http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2013/12/12/the-value-of-civic-science-literacy.html–“Studies by law professor Dan Kahan at Yale show that even highly numerate people are prone to cognitive traps when the data contradicts the conclusion most congenial to their political values.”–
Source date (UTC): 2015-02-17 15:54:00 UTC
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3042408/why-samsung-design-stinksON DESIGN
Source date (UTC): 2015-02-17 15:51:00 UTC
http://www.historytoday.com/ole-j-benedictow/black-death-greatest-catastrophe-ever#sthash.hVY6px39.dpuf—“At the time, this area was under the rule of the Mongol khanate of the Golden Horde. Some decades earlier the Mongol khanate had converted to Islam and the presence of Christians, or trade with them, was no longer tolerated. As a result the Silk Road caravan routes between China and Europe were cut off. For the same reason the Black Death did not spread from the east through Russia towards western Europe, but stopped abruptly on the Mongol border with the Russian principalities. As a result, Russia which might have become the Black Death’s first European conquest, in fact was its last, and was invaded by the disease not from the east but from the west.
The epidemic in fact began with an attack that the Mongols launched on the Italian merchants’ last trading station in the region, Kaffa (today Feodosiya) in the Crimea. In the autumn of 1346, plague broke out among the besiegers and from them penetrated into the town. When spring arrived, the Italians fled on their ships. And the Black Death slipped unnoticed on board and sailed with them.
– See more at: http://www.historytoday.com/ole-j-benedictow/black-death-greatest-catastrophe-ever#sthash.hVY6px39.dpuf”—
Source date (UTC): 2015-02-17 15:23:00 UTC
http://www.historytoday.com/ole-j-benedictow/black-death-greatest-catastrophe-ever#sthash.hVY6px39.dpuf”—-“It used to be thought that the Black Death originated in China, but new research shows that it began in the spring of 1346 in the steppe region, where a plague reservoir stretches from the north-western shores of the Caspian Sea into southern Russia.”–
Source date (UTC): 2015-02-17 15:19:00 UTC
A SWORD IS THE MAKER OF COVENANTS
— ‘Covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.’ —
[Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 17, 117.]
Source date (UTC): 2015-02-17 13:42:00 UTC
—“There are two distinct senses of ‘privatization’:
(1) The government has one of its traditional functions performed by private businesses rather than civil servants.
(2) The government abandons the idea of performing some traditional
function altogether, and leaves it to the private sector to sort things
out.”—
I am not sure, but i think this qualifies as a third:
(3) a heretofore commons such as land, radio-spectrum, or seas, is sold off to the private sector in order to protect it from consumption.
Source date (UTC): 2015-02-15 08:28:00 UTC
http://www.hookingupsmart.com/2013/02/12/hookinguprealities/the-most-attractive-women-have-the-least-casual-sex/WE WANT TO BE DESIRED
“1. For women, the number of sexual partners decreases with increasing physical attractiveness.
“2. Very physically attractive women are more likely to form exclusive relationships than to form purely sexual relationships.
“3. Attractive women are less likely to have sexual intercourse within the first week of meeting a partner.
“4. Underweight and normal-weight women are more likely to report romantic experience.
“5. Overweight women report approximately 10% more partners than normal-weight women whereas obese women report approximately 10% fewer partners.
“6. For women the effect of being underweight on within-relationship outcomes resembles the effect of being very physically attractive.”
Source date (UTC): 2015-02-15 03:06:00 UTC
RIFFING ON MICHAEL PHILIP – ON THE PRICE OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL COMMONS
–“In the socialist calculation debate, Mises says socialism fails because we can’t impute prices to capital goods without prices for consumer goods and consequently we can’t rationally allocate capital across sectors. In the environmentalist calculation debate, we can’t rationally allocate an environmental price to a consumer good without having environmental prices on capital goods. In the fully Pigovean world, prices fully convey information about costs including environmental costs. Outside of that world, we probably still do best by looking only to prices as the best potential aggregation of knowable cost”– Michael Phillip
To create a market price you have to privatize a good.
To partly privatize a good one can limit Usus, Fructus, Mancipio and Abusus. Meaning that we can privatize the Use, Fruition and in some cases transfer (sale) of a good, without the right of Abusus (destruction or harm).
It is not necessary to grant Abusus, or even Mancipio to create a tradable good (we don’t grant Mancipio and Abusus to ourselves when selling our labor). Privatization requires only the rights of Usus and Fructus in order for us to create prices from those trades.
So it is a fallacy that we cannot have the best of both worlds: commons. Commons in which we privatize Usus, Fructus, and Mancipio, while retaining Abusus.
We do not grant Mancipio and Abusus to Man, nor do we grant it to our commons. Most of our commons we grant Usus (parks). Occasionally we grant fructus (grazing on park land). But the only way to know the price of a commons is to at least grant Usus and Mancipio. And we probably, in all circumstances, should prevent Abusus.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine
`
TERMS:
Rights of use:Usus, the fruits of:Fructus, to transfer: Mancipio, to abuse:Abusus.
http://www.propertarianism.com/2014/11/02/usufructs-under-propertarianism/
H/T Ayelam Valentine Agaliba for getting me to use the right terminology.
Source date (UTC): 2015-02-15 02:55:00 UTC
–“This article requires a Controversy section. I came here looking for it. Surprised it wasn’t included. Particularly in reference to pseudoscience in the social sciences, and on Boas as one of the most influential pseudoscientists produced by the Cosmopolitan movement. And I’m kind of surprised at the ‘heaping of unworthy praise’, and the total abandonment of the NPOV in the article. We all love our heroes, but many of our heroes turn out to be largely wrong. Marx, Freud, Boas, Cantor, Mises, Rothbard and Gould were wrong – and the consequences will be the subject of study for centuries, just as Hayek had suggested (“…the century of mysticism”) . That doesn’t mean Boas didn’t positively influence culture, but it doesn’t forgive the fact that despite his claims of empiricism, he was engaging in not just bad science, but pseudoscience (and there is a difference). And it’s only been since the beginning of the Pinker era that he’s been incrementally corrected, and at this point largely discredited. Darwin, Weber, Pareto, Durkheim each with their flaws, but producing better work. Now, I am perhaps part of a new generation of thinkers, and I am perhaps more sensitive to pseudoscience because debunking it and preventing it is one of my areas of research, but facts are facts, history is history, and Boas requires a Controversy section.”—
Source date (UTC): 2015-02-14 18:43:00 UTC
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2015/02/jon-stewart-and-barack-obama.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FromNyToIsraelSultanRevealsTheStoriesBehindTheNews+%28from+NY+to+Israel+Sultan+Reveals+The+Stories+Behind+the+News%29″THE ERA OF BAD FAITH ENDS”
Maybe more of progressivism will end….
Source date (UTC): 2015-02-13 07:57:00 UTC