, i-whatever else, HD digital camera, etc. Also, poor people in America are obese. Poor people elsewhere are walking skeletons, like in Ethiopia on those Feed the Children commercials, but poor people in America are obese! How does that happen?
When you think about it, for 99% of human history only the tippity top of society could afford to get obese; less than 1%. The poorest people in America are obese, which puts them at the top richest 1% of all people in all of human history. Think about this: Louis XIV of France, the God-Emperor of all the world who built the largest palace on the continent and bathed in champaign and dressed in solid gold never used a toilet. His entire life, Louis XIV, the richest, most powerful man in all of Europe never used a toilet. He had to shit in a box and have someone dump it out a window. Louis XIV didn't have refrigiration in the summer, he didn't have heat in the winter, he didn't have a cure for measles. He had no electricity or motor vehicles. He had no means of keeping famine or war or plague from devastating his country. Louis XIV, the absolute ruler over millions, didn't live as well as poor people do in 21st Century America!
In spite of all this, the pussies at Occupy Wall Street* are still complaining! They claim to be the voice of the 99% against the top 1%, yet they are the top 1%! The people occupying Wall Street are among the top 1% of richest people in all of human history! They got used to getting a free ride from their bottomless mommy-government and when the tap got turned down slightly they started throwing a tantrum. They all have iPhones and iPads and HD digital cameras. They all have adequate nutrition (weren't they eating smoked salmon in their tents?). They have one of the best sanitation systems in human history, no threat of war now that there's an all volunteer military defending a nation protected on two sides by oceans. They have the best healthcare system on the planet, the one responsible for every last major medical advancement in the past thirty years. Think about it. The OWS pussies have it better than my ancestors did when they came to this country 100 years ago to escape being peasant farmers in Italy. There's child labour laws, civil rights, gay rights, womens' rights, free education till your 18th birthday, food stamps so poor people don't go hungry, indoor flush toilets, vaccines that save millions of children from previously fatal diseases that have vanished in the Western world. Hundreds of pages can be written about all the blessings these pussies have and only a couple on the troubles they face, yet they still are not satisfied! The selfishness of these people, shitting in police cars, mating under tarps, trying to keep a third of all employed New Yorkers from working**, assaulting the police to provoke retaliation and win sympathy like wife-beater Rodney King. The selfishness of the OWS pussies is disgusting.
*A group of activists believing that by yelling loudly enough some slogans they don't fully understand about some economic concepts they don't even begin to comprehend, they can change an economic situation they don't really like into a better one that they haven't quite defined yet.
**A third of all people in NYC are employed in some fashion by Wall Street.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Swami Kriyananda on the Economic Collapse
Recall earlier how I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Paramhansa Yogananda's disciple Kriyananda's world brotherhood colonies, dubbed "Ananda Villiages", were neither hippie nor communist. Everyone must be fiscially responsible and contribute financially to the community. Now Swami Kriyananda gives an hour talk on the global economic collapse. In summary:
*Using creative energy to help others is like a muscle - it gets stronger the more you use it - and not like a fixed quantity like gold that diminshes the more you use it
*A lot of people care only for money, not for people, and they often play the stock market
*Government is too damn big (though he doesn't say "damn")
*Welfare helps government orders of magnitude more than it helps the needy
*...And it's FDR's fault!
*Deficite spending doesn't work and is killing the world economy
*"Legalise pot and maybe hard drugs so criminals can't make profits off of it and addicts can be given help, not rectal exams
*(Interestingly) Rock music (especially metal) is the vibration of negative dimensions and can cause natural disasters!
*Kindness and generosity can shelter you from economic hardship, though not always immediately, and, consequently, if you apply for enough jobs you'll eventually get one
*The Dollar will collapse, leading to world-wide hyperinflation
*The Euro sucks (too)
*Gold coins are very good to survive the economic apocalypse, but good farm land is the best investment
*Starting small communities in the country with similar minded individuals is the key to saving humanity, because cities will explode with apocalyptic crime
*Using creative energy to help others is like a muscle - it gets stronger the more you use it - and not like a fixed quantity like gold that diminshes the more you use it
*A lot of people care only for money, not for people, and they often play the stock market
*Government is too damn big (though he doesn't say "damn")
*Welfare helps government orders of magnitude more than it helps the needy
*...And it's FDR's fault!
*Deficite spending doesn't work and is killing the world economy
*"Legalise pot and maybe hard drugs so criminals can't make profits off of it and addicts can be given help, not rectal exams
*(Interestingly) Rock music (especially metal) is the vibration of negative dimensions and can cause natural disasters!
*Kindness and generosity can shelter you from economic hardship, though not always immediately, and, consequently, if you apply for enough jobs you'll eventually get one
*The Dollar will collapse, leading to world-wide hyperinflation
*The Euro sucks (too)
*Gold coins are very good to survive the economic apocalypse, but good farm land is the best investment
*Starting small communities in the country with similar minded individuals is the key to saving humanity, because cities will explode with apocalyptic crime
Friday, September 2, 2011
Milton Friedman on Donahue - 1979
Economist Milton Friedman takes down Phil Donahue's appeal to emotion by pointing out that greed is not capitalism's fault but is a basic human condition plaguing all political and economic systems. 9:28
Friday, July 16, 2010
The New Age
On this day in 1945, just before dawn, the world entered the atomic age. The Manhattan Project cost $2 billion ($20 billion today) and involved the largest group of brilliant minds ever assembled. Not too long after two bombs would be dropped on Japan, turning the largest science experiment in history into largest weapon of war ever used. It was estimated that in order to defeat the Japanese the largest invasion ever would have to be conducted, resulting in one million American casualties. Five million Japanese would have to be killed reaching Tokyo and forcing the government to surrender. The Russians would have invaded from the north, resulting in millions more dead and dividing the Japanese islands in two, one communist, one capitalist. The divided nation would eventually go to war to reunify the islands in a conflict that would make Korea look like a school yard squabble. For saving countless millions of lives and ending the war more than a year early, the overwhelming impetus toward world peace that was born on 16 July 1945 cannot be underestimated. There has not been another World War since. There has not been anything close to one, and we have the threat of nuclear annihilation to thank. It seems we humans are so primitive that we have to be scared straight, or at least less crooked.
Clip from "Trinity and Beyond"
Clip from The History Channel
Clip from "Trinity and Beyond"
Clip from The History Channel
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