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 state evolved to finance war. (Thank you Napoleon.) But a city is a market. A market is a community of common interest. Beyond that, languages each imply metaphysical reality, and manners, ethics and morals imply the rules of human coordination.
Small is better. More peaceful. More prosperous. More egalitarian. If you want a ‘community’. It has to be small.
Source date (UTC): 2011-07-31 08:08:00 UTC
I love my country. The world is a better place because of the American Constitution. And the evidence is clear that everyone has been better off having been an English colony than a French one. But the colonists declared independence largely to escape paying the costs incurred by England in protecting the colonies during the Seven Years War. Which was at the very least, an unjust avoidance of responsibility by the colonists. Personally, I would prefer we had remained a colony. And I would still prefer a King or Queen to a president. History is a better thing to admire than politicians, and the evidence appears to suggest that monarchs were far better governors that our elected representatives have been. Despite the comforting untruths we tell ourselves. I still like the fireworks. 🙂
“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
http://www.capitalismv3.com/?p=2821Possible charged topic warning. Putting Abramson’s Promotion into a global historical and political context.
Source date (UTC): 2011-06-03 08:38:00 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
Develop a cohesive, written ideology and the economic justification of the ideology. Privatize the school system. Create a network of school. Teach the great tradition of western history for two generations. This line of reasoning is the best method of producing great minds – even in average people. These students will be sought by business and industry, and their social status will be something that people will seek to imitate. Create two new branches of military service: homeland maintenance (emergency preparedness), and foreign service (policing and administering), and leave the existing institutions for the sole purpose of violence. Withdraw our troops from europe and asia. Require military service of all citizens in order to vote. And in two generations you will make it possible to have a Constitutional monarchy. Monarchy is a government for nationalism – an extended family. Families have common values. Education an service make people invested. Our current form of democracy in the USA is more concerned with protecting our trade routes, disempowering white males, promoting ideological class warfare, and obtaining political power than it is in the long term health of the nation.
Source date (UTC): 2011-05-16 17:19:00 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
Mystical Political Religion and the concept of good and evil was invented by the Persians to separate the persian people from the indians who were, at that time, similar peoples. Mystical religion was invented to cause conflict and political division. All cultures developed religions of some sort. If by religion we mean a body of habituated knowledge consisting of Myths and Rituals – but which in modern terms we call ‘education’. History and Political systems are in effect, Myths and Rituals too. If we look at history, the lower clases make use of and rely on mystical religion for insurance and education, the (admittedly small) middle classes on craft, guild, contract and trade, and the the upper classes on politics and bureaucracy, and the different classes cooperate by sharing those different cooperative strategies. So, even the ancient politicians learned how to use education for political purposes. Thats where we get mystical religion from. (See Nietzsche if you can manage it. Gimbutas, Weber and Armstrong otherwise.)
[callout]History and Political systems are in effect, Myths and Rituals too. If we look at history, the lower clases make use of and rely on mystical religion for insurance and education, the (admittedly small) middle classes on craft, guild, contract and trade, and the the upper classes on politics and bureaucracy, and the different classes cooperate by sharing those different cooperative strategies.[/callout]
Moral principles are, without exception, under analysis, economic principles – and as economic principles they can be rationally articulated, or embedded in a narrative like a fairy tale, so that they may be taught to children who cannot grasp more abstract, rationally articulated ideas. There is no need for religion to achieve moral education. The fact that all religions, even post-buddha buddism, have developed a myth of afterlife is to add the force of violence to mysticism. The fact that we teach mystical religious principles instead of rationally articulated moral principles makes it impossible to create political compromises between religious traditions – which encourages conflict. More importantly, religious traditions are economic strategies – they promote the values of particular social orders. (west=fraternal and technical, middle=tribal and mystical, east=familial and bureaucratic) This difference is why the west developed the industrial revolution twice (greece and england) and no one else ever has. It’s simply a better strategy for experimentation. (See Hayek, Weber and Armstrong)