Curt Doolittle

Theme: Crisis

  • TO CAPITALISM “The major modern challenges to capitalism came not from that or a

    http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2013/09/has-capitalism-revivedsurvived-posner.htmlCHALLENGES TO CAPITALISM

    “The major modern challenges to capitalism came not from that or any other depression, but from the two world wars of the twentieth century, without which it is hard to believe that the European nations would have lost their colonies, experienced a great depression (in the 1930s), or (in central and eastern Europe) become communist. Without World War I, it is very doubtful that Russia would have become communist; and without the Soviet conquests in eastern and central Europe in World War II, neither would Poland, Rumania, etc. have become communist.”

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-24 13:51:00 UTC

  • DISASTER OF POSTMODERNISM: TOTALITARIAN HUMANISM “Diagnoses of the malaise of th

    http://berlinbooks.org/brb/2013/09/the-humanities-are-not-your-enemy/THE DISASTER OF POSTMODERNISM: TOTALITARIAN HUMANISM

    “Diagnoses of the malaise of the humanities rightly point to anti-intellectual trends in our culture and to the commercialization of our universities. But an honest appraisal would have to acknowledge that some of the damage is self-inflicted. The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness. And they have failed to define a progressive agenda.”

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-24 12:50:00 UTC

  • 2007 WHEN I SAID THIS WOULD HAPPEN, EVERYONE TREATED ME LIKE AN IDIOT Told ‘ya.

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/charleskadlec/2012/02/06/the-federal-reserves-explicit-goal-devalue-the-dollar-33/IN 2007 WHEN I SAID THIS WOULD HAPPEN, EVERYONE TREATED ME LIKE AN IDIOT

    Told ‘ya. No Other Way Out.

    Period.

    (Of course, I haven’t had any US dollars since 2009, or US assets since 2010.)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-20 10:29:00 UTC

  • MAN RECESSION CONTINUES Women are back at work. Men, not. We don’t yet know how

    http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/09/gender-jobs-gap-women-have-recovered-all-of-the-jobs-they-lost-during-the-recession-men-are-still-2-14-millions-jobs-short/THE MAN RECESSION CONTINUES

    Women are back at work. Men, not. We don’t yet know how many will never reenter the work force again.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-17 23:30:00 UTC

  • DEATH PANELS. Told you. You cant control costs any other way. So care will be de

    DEATH PANELS.

    Told you. You cant control costs any other way. So care will be delayed. People will die from delay. People will die because of death panels. High cost experimentation will stop. The R and D will decline. We will export our only remaining technical advantage offshore.

    So top medical care will require medical tourism. Great for me. Sucks for everyone else.

    Should have just given people medical visa cards and subsidized hospitals and clinics to accept them. Create a signaling-only medical economy like we have for all other goods, so that the wealthy continue to pay for R&D and ordinary people benefit from the expenditures of the wealthy.

    Like every other process in human history.

    Sigh.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-16 14:28:00 UTC

  • READ. USE IN DEBATE. Reality needs assistance in the face of ideology myth and d

    http://keithhennessey.com/2013/09/12/observations-paper/MUST READ. USE IN DEBATE.

    Reality needs assistance in the face of ideology myth and dogma.

    CRISIS BULLET POINTS

    Taleb is right: We must not create fragility. (My argument is that we must preserve calculability if we use fiat credit. )

    SUMMARY

    “Narrative 3: “Everyone” was at fault: Wall Street, the government, and our wider society. People in all types of institutions and as individuals became blasé about risk-taking and leverage, creating a bubble across a wide range of investments and countries.”

    http://keithhennessey.com/2013/09/12/observations-paper/

    http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2009/11/23-narrative-elliott-baily

    http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2009/11/23-narrative-elliott-baily/1123_narrative_elliott_baily.pdf

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-12 15:10:00 UTC

  • IS BETTER (HOPPE IS RIGHT) “Conflict does appear to be less common than it had b

    http://www.psypost.org/2013/08/is-war-really-disappearing-a-new-analysis-suggests-not-19918SMALLER IS BETTER (HOPPE IS RIGHT)

    “Conflict does appear to be less common than it had been in the past, he said. But that’s due more to an inability to fight than to an unwillingness to do so.

    “As empires fragment, the world has split up into countries that are smaller, weaker and farther apart, so they are less able to fight each other,” Braumoeller said.

    “Once you control for their ability to fight each other, the proclivity to go to war hasn’t really changed over the last two centuries.”

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-09 01:35:00 UTC

  • WE ARE NOT ‘BOOMERS’. I AM NOT A BOOMER. THE BOOMERS DESTROYED CIVILIZATION. WE

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_JonesNO WE ARE NOT ‘BOOMERS’. I AM NOT A BOOMER. THE BOOMERS DESTROYED CIVILIZATION. WE HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON WITH THEM. AT ALL.

    Generations are not determined by dates, or head-counts, but by shared experiences – the perception of changes either within or beyond our control.

    People of my generation are members of the ‘JONES GENERATION’. We missed the sixties and were formed by the seventies: The fantasy of the excessiveness of the 60’s followed by our perception of “the great fall”: Gas Lines, unemployment, post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, the Iran Hostage crisis, a cowardly president in blue jeans, doomsday movies and books, and a pervasive fear of the accelerating cold war, with technology as the only promise of redemption, and star wars as our mythological call to arms. My generation includes the tech giants that changed our world.

    I’d burn the boomers at the stake and alternately throw gasoline, salt. vinegar, and lemon juice on them if I could. So please don’t call me or my generation ‘boomers’.

    Because boomer doesn’t mean ‘population boom’. It means ‘destroyer of civilization.’

    As Charleton Heston famously said while looking at the remains of the statue of liberty: “Damn you! Damn you all to Hell!”

    —- NOTES —–

    “Generation Jones is a term coined by Jonathan Pontell to describe the cohort of people born between 1954 and 1965. Pontell defined Generation Jones as referring to the second half of the post–World War II baby boom. The term also includes first-wave Generation X.”

    “In his book, Pontell observes that this age group felt the bright promise and optimism shown to children in the 60s, only to have those hopes crushed by hard economic realities brought by recession, rising energy costs, high interest rates and tight employment when they came of age in the 70s. Hence the term “jonesin’” means to be yearning or even craving something and not yet finding fulfillment.”

    “They didn’t buy into or were too young to understand the Baby Boomer tantrums; yet they were a tad to old to join the Gen-Xers in the mosh pits.”

    “Between Woodstock and Lallapalooza….”

    “We are practical idealists…”

    “…craving…”

    “…forged in the fires of social upheaval while too young to play a part….”

    “…experiencing the fall and blaming them for it….”

    The name “Generation Jones” derives from ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ competition of our populous birth years.”

    “Yuppies, not hippies.”

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-31 06:32:00 UTC

  • FIRST PROGRESSIVE WHITE FLAG We conservatives and libertarians spent 30 years tr

    http://theumlaut.com/2013/07/09/age-of-negation/THE FIRST PROGRESSIVE WHITE FLAG

    We conservatives and libertarians spent 30 years trying to destroy the progressive fantasy, first economically, second intellectually, third morally, and finally with media. We were slow. But we were willing to lose everything to stop communism, socialism and its successor ideological postmodernism.

    Morality is a mirror of family structure. And family structure a mirror of production structure. Without a common family structure, we have no common morality. Without a common morality we cannot democratically select priorities, and instead are stuck in perpetual conflict.

    The northern universalist fantasy was developed in ignorance of our own homogeneity as an outbred extended family. The rest of the world finds this anti-kinship ethic horrifying and immoral. Neither they nor we understood that our la k of corruption was a byproduct of our small states and extended tribalism. As such its impossible elsewhere – where trust is impossible at our level.

    The historical fact that the proletariat never leads anything, and cannot, was not enough. The falsehoods of the labor theory of value, the necessity of prices and incentives, the fact that capitalism produces mass consumer goods cheaply was not enough. The failures of socialism and communism were not enough. The success of converting communist countries to consumer capitalism wasn’t enough. The economic crisis wasn’t enough. But the result of diversity combined with the degeneration of the family, and the loss of our privileged status of the only technologically advanced society was enough.

    But we cannot undo the damage from destroying the nuclear family, intergenerational saving and lending, and the rule of common law, the constitution, or the homogeneously moral society.

    Pending a dramatic reversal driven by economic necessity the progressive movement will succeed as did the french revolution, the Bolshevik And Maoist revolutions, albeit more slowly: the reduction of the competitive norms of the people and setting them back for centuries.

    The left didnt kill capitalism. Just our civilizations prosperity. And maybe our status as a people forever.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-18 08:01:00 UTC

  • BY THE STATE, TOM WOODS’ NULLIFICATION, MARK LEVIN’S RESTORATION, SECESSION, OR

    http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00740KVN0/ref=tsm_1_fb_lkCONQUEST BY THE STATE, TOM WOODS’ NULLIFICATION, MARK LEVIN’S RESTORATION, SECESSION, OR COMMON VIOLENCE.

    Choose one or have it chosen for you.

    While nullification is the cheapest solution and violence the most expensive, I’m not personally partial to non violence so Nullification, Restoration, Secession, or violent Revolution are all acceptable alternatives to conquest, culture-cide, and genocide. ;).

    http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00740KVN0

    http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1451606273/ref=redir_mdp_mobile/190-1332324-1194528?keywords=liberty%20amendments&qid=1376569733&ref_=sr_1_1&s=books&sr=1-1

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-16 03:45:00 UTC