Most beautiful city in the world? Not really that many contenders. a) Venice, b) Brugge are really the best, followed by c) Cambridge. For the big cities then Maybe d) Florence and e) Paris, but they are dirty then there is e) London. Maybe f) Capetown. My hometown Canandaigua probably gets in there for ‘small towns’.
Source date (UTC): 2011-08-09 06:59:00 UTC
“The histories of mankind are histories only of the higher classes.”
– Thomas Malthus. (Isn’t that because they’re the exceptions? Why spend effort and analysis to catalog and remember the pervasive and innocuous? Humans, like all apes, will forgo food to watch their Alphas. We learn from our Alphas. Our upper classes are our Alphas. There isn’t anything more to it. And we’d go extinct otherwise.)
Source date (UTC): 2011-06-10 13:35:00 UTC
Regarding The Wars Of Religion: The wars of religion were the result of economic power transferred from the Mediterranean to the atlantic, and the rise in germanic people’s populations which in turn resulted in their ‘revolution’ and separation from the south. Protestantism was a reaction to the political corruption of the church and the export of capital from the north to the south as taxes. The germanic monarchies wanted to keep the money in-country rather than export it to the south, and so they supported Luther. The people were simple pawns in this process, just as they were during the American civil war. The American civil war was fought between a merchant manufacturing north and an agrarian export south, over the markets created by the westward expansion made possible by the Louisiana purchase and the fact that the south could block northern legislation leading to political stalemate, and the south, as an export economy, paid for all the government’s costs, so there was a tension between the two economic and political bases. Europe’s first civil war was not over religion, it was over economics. America’s first civil war was not over slavery, it was over economics. All wars are over economics. It’s not complicated. What we are seeing today in the muslim world is similar. A combination of rapid increase in population accompanied by rapid increase in food prices, when food prices consume 70% or more of the income of these peoples. They are not ideological revolutions. They are about food. The fact that we talk about these historical events in moral and emotive populist terms is why we fail to learn from them and hence repeat them. THe USA is now going through a demographic shift, and trifurcation if not a four way split of the economy, and a political stalemate between regional cultural differences. This will eventually result in some sort of revolution or change int he political system. THere are any number of theories when this will occur. But the economic and cultural interests are sufficiently divergent that it is unlikely that the domestic empire can persist indefinitely. There are no wars of religion. There are wars of economic interest. FOLLOW THE MONEY.
Source date (UTC): 2011-05-18 06:16:00 UTC
From Peter Gordon, referring to an article in the Atlantic. “The LA metropolitan area is actually spread over parts of five counties and includes twice as many cities as writer Conor Friedersdorf cites. The Orange county-LA county boundary is invisible to most of us. And even granting Friedersdorf’s view of the world, trading the 88 cities he acknowledges for even more authority accruing to the LA County five-member Board of Supervisors would be no great boon. These five already have much more power and money than they can wisely administer.” “There are many good reasons that Americans migrate to the suburbs and one of them is home-rule. Another one is a measure of local government choice. The City of Bell and some others have been found to be corrupt. But the fact that the bad guys have a small jurisdiction to steal from rather than a big one is a good thing.”
Editing audiobook. Law, Legislation and Liberty. Priceless quote: “If our civilization survives, … I believe men will look back on our age as an age of superstition, chiefly connected with the names of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.”
Source date (UTC): 2011-04-19 22:17:00 UTC
http://www.thelocal.de/society/20110407-34257.html?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=185First plausible solution to the popular Victorian mystery. A german merchant seaman was in port in germany, london, and new york for each murder, and was captured and imprisoned in new york, after which the murders ceased.
Source date (UTC): 2011-04-08 10:07:00 UTC
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/living/not-as-old-as-you-thinkYoga is a modern invention, and largely American, or at least western rationalist in origin. Not one of my areas of interest, other than the pervasive distribution of thought around the world, and the merging of different bits of it from here and there.
Source date (UTC): 2011-03-13 18:38:00 UTC
Humans unconsciously rely upon these social constructs in order to establish priorities in political decision making:
In the west, we rely upon the fraternity. The remnants of our military social order. Democracy works for us because we are a fraternal society FIRST. Democracy DEPENDS upon the fraternal society. The competing sentiments of tribe, cult, and family give rise to the different approaches to the solution of political problems. IT’S THAT SIMPLE.
When we invented farming, money and cities, we had to convert the barbarians into peasants. As a consequence, we had to endure their disastrous magical religions. When we invented credit, and machines, we had to convert the peasants into proles. As a consequence, we had to endure their ridiculous Marxism and it’s murderous and impoverishing consequences. When we invented fiat money, nationalism, mass production, we had to covert the proles into consumers,. As a consequence had to endure their ridiculous redistributionism, multiculturalism, feminism, and Democratic Socialism
[callout]I pray thee God, deliver us unto Kings, and save us from ‘The People’.[/callout]
When we invented consumer credit and digital technology, we tired to to convert consumers into middle class citizens, and entrepreneurs. As a consequence we have had to endure conversion into a minority, loss of sovereignty, declining birth rates, and threats of Islamist movements. In retrospect, our advances are unwanted. The proles are a permanent resistance movement. A permanent detriment to the species. Our advances are unwanted and unappreciated. We are demonized by the lower class, not as heroes acting for the good of all but as selfish malcontents. There is never enough improvement to sate the desires of people whose real motivation is to counteract the one irreconcilable problem: The daily reality of their social status as consumers, proles, peasants and barbarians – as the lower class. Their status is written on their faces. IN their genes. In their body language. In their speech. They cannot escape it. They rail against their betters, envying what they do not have, cannot have, and would not have, but for the efforts of their betters. Why then, do we simply not return the consumers, proles, and peasants to barbarism and ourselves to nobility in the process? The proles act as if their threats of revolution are meaningful. When, the opposite is just as clearly true: That the strong can easily eat the weak. Maybe it’s time to recognize the futility of our heroism. The few have always been able to buy the cooperation of a minority willing to oppress the rest. If only in our self defense. To stop them from destroying the world we have made. “I pray thee God, deliver us unto Kings, and save us from ‘The People’.”
The takeover of the administration of state by the middle class in England created a problem for politicians. WIth their new found responsibility, they were not against the king any longer, and now were against each other. Some were cognizant of the risk. Conservatism: Sentiments of freedom from totalitarianism, brotherhood of protection of the city, individual responsibility. group persistence. the unity of church and state. fidelity to one’s word. Objective truth in all statements. Purity. These are sentiments of group persistence. Classical Liberal: institutional Balance of power, the rule of law, enfranchisement of the many, contractually explicit government, the virtuous citizen created by trade and exchange. Libertarian Anarcho Capitalist: privatized institutions of social services, sound money, and the credit society. Hoppian Monarchy: the inter-temporal incentives of monarchy to accumulate social capital. Insurance companies as vehicles for Machiavellian: power maintained by minority willing to keep it by violence. violence is superior to fraud in both practice and logic. Compulsory saving. What separates the west from the less successful cultures, is that the [glossary:aryan] tradition’s philosophy is political rather than interpersonal. The greeks solved the problem of politics. The romans adopted and spread it. The church by contrast teaches empathy. The military state teaches objective truth. Neither compromises. Our version of ying-and-yang is not philosophical and personal, but institutional and political, and people are expected to master both empathy and objective truth. We did not fail to solve the problem of politics as did the other societies. We failed to keep it once we solved it. Monarchy, Senate (lords), Parliament, militarism, and the credit society. A house for each class. Not class warfare, but class cooperation.