http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/09/gabrielle-giffords-shooting-rightwing-rhetoricThe problem with the guardian’s position, is that Gifford’s attacker is a radical LEFTIST. He wasn’t agitated about anything ‘right wing’. He was angry that the congresswoman wasn’t LEFT WING ENOUGH. (Yet another example of the vast delta between the urgency of news reporting and the accuracy of what’s reported.)
Source date (UTC): 2011-01-10 10:34:00 UTC
Putin Slams West for Wikileaks’ Assange Arrest : Putin Suggests U.S. Criticism Is the Pot Calling the Kettle http://abcnews.go.com/International/putin-slams-west-wikileaks-arrest/story?id=12364345 Putin criticizes supposedly democratic institutions for clamping down on a dissident.
“The villagers say, that if your neighbor’s cow is mooing, yours better be silent”. Which is the Russian equivalent of ‘the pot calling the kettle black’.
[callout] In fact, what’s impressive about the Wikileaks data, is that the USA actually looks like a pretty benevolent, if mildly overstretched and incompetent, empire, whose only material problem is creating a responsible, peaceful, core state for Islam[/callout]
I wrote two days ago that arresting Assange is nonsense unless we have a real property crime. Unless property is transferred (technology secrets) and unless there is material harm ( our people get killed), or a trust is broken on a contract with a foreign government (we are trying to help rescue some government from oppression) there is not really a crime. In fact, what’s impressive about the Wikileaks data, is that the USA actually looks like a pretty benevolent, if mildly overstretched and incompetent, empire, whose only material problems are assisting in the maturity of market-participating states everywhere, and in particular creating a responsible, peaceful, core state for Islam – solving a serious problem for the world by helping modernize a violent, non-market, ignorant, superstitious and primitive expansionist culture so that it can play with the rest of the grownups in the world. Putin is one of my personal Heroes. I think, for Russia, he’s a perfect leader, and the leader that they need. Is Russia, and is all of Byzantine Christianity corrupt? Yes. Is the state an oligarchy? Yes. Is that bad for Russia at this point in it’s lifetime? No. Democracy, or at least, civic republicanism is NOT something that’s intrinsically good. Corruption is bad. Democracy can be a check on corruption. But only when the middle class is fully active, and fully enfranchised. Otherwise, the people will vote themselves into totalitarianism. Russians in particular will do so. Putin should be Tzar. Russia needs a King. The west needs kings. We all need kings. Not kings that can write laws. Kings that can veto abuses of the law. We may not know what we should do. But we can know what we should not do. And that is a job of a great monarch. Kings make it impossible to compete for political power, and force people to compete for economic power. That’s the beauty of monarchy.
OK. I just dont get arresting Assange for getting women to sleep with him, and not using a condom. We’d need an awful lot of additional jails. Either arrest the guy for the real reason that you want him, or you’re abusing the justice system. I’m not a fan of this guy, and I think public opinion will crowsdsource his guilt or innocence correctly. But this kind of legalism is simply abusive. I don’t let the state use my violence on my behalf for injustice. I give my violence to the state to use on my behalf in order to prevent and resolve disputes between my fellow citizens over theft, fraud and violence. I do not give my violence to the state to use on my behalf to trump up bad manners into illegal actions for the purpose of political nonsense. It’s just proving his position that our governments are corrupt. Arrest him for distributing state secrets (even if they are meaningless so far). Make an example of him if you want. But we’re going to have to legalize prostitution, universally license all women, and men are going to have to ask for receipts in order to have sex and prove it was voluntary. Ridiculous. Brits should be ashamed.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11923766Up to this point, other than as a diplomatic inconvenience, the information leaked has been a non-event, and nothing was in the cables that wasn’t discussed in the community, right out in the open. Actually, what’s been interesting is just how mundane the content has been – illustrating nothing more than the natural incompetence that arises from imperial overreach. But if this new list exposes potential targets I thi
Source date (UTC): 2010-12-06 01:46:00 UTC
More weekend writing: “And I do not understand, why we grant particular grace to current democracies – the merit of which is still in play, until we observe how we fare now that the rest of the world has adopted capitalist instituions, and erased our prior advantage. It certainly appears, that instead of Democracy, the award goes to capitalist institutions, calculation and incentives. Democracy is irrelevant.”
Source date (UTC): 2010-12-05 14:19:00 UTC
http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20101202_geopolitical_journey_part_7_polandBrilliant, insightful, and possibly profound advice. As always.
OTOH, I do not think it is a forgone conclusion that a German-Russian Entent is bad for europe or the world. In fact, I think such a relationship is economically, and socially useful for both germany and russia. Such an alliance mat be a necessity that the anglo world should see as a useful and necessary one — largely because ours is fragmenting.
Be
Source date (UTC): 2010-12-03 14:55:00 UTC
SURPRISE? NO SURPRISES IN WIKILEAKS AT ALL. These are common diplomatic cables, written in the common business-language-of-state. Anything ‘shocking’ is simply the result of how people speak when they believe that their communications will remain private. Look at your own email, or personal conversations. We all trash-talk whenever we can. It vents our frustrations. For example: Everyone knows that Berscolini is a vain and incompetent man. But he’s a politician in Italy. Putin? We’ve all known Putin’s ambitions and position for years. Is confirmation something we needed? There is nothing so far in these docs that hasn’t been discussed to death. The docs only give legitimacy to those previously debated topics. *** Fools will always find a source of conspiracy in the natural incompetence of bureaucracy. *** WHAT WE LEARNED: There are only three things to learn from these docs:
[callout]There is no competent leadership in washington, and it is possible that there cannot be competent leadership, that can develop a consistent policy across that divergent a set of interests.[/callout]
1) The people who work on these communications are simple white collar government clerical bureaucrats, covering the communications of a vast and diverse state department, running a large naval empire during a time of enormous economic and political power changes. 2) The state department bureaucracy is too big, and american political and military reach is larger than the competence of the individuals in the State Department can coordinate — which is true of all bureaucracies. 3) There is no competent leadership in washington, and it is possible that there cannot be competent leadership, that can develop a consistent policy across that divergent a set of interests. HOWEVER The solutions to most of these diplomatic issues has been covered by Huntington in the Clash Of Civilizations. That is the only policy document necessary to coordinate the vast national interests abroad. We need a strong russia. We need a non-nuclear iran. Islam needs a different core state. We need to help south american, asian, hindu and the vast, ignorant, poor islamic states come into power, while we gracefully reduce our scope of responsibilities.
I don’t particularly like criticizing Tyler Cowen, but this is a bit ridiculous, and I”m going to have to chalk it up to excess holiday tryptophan. Last time I read Road To Serfdom was this fall, driving cross country. Actually, I listened to it on tape. And I cautiously pulled aside whenever I needed to take notes. I took ten pages of notes. But that’s OK. It helped with fatigue. Tyler recently re-read Road To Serfdom. Here are his comments.
Rereading *The Road to Serfdom* Given all the recent fuss, I picked it up again and found: 1. It was more boring and less analytic on matters of public choice than I had been expecting. 2. Although some of Hayek’s major predictions have been proven wrong, they are more defensible than I had been expecting. 3. The most important sentence in the book is “This book, written in my spare time from 1940 to 1943…” In those years, how many decent democracies were in the world? How clear was it that the Western powers, even if they won the war, would dismantle wartime economic planning? How many other peoples’ predictions from those years have panned out? At that time, Hayek’s worries were perfectly justified. 4. If current trends do turn out very badly, this is not the best guide for understanding exactly why. It’s fine to downgrade the book, relative to some of the claims made on its behalf, but the book doesn’t give us reason to downgrade Hayek.
Straw man. Self serving at that. No direct criticisms. Obtuse criticisms are illogical. a) The book contributed to the current state of affairs. b) The book was written for the masses, and that is why it has been widely read., and why it contributed to the current state of affairs. (more so than Braudel – although no discredit to him – and others.) c) The book’s criticism of central planning is not the same as the current criticism of the welfare state. And I do not understand, nor does it appear others here do, why you grant particular grace to current democracies – the merit of which is still in play, until we observe how we fare now that the rest of the world has adopted capitalist instituions, and erased our prior advantage. It certainly appears, that instead of Democracy, the award goes to capitalist institutions, calculation and incentives. Democracy is irrelevant. Other than, under democracy, it appears, it is far more common to vote one’s self into tyranny, than is possible under parliamentary monarchy, or oligarchy. I believe the three points above refute all four of your observations. In fact, I’m having trouble understanding why you even view it through your empirical framework. It is a narrative pedagogical work. And as a narrative pedagogical work it will very likely be as durable as most innovative narrative works are, versus the very perishable empirical works of political economy that are fashionable flashes of the moment. AFWIW: Whether one lives under tyranny or not is a matter of perspective determined by one’s definition of property. Cheers
“To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.” — James Madison Becomes: “Liberty represents the ability of each individual to achieve his greatest happiness, but only by servicing the wants and needs of others, and to do so by participating in the market. By doing so he reduces prices and increases choices, and creates value through exchange and decreasing prices through a division of knowledge and labor. It is an impossible supposition, that any form of government that we create, and any system of incentives and punishments we invent, will secure us our desired prosperity without the willing contributions of citizens, who daily pay for that prosperity by their expenditure of effort in production and exchange, but also by their forgoing of opportunity for gain by means of legal plunder, or by fraud, or by theft, and therefore avoiding paying the high cost of maintaining that prosperity.” “To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” — Thomas Jefferson Becomes: “A man pays for his government first, in forgone opportunity costs, and second, by the expenditure of his time and labor in production and trade, and third, by the taxes he directly pays to the government. He pays with all three: since all three are avoidable, he pays with all three methods. Manners, Ethics, Morals, and most importantly, his avoidance of corruption: to live off the productive results of others without voluntary exchange – provide his easiest means of cheating – of obtaining the benefits of such a society at a discount. A man who does not pay the cost of manners, ethics, morals, AND observation of the cultural system of obligatory payments we call culture, is a thief. Therefore when the government ‘tolerates’ counter-cultural behavior it condones theft. When it supports people who do not make such payments, it pays one group to steal from another. Therefore, no man who makes payments to the state either in taxes or in forgone opportunity costs, should ever tolerate redistribution of his efforts to brigands, and thieves. The purpose of a government is to disallow people to obtain extra-market discounts while obtaining the benefits of participating in the market. A barbarian is someone who does not participate in the market, and in particular, someone who steals from the payments of citizens by avoiding the forgone opportunity costs we call ‘culture’.
In a staff meeting the other day, one of our senior people asked me what the elections mean for the economy, since our business (advertising and marketing) is highly influenced by the direction of the economy. We are a leading indicator of both upward and downward trends. I responded that the question depended upon the time frame one was using. In the short term, the elections mean that a divided government will eliminate social and political tensions so that people will spend more time on meaningful activities at home and work, and that business people will feel less [glossary:REGIME UNCERTAINTY] Regime Uncertainty. That means that the small business side of the economy should improve. That’s about all. The common people assume that the quantity of political rhetoric is equal to the qantity of economic power that a state can exercise, and this is not true. A state as we currently have constructed it, is largely capable of USING economic wealth in the short term, but incapable of creating wealth in the long term. That is the primary change in government over the past hundred and fifty years. We have converted from middle-class wealth creation to lower class wealth distribution in the west, as the consumer economy and democracy put political power in proletariat hands. That trend was acceptable given our extraordinary wealth. But the current trend must reverse itself, and the power of government must switch from an ambition entirely devoted to redistribution, to one more concerned with increasing the intellectual capacity of our less-than-hard-working citizenry.
[callout]A state, as we currently have constructed it, is largely capable of USING economic wealth in the short term, but incapable of creating wealth in the long term. That is the primary change in government over the past hundred and fifty years. We have converted from middle-class wealth creation to lower class wealth distribution in the west, as the consumer economy and democracy put political power in proletariat hands. [/callout]
In the medium term, it means that middle class white people are beginning to act like a minority, as has been predicted for some time now by any number of public intellectuals (Buchanan). It means that our economic recovery will be slow and protracted and vulnerable to shocks, and that it will take a decade or more for the worlds distorted capital structure to realign. It means that unemployment will be persistent and chronic for that period of time. It means that the US will not likely return to previously comforting low unemployment levels. It means uncertainty will prevail. In the long term, in regard to the general economy in the united states, it is not likely that any government intervention on any scale that is politically tolerable, will allow the adjustment to education that is needed to alter our basic competitiveness. It is unlikely that US businesses will produce at 20th century levels, which were only possible because of factors outside of political action: the large land area, the high rate of breeding and immigration, the high transformation of the population into the middle class, the low cost of language and legal transactions due to cultural homogeneity, and the low cost of administration due to the use of the common law. The response to my statements was that they painted a gloomy outlook. I responded that there is a vast difference between objective reality, and the emotional experience that we attach to it. I read something the other day about african meat-packers, living a terrible and dirty life. But that during the day, as they worked, they were joyous, playful, enjoyed their friends and family, and in general described themselves as happy. For human beings, uncertainty, unpredictability, and negative environmental change are impediments to our rather fixed rate of adaptation. But people adjust to their circumstances when they can, and find good in almost everything. Therefore, the objective picture may appear gloomy, but the general sentiment will improve as people adjust to the new circumstances. What will happen is the perception of power, or excellence, which we refer to as ‘status’ will change, worldwide, and continue, as it has since the collapse of the soviet system, to be local and cultural, and less western or ideological. The world’s common people, will continue to return to it’s civilizational biases, and admirations. It’s business leaders and intellectuals will continue to explore each other. Consumers will adopt whatever fashion is relevant to them. But by and large, they will be more interested in their cultures than in western culture. The west will be less of a destination for the highly talented and upwardly mobile. And the western demographic problem (the high land occupation by white christians) will be under pressure, and white christians will increasingly adopt minority postures, just as their political leadership warned they would for the past century and a half. This is the meaningful trend. We will be less wealthy of a civilization relative to others than we have been since the opening of the atlantic trade 500 years ago. Our politics is just the daily expression of our sentiments as these shifts occur.