Archive for the 'The Coming End of Pre-History (One Way or The Other)' Category
Saturday, February 20th, 2010
American Un-Civilization
The demand of the American Revolution was “No taxation without representation.” It was not “No taxation.”
A hundred years later, Oliver Wendell Holmes frequently repeated the aphorism “Taxes are the price of civilization.”
Now, facing profound national and global problems in the make-it-or-break 21st century, we have numb-nutters running around dressing up like Thomas Paine (who would have hated their guts) while being pandered to by morons like Scott Brown, who defends psychotic, murdering crooks by saying “Certainly, no one likes paying taxes, obviously.”
The childishness of it all is breathtaking. Do you like having a road on which to operate your motor vehicle? A school for your child? Are you one of the dupes who think “our troops” are fighting “for us”? Do you enjoy knowing that the fire department will arrive if your house catches fire or you go into cardiac arrest? Do you admit any contradiction between enjoying these things and Mr. Brown’s (massively dishonest — the Republican Party is never going to reduce the size of government, as doing so would draw a Depression that would make this Great Recession look like a Golden Age of prosperity) advocacy of an utterly juvenile anti-social worldview?
Not that the lying, bought-and-sold Democrats are an ounce better…
Monday, February 8th, 2010
It’s the Capitalists, Stupid
From economist Emmanuel Saez, reporting on the share of personal income going to various percentiles of the U.S. households:
Year 2007 [was] the second highest year on record since 1913 almost equaling 1928, the record year when the top percentile share reached 23.9 percent. Even within the top percentile, the gains from 2006 to 2007 are extremely concentrated. The top .01% (top 14,988 US families, making at least $11.5m in 2007) share increased from 5.46% in 2006 to 6.04% in 2007 leaving well behind the 1928 peak of 5.04 percent.
One wonders whether the year 1928 doesn’t have rather a great deal of relevance as history repeating itself. 2007 looks an awful lot like that former pinnacle, with eerily similar effects seemingly ensuing, with the crucial difference that, behind the marketing facade, Obama is Hoover redux, not FDR II.
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
The TCT Position on Climate Change
Well, the evidence that CO2 levels are rising is inarguable. Nobody disputes that, since it’s easily measured and recorded.
What impact CO2 levels have is somewhat arguable. As this article says, “‘We really don’t know how high CO2 has been in the geologic past. Thus we don’t know how sensitive the surface temperature of the Earth is to CO2,’ said Don DePaolo, head of the Earth Sciences Division at the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory in California. Most global warming predictions are based on fluctuations in CO2 levels and temperature that happened between a relatively recent series of ice ages.”
If you go by what’s known about recent ice ages, the correlation between CO2 levels and surface temperatures is tight. There is some (probably minor) chance that those recent ice ages produce a false correlation, though.
The other issue is whether the rising CO2 levels are partly or wholly human-caused, or merely naturally occurring. To me, it seems highly unlikely that this spike in CO2 just randomly happened to overlap perfectly with the Industrial Revolution and its accelerating burn of CO2-emitting substances.
So, whether you “believe” is really the wrong question. The question is where you place the odds, based on the evidence. Personally, I see it as 90 percent chance that GW is happening, and another 90 percent that it is largely human-made. So .9 times .9 is .81, meaning I think there’s an 81 percent chance that the scary story is accurate.
Of course, the other issue is the attitude to risk one thinks is proper. Unless you think there is strong evidence that global warming is either a complete hoax or is real but holds zero percent chance of causing serious problems for the future, then you have to adopt a responsible position on it, if you wish to practice elementary ethical behavior. To me, the choice is between assuming it’s fake and/or won’t cause big problems, and assuming it might. If it might, then the next question is what to do about it.
Is it not the height of recklessness to refuse to acknowledge a possibly immense risk to one’s (and other people’s) children and grandchildren? Is it not the height of irony that the ones who are doing exactly that are also the ones who claim to stand for “values?”
Meanwhile, the other, possible more pressing environmental catastrophe is peak resources. Personally, I think the odds of encountering huge problems, soon, stemming from that are 95%. Yet, it is entirely suppressed by the media and mainstream politics. Why? My analysis is that it is indeed less debatable, both at the level of evidence and required solutions. And the required solutions include a cessation of capitalism.
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
Empires Never Learn
Escalation you can believe in. Obama is a defective product. I give him a 0 out of 100. If last November you’d outlined a script for the worst possible nightmare from his rule, he’d have followed it to the letter.
CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll. Nov. 13-15, 2009. N=1,014 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3. |
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| “Do you favor or oppose the U.S. war in Afghanistan?” | ||||||
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| Favor | Oppose | Unsure |
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11/13-15/09 |
45 | 52 | 3 |
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10/30 – 11/1/09 |
40 | 58 | 2 |
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9/11-13/09 |
39 | 58 | 3 |
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8/28-31/09 |
42 | 57 | 2 |
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7/31 – 8/3/09 |
41 | 54 | 5 | |||
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
What Kunstler Said!
James Howard Kunstler remarks today on the continuing reign of the word “consumer” within our market-totalitarian communications environment:
And, incidentally, what exactly is a “consumer?” And why, at the highest levels of journalism in this land, do we refer to citizens that way? As if the American people have no other purpose except to buy things? Or is that the only way an “economist” can imagine them?
Someday, if we survive the coming capitalist ecocide, people will look back and be amazed at how blind and thoroughly dominated we have been — right up to its end, apparently — in this investors-first epoch.
Meanwhile, it might help raise our odds of passing along this possibility for amazement if at least we, the supposed progressives and radicals, would stop parroting our overlords’ rank biases.
Saturday, November 21st, 2009
What is Capitalism?
Capitalism is an inherently expanding social order in which the goals and powers of profit-seeking, wages-for-worktime-paying private investors are the most important force shaping society.
Capitalists hate free markets, which force them to pass along technological advances in the form of lower prices. To protect themselves from that, in the late 1800s, leading capitalists lobbied state legislatures in the USA to win the right to form the giant conglomerate corporations that have since been the major units of the system. Thomas Edison explained this to The New York Times in February 1892, when he was merging Edison Electric with rival Thomson-Houston Electric to form General Electric.
Capitalism presumes that Earth can sustain endless economic expansion and whatever level of resource consumption that may require.
