Curt Doolittle

Theme: Deception

  • MY FIRST EXPERIENCE WITH UKRAINIAN POLICE CORRUPTION. In the states, police depa

    MY FIRST EXPERIENCE WITH UKRAINIAN POLICE CORRUPTION.

    In the states, police departments raise money with irrelevant speed traps, stoplight cameras and buckle-up campaigns and other administrative forms of extortion.

    It’s corruption sure. It’s just procedural corruption. It’s systemic but impersonal.

    Here in Kiev. On the way home from the restaurant. Our taxi is pulled over by a lone policeman who flagged us down with a flashlight. He claimed the street was restricted at this time – although there were no signs, it’s a main street lined with cars, and other cars were on the road with us.

    Apparently it’s 20 bucks to get out of a fabricated infraction. The policeman pocketed the money and we drove off.

    I told my admittedly educated Ukrainian friends that this sort of direct corruption might not be better than the more advanced indirect corruption that’s so pervasive in the states.

    They responded that no, the visible corruption makes people distrust the government.

    And I agreed. It makes people hold an accurate view of government.

    Ticketing moms in minivans for going three miles over the speed limit on four lane roads in clear weather on one hand. And allowing nine arrests before a car thief does jail time, letting meth heads free reign to commit petty crimes in our rural areas because its difficult and expensive to lock them up, allowing massive illegal immigration as a matter of political utility in seizing power through immigration that cannot be obtained through argument and reason, jailing right wing movie makers while heralding left wingers.

    Ukraine has a problem that’s fixable with articulated property rights, imported western judges, pay increases for policemen and an independent internal affairs organization to

    Investigate and monitor corruption. And the right of citizens to sue anyone in the government for corruption or damage from incompetence.

    You can’t fix the USA without breaking it up and starting over.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-09 16:14:00 UTC

  • IS EVENLY DISTRIBUTED BY POLITICAL PARTY (Why? Its not complicated. )

    http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/08/racism-by-political-party.htmlRACISM IS EVENLY DISTRIBUTED BY POLITICAL PARTY

    (Why? Its not complicated. )

    Source date (UTC): 2012-12-29 08:55:00 UTC

  • JOURNALISTS ARE PRIVATEERS : STATE SPONSORED THIEVES AND TERRORISTS Free speech

    JOURNALISTS ARE PRIVATEERS : STATE SPONSORED THIEVES AND TERRORISTS

    Free speech is device by which we expressly grant each other the freedom to research, publicize and profit from the publicity of, those who would use the violence of state monopoly, or privilege granted by the state monopoly, for the purpose of conducting involuntary transfers from one group to another.

    In this sense, journalism has a function. That is, journalism is the right of essay on involuntary transfers. It is, in effect a form of policing.

    Journalism would fulfill it’s function if we restored libel and slander laws, and we restored privacy and free passage laws so that paparazzi weren’t state sponsored terrorists. Your reputation is your property. Libel and slander laws are simply codifications of your property rights, like any other property right is codified.

    We wrongly grant the police, politicians, bureaucrats, regulators, the judiciary, and even journalists, insulation from suit by private individuals, and groups of individuals. This is what costs us our freedom. If instead we required everyone to respect property rights, then we would have the right of suit against those who libel or slander us, or others.

    The truth is the truth. But hypothesis and drama are not truth, they are profitable utility that is merely theft by involuntary transfer from victim to journalist. As such, journalists are state sponsored thieves and little more, whenever they report on anything other than the involuntary transfer of property, or a political plan to promote and legislate the involuntary transfer of property.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-12-28 10:11:00 UTC

  • THE BEST WAY TO DISPROVE THE SUPERIORITY OF ANY IDEOLOGY IS TO SHOW THAT ALL IDE

    THE BEST WAY TO DISPROVE THE SUPERIORITY OF ANY IDEOLOGY IS TO SHOW THAT ALL IDEOLOGIES ARE NOTHING BUT REPRODUCTIVE STRATEGIES GIVEN VERBAL JUSTIFICATION IN AN ATTEMPT TO GAIN POLITICAL POWER TO DISTORT PROPERTY IN FAVOR OF FUNDING ONE GROUP’S REPRODUCTIVE STRATEGY AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHERS.

    This means that the only ‘good’ ideology is one that produces the best biology.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-12-07 18:15:00 UTC

  • SCHIFF ON THE MYTH OF THE 91% TAX RATE IN THE 50’S “…the top marginal income-t

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324705104578151601554982808.htmlPETER SCHIFF ON THE MYTH OF THE 91% TAX RATE IN THE 50’S

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324705104578151601554982808.html

    “…the top marginal income-tax rate in the 1950s was much higher than today’s top rate of 35%—but the share of income paid by the wealthiest Americans has essentially remained flat since then.

    In 1958, the top 3% of taxpayers earned 14.7% of all adjusted gross income and paid 29.2% of all federal income taxes. In 2010, the top 3% earned 27.2% of adjusted gross income and their share of all federal taxes rose proportionally, to 51%.

    So if the top marginal tax rate has fallen to 35% from 91%, how in the world has the tax burden on the wealthy remained roughly the same? Two factors are responsible. Lower- and middle-income workers now bear a significantly lighter burden than in the past. And the confiscatory top marginal rates of the 1950s were essentially symbolic—very few actually paid them. In reality the vast majority of top earners faced lower effective rates than they do today.

    In 1958, an 81% marginal tax rate applied to incomes above $1.08 million, and the 91% rate kicked in at $3.08 million. These figures are in unadjusted 1958 dollars and correspond today to nominal income levels that are at least 10 times higher. That year, according to Internal Revenue Service records, just 236 of the nation’s 45.6 million tax filers had any income that was taxed at 81% or higher. (The published IRS data do not reveal how many of these were subject to the 91% rate.)

    In 1958, approximately 28,600 filers (0.06% of all taxpayers) earned the $93,168 or more needed to face marginal rates as high as 30%. These Americans—genuinely wealthy by the standards of the day—paid 5.9% of all income taxes. And now? In 2010, 3.9 million taxpayers (2.75% of all taxpayers) were subjected to rates that were 33% or higher. These Americans—many of whom would hardly call themselves wealthy—reported an adjusted gross income of $209,000 or higher, and they paid 49.7% of all income taxes.”

    Source date (UTC): 2012-12-07 08:34:00 UTC

  • THE ONLY WAY TO KILL IDEOLOGY: IT”S REPRODUCTION SILLY To demonstrate that all i

    THE ONLY WAY TO KILL IDEOLOGY: IT”S REPRODUCTION SILLY

    To demonstrate that all ideologies are justifications for attempts to acquire power that supports one’s reproductive strategy.

    This is an intentionally loaded overstatement, perhaps, But it brings home the point that people vote by race, gender and class. They support their reproductive strategy.

    Well, there is more to it you say.

    Um. Not really. Not in the aggregate. Ideology is necessary only because of democracy. If instead, we had monarchies, and rigid property rights, then people would not have access to political power, and instead would be limited to economic power. And economic power can only be obtained through satisfying the wants of others – or by corporatism or alliance with the state.

    Monarchy denies people access to power. Democracy simply is communism by slower means.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-12-06 16:09:00 UTC

  • STUPID STUFF: CELEB TRAIN WRECKS Why are celebrity train wrecks so fascinating?

    STUPID STUFF: CELEB TRAIN WRECKS

    Why are celebrity train wrecks so fascinating? I mean, Lohan, Sheen, on one end, Spears in the middle, and Moore and Stone on the other.

    Most of human existence is pretty transparent to me. Tediously obvious even. But the crazy stuff people do never ceases to amaze me, and I find it endlessly fascinating – even if I wish I didn’t. Even if I’m embarrassed that I do.

    But somehow I love to live in a world where we have all these entertaining characters who tests the limits. Not of criminality. Not of violence. But of some insanely uncontrollably misdirected passion.

    When I was younger I used to love to watch the Dead-Heads go to concerts. I have no interest in them. I dont want to know them. But they’re all happy and adorable in a completely ‘white’ kind of way. And I just loved living in a world with people like that in it. Where it’s perfectly OK to be peaceful counter-culture.

    It’s beautiful – in a sort of twisted way.

    But American civic culture has declined with the ascent of the government, the decline of the family, and the misplaced admiration for division-inducing multiculturalism. And so our countercultures, except for possibly the burning man phenomenon, are almost entirely forms of politica agitation.

    I wont’ get into why this state of affairs exists. It’s a depressing distraction. I’ll just appreciate that a few outrageous individuals can buck the prohibition on revelrous passions.

    Even if it’s just vicarious.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-29 16:35:00 UTC

  • “5000 YEARS OF DEBT” By David Graeber (From Elsewhere) I started to write someth

    https://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=CZIINXhGDcsON “5000 YEARS OF DEBT”

    By David Graeber

    https://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=CZIINXhGDcs

    (From Elsewhere)

    I started to write something substantial about this but I havent read his book. So I’m afraid to criticize his lecture, under the assumption that his book may make some kind of substantial argument where his lecture absolutely fails to.

    The lecture is entirely anecdotal. He describes what could be construed as proximal accounting practices when people all know each other, are marginally related, and where their productivity and interests marginally indifferent.

    But that’s not why we have debt. we have debt because people who do NOT know each other, are not related, and where their productivity and interests are marginally different.

    We have numerical debt because it would be impossible to plan our use of resources without it. This property of money is known as “a unit of account, a medium of exchange, and a store of value”. Without units of account, we cannot plan the complex economies that make our escape from malthusian poverty possible.

    His argument that debt has become a component of morality is sensible only in the sense where we DO have numerical monetary debt. Humans and most animals obey reciprocity. if they didn’t they’d cease all cooperation (like apes). Humans would simply go extinct. So non-numeric debt is demonstrable in all societies. And it must be. It is necessary for cooperation.

    His argument that we have made debt immoral, and that we must pay our debts is a moral technological innovation that guarantees that people will take the vast risk necessary to lend money to people that they don’t know. Just as the church broke family bonds by giving women property rights and prohibiting cousin-marriage in order to de-capitalize the extended family so that it could more easily acquire lands, the manorial system that resulted made it necessary for farmers as well as merchants to borrow money for tradable goods from people who were NOT in their families. This allowed greater concentration of capital, but also led to the protestant work ethic, and from the protestant work ethic, the high trust society that exists EXCLUSIVELY in the west.

    In this sense, Debt is in no small part, part of the reason we have such dramatically lower corruption than the rest of the world. (And why it is counter-intuitive to have a high trust society.)

    His argument that the purpose of FIAT MONEY and FIAT CREDIT, which is the requirement that taxes be paid in government currency, and that this allows the government to finance warfare, is true. That the vast expansion of warfare from the traditional european monarchical war, to Napoleonic Total War, is only possible with Fiat Money and the ability for the government to borrow vast sums because of it. (Which we now borrow to pay for services. We do not pay for our military. The rest of the world does through the artifice of petro-dollars, US treasuries, and US Inflation.) Without this artifice we would not be able to possess our military, nor would Europe be able to possess its social programs.

    So not only is debt necessary but it’s GOOD. Unless we want to return to dirt scratching poverty again.

    Lastly, the current reason to criticize debt is that it’s unclear that it is not more profitable and evolutionarily viable to directly redistribute gains (profits we call taxes, or additional fiat debt we call inter-temporal-redistribution) to consumers in order to stimulate demand. This is the idea behind Modern Monetary Theory. THe general criticism of this theory is that it will not only lead to permanent inflation which destroys risk taking, and economic calculation, but that it would (like the tech and housing booms) misallocate human capital and expose the nation to competitive long term risk. This is why the debate among economists is to determine how much intertemporal debt we can create without dangerous consequences (like our current collapse), by targeting NGDP growth rates rather than inflation. People in my wing of economics argue (rightly I think) that this limit is very low before it causes disastrous booms and busts.

    Debt has further value, since it acts as an unorganized police force on human behavior. One can be ostracized from the credit system by bad behavior and impulsive behavior, and doomed to poverty. As such, DEBT= Citizenship.

    I hope this is useful to someone on your list. I”ll cross post it on mine.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-24 15:56:00 UTC

  • POLITICS Conservatives eat their dead. Progressives resurrect them, and rewrite

    http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/republicans-mourning-mitt-romney/story?id=17742687FUNNY: POLITICS

    Conservatives eat their dead. Progressives resurrect them, and rewrite both memories and history to suit consensus.

    Conservatism is aristocracy. Aristocracy is meritocracy. Meritocracy is objective.

    Even if its language is allegorical.

    There is a difference between arguments and actions. Of the two arguments are less scientific than actions. 😉

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-17 08:36:00 UTC

  • EX WIFE LEVIED THIS CRITICISM AGAINST ME DURING OUR DIVORCE WTF? Cute tactic as

    http://spp.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/10/02/1948550612461284.shortMY EX WIFE LEVIED THIS CRITICISM AGAINST ME DURING OUR DIVORCE

    WTF? Cute tactic as a means of trying to deny me access to my son as leverage to get more money. Well, how does that explain my extenuated rotund period? 🙂 Until I dated again, I certainly didn’t push fashion. Personally, if I didn’t have to raise money and sell ideas to other people, I’d wear jeans and untucked collared shirts half unbuttoned, with long hair and sneakers. I’d look like a rumpled professor. And I certainly would’t shave my chest any longer. That’s the inner me. OK? I think ‘adornment’ equates to having to sell s**t for a living. It’s the people that dont sell s**t for a living that dress up that always bother me. If selling s**t is sociopathic then we’re all in for an interesting world someday.

    In fact. WTF. Save teh dressup for the club scene.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-06 07:43:00 UTC