Archive for the 'The Coming End of Pre-History (One Way or The Other)' Category
Sunday, July 4th, 2010
Our Revolutionary Right/Duty
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Monday, May 17th, 2010
40 IQers and a Fool
So, like, Las Vegas, the poster child for late capitalist heedlessness, is totally wrecked and doomed. So, what are the local sellers and chasers doing down there?
Home prices in Las Vegas are down by 60 percent from 2006 in one of the steepest descents in modern times. There are 9,517 spanking new houses sitting empty. An additional 5,600 homes were repossessed by lenders in the first three months of this year and could soon be for sale.
The price declines in Las Vegas have been so brutal that most homeowners with a mortgage owe more than their home is worth. If they must sell, their only option is a so-called short sale done with the approval of the lender, which can be a lengthy and frustrating process for all concerned.
Yet builders here are putting up 1,100 homes, and they are frantically buying lots for even more.
Las Vegas is trying to recover by building what it does not need. It is an unlikely pattern being repeated in many of the areas where the housing crash was most severe.
Leave it to The New York Times to call this standard late-imperial effort to make a symptoms into a cure “unlikely.”
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
Keep an Eye on New Jersey
It’s actually far from funny. But, after three decades of selling the more deluded crackers the notion that big government is the primary source of economic hardship and social discombobulation, there are now enough deep believers to not just elect peddlers of this laughable dogma, but a few major office-holders who are actually going to try it all out.
One such is the perfectly-named Chris Christie, the doughy, mafia capo look-alike who was recently elected by the benighted part of the New Jersey electorate to be that state’s Governor.
According to today’s New York Times, Christie didn’t get the memo that actually cutting government is not something a good government-basher actually does upon reaching power:
“Today, we are fulfilling the promise of a smaller government that lives within its means,” Governor Christie said in remarks prepared for delivery at 1 p.m. “The defenders of the status quo have already begun to yell and scream. They will try to demonize me. They will seek to divide us rather than unite us. But even they know in their hearts, if not yet in their minds — it is time for a change.”
The plan?
Over all, [Christie's] budget would shrink state spending by 9 percent from the fiscal year that ends in June, to $28.3 billion.
Upending the priorities of his Democratic predecessors, Governor Christie unveiled a budget that would hit the poor, elderly, schoolchildren, college students and inner-city residents hardest, while largely sparing the wealthy and businesses.
It remains to be seen whether Christie can get this through the New Jersey legislature, given that most office holders, including those who peddle anti-government cant, secretly know that cutting government spending in the middle of a depression is a recipe for disaster.
But, if Christie gets his way, look for New Jersey to implode even faster than the rest of this deluded and dying empire.
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.
