In the american revolutionary war, people were split about the 1/3,1/3,1/3. So that is a relevant number set in terms of general support. It is important to realize that the "good guys" were pretty much outright terrorists as we define it now. For instance, in New England there are pretty no fancy houses from that period. Such houses pretty much belonged to royalists and they tendedto get burned out. Fire departments were sort of volunteer subscription services, but even if you were paid up, the fire department might simply refuse to respond. And that american phenomena of tar and feathering was popular back then. This turns out to be a highly unpleasant, sometimes fatal, punishment.
A different trigger point comes if you cannot publicly politically organize. At that point, I figure anything goes. On the other hand, if you can organize publicly, then the issue is not so much the government as the population.
Some posters worry about what you get when you win. This is a good worry. In the american revolution period, the cultural level of the colonies were the highest on the planet. For instance, literacy was higher than now. Public discourse was much more sophisticated and profound. A little later, the douglas/lincoln debates went on for maybe four hours. I do not have the attention span anymore.
The way this stuff really works in this period, the financial people find that to keep going a while longer, they need so much austerity on the population that a representative government cannot do it. So something gives. At that point, fascist mass movements are a big deal. But our american exceptionalism seems to say we will not tolerate that or a military government. That does not mean anybody gets to live happily ever after. So the OP is asking the wrong question. It is not how or when to become a revolutionary--times like this, it gets easily to the point where you have a 100K people in the street and the police and military sit on their hands. Things end up changing rather quickly. But change to what? That is a good question. People who are serious need to ask what happens post-Obama, which is a lot sooner than 2113.
Sure the invisible hand is some sort of religious thing. But last I heard, the dominate economic advisors in the white house were followers of some israel guy who figured economics was irrational and you can get people to do anything. Sort of true, but sort of misses the point that economics is a physical thing. So it needs some consistency with the universe, else everyone dies. The easy point is that money has no intrinisic value and economic value is physical. So much for monetarism and a few thousands years of human stupidity. Don't worry about which popular economic model is least worthless.
I have some familiarity with the guy. I think he first came to my attention with something about evaporating black holes. Way back when. Go his name attached to the theory and it is still a pretty well accepted theory. I do not have much use for black hole theorists. They end up wanting to introduce unlawfulness into the universe and often have a belief in physical singularities. Warps them all over the place.
I notice you really liked to do an appeal to authority of some sort. On the other hand, you did not deign to offer an opinion on any aspect of terrestial human extinction events. But Hawkings must have good intentions, so let us all praise his arguments. Oh, and he is a bit of a popular celebrity in a way. Maybe he will eventually attain the status of Elvis and we can hope for a second coming.
I do not recall proposing government money for mitigation. I do want to push for manned space exploration, but not particularly for some sort of contingency planning. Perhaps you like straw men arguments too. To be fair, some of my letters are MSE, so I would have to admit to sometimes doing risk mitigation, and I suppose this might fall under that rubric.
So, given the great validity of your arguments, I suppose the question is: Just how slimy are you?
I RTFA as much as I could tolerate. The near-term examples I saw Hawkings using were global warming and nuclear war! This guy is pretty much a nut job. Giving oil supplies and the usual warmist assumptions, why would anyone honestly claim that global warming was a human extinction event. Yeah, I have seen it done, but come on. Nuclear war is always a good boogie man, but I suspect a spasm still would not be a human extinction event. Hawking actually cites the cuban missile crisis, apparently as a close call to a human extinction event. For perspective, there was a near event about 70K years ago. Might have reduced the population to say 10k. A really big mt st helens event in Indonesia. Nobody really notices anymore. Now astronomical events are fine as human extinction events. People worry about silly local rocks, but we are close to solving that. On the other hand, there might have been a stellar nova a 100 light years away and tomorrow we will be deep fried. I applaud the possibility that Hawkings is apparently trying to think, and space capability is what is needed, but we are not getting clear thinking from this guy. Of course, if he is lying through his teeth, I can respect that.
I was hearing some other doomsday scenario and recently googled a bit around a kind of volcanic event. Oh, it was associated with Obama's oil spill.
About 70k years ago there was a big volcanic event in Indonesia. Seems it pretty well covered the planet in ash. Estimates of surviving human population range from 5k to 15k.
A near extinction event for humans.
Tell me about how your doomsday scenario is in fact an actual human extinction event coming on in the next 200 years.
You seem to be a fine example of what the "deniers" complain about around fearmongering. Hmm, troll? Worse?
RTFA, seems they are going to be limited in what they censor on the popular sites. Now in the USA there is significant pressure for censorship at public libraries. A reasonable solution on sex censorship, at least used at Tacoma Public Library, was to do sex censorship, but only of images. I think this is a lot better than some sort of secret commercial censor ware. Now in a way the pakistan stuff is a bit similar, but affects private citizens at home.
In the totality I think there some significant similarities between sex issues here and religious issue there. To push some of the sex issues consider text or cartoons about underage females on your home computer. A lot of vocal types start talking abut summary execution. Sort of interesting.
Now Pakistan still has some sovereignty. It has some democracy, if that seems important. Is it a republic? Not sure but I am inclined to think so at least somewhat. Is it a theocracy? I do not think so, so it starts out better in my head around this than say Israel or Saudi Arabia. Yemen Iran. Taliban. Etc.
Here is some little history. These days the treaty of westphalia gets quite a bit of attack from evil sorts. But this was a real big deal in religious freedom and sovereignty. Maybe you would be wise to work with a resolution of these two items and realize different countries really need to have some differences to function right. Of course, liberal economics, oh now called things like globalization and transparency, is hostile, very explicitly, to sovereignty. But maybe you should spend some time thinking about pushing Westphalia in SW Asia?
no real knowledge, but I was a member of acm for 40 years and I would poke around there they have a lot of sigs, with publications and conferences and I would expect there are local knowledgable people that you can actually meet face to face. Also, the format stuff for their big journal is all on the web.
A little plug for acm. they have some real nice online library stuff if you are a member. Perhaps most of the people on slashdot are eligible for membership. they certainly have some prestige For instance, if you were looking for some equivalent to a CS nobel prize, you would be looking for their Turing Award.
On the other hand, it is IMO pretty rare for anyone to actually try to do a device that might do breakeven as constructed.
Back in the 70's, getting break even was known to be pretty straight forward. Some simple linear pinch device, but say two clicks long. This might actually go back to the 50's.
which what? google. most people on shashdot know that you cannot find a picture of the roof of the white house. One place a naive person wOuld look is google maps, but it is just grey. Several place like that around and it is pretty public that it is that way. In the WH case, it is at least air defense missiles. No one is upset. But I would be surprised if there were not a lot of lethal stuff to use against demonstrators. Might be be some push-back if it were easy to know about. Was it Ike or McArthur who got his start killing a lot of veterans who were prtesting about not receiving their pensions?
Anyway, I was surprised not to find easy hits abut DC government protection troops. It is the sort of thing that is pretty easy to know and there is always someone who is interested, so it would seem to be expected on the internet and easy to find.
So maybe I am alarmist, but I can see pretty easy not being able to publically politically organize this year. Then a lot of people are going to be interested in troop dispositions and whose orders and what orders they will obey.
Try it this way. Suppose all the world's stock market crash deep and the plunge team printing presses do not "solve" the problem. What happens next?
Actually I have usually thought he had the goods, so the dems promised him the presidency "next time".
But, you may be a child of a time when the Bush-Gore? election manages to happen and not destroy the country. It is credibe to say some really unpeasant things abut that election. The jfk election was very close and there was a lot of worry that we had come so very close to a constitutinal crisis. If the winner of the electoral college was not the winner of the popular vote, it did not seem clear that this would be tolerated.
I do not think you have the right idea about constitutional crisis. So I looked a bit.
short version: you are saying the american civil war was not much of a big deal.
Here is a kind of today speculation about constitiona crisis. Make a judgment about how long the eurozone will last. From that, you might then ask if the US economy will go down competey in June or in July. At that point there could be lots of troops in the street. Not so good. For a constitutional crisis, figure the troops are actively fighting each other.
Not credibe? Well Obama got the stimulus package through by beating up congress with the expectation of troops in the street before that year was out if they did not vote for the bill.
Hah, fun. I was going to mention there were aways, pretty much forever, a lot of troops in D.C. for the obvious reasons. The last time I noticed was when they were omitted from a sort of silly press release where they were the obvious counter-example. googled a few times and they did not turn up. oh, an air defense unit, but nothing about anything with serious capabiity to kill protesters. Maybe google suppresses more than WH air defense capability pictures.
I admit I was pretty young and actually believed what I read in newspapers. I believe the explanation was he chose to avoid a constitutional crisis. Now as it happens I figure watergate was more about some sort of treason, but treating it simply, consider Nixon's motivation there as driven by his experience with the dems in the jfk race. Kind of fun.
Useful to realize that there was not much in the press about stealing the election.
Pretty hard to figure that any of this is demonstrateable. So there could be 50 year old news articles. Do you really want to treat the news then as more truthful then now? And these were sort of opinion pieces.
So there are reports, some fairly old, that green US soldiers have issues about firing their weapon during combat. Now the study you could probably find has had some debunking attempts, but you can bet some good studies have been done.
When I was in basic doing bayonette stuff you were "encouraged" to loudly yell "kill" as you stuck the bayonnette into the dummy's gut.
I understand the miitary was the initial developer of what we think of as video game tech.
The early commercial developers came out of the above environment.
Commercial gaming is going back to DC looking for government contracts.
I put this together in the following way: People have always the intent that games affect behavior. The effects intended are not always what most would consider socially positive.
As to reality, I figure the miitary has real good data, but good luck seeing it.
From a different angle, suppose I was greatly endowed and had nothing I thought better to do so I had sex 40hr/week for a few years. Or just watched porn that much. I doubt there are any good studies, but I suspect it might not be good for me.
Let us start with the observation that vote fraud is as american as apple pie. Consider jfk vs nixon. The vote fraud in Texas and Chicag gave the race to jfk. Nixon knew this AND had court room style proof.
My observation is that these statistical type arguments do not do well in a court room. So stat expert could this have happened by chance?
The really relevant thing at this point is that a lot of incumbents simply cannot get elected, on one hand, and on the others, people get elected that no can believe could win, and even after the fact, there is no explanation possible, at least publically. I think of Rogers in texas and most recenty Lincoln in I think arkansas.
Rogers was an unknown, but real clear about impeaching obama and wn the dem CD nminatin in a three way race. Might have got twice the votes of the dem hack. Lincoln is an incumbent dem, but has not been properly obedient to Obama and serious in closing down the speculators. So big money came in against her. Soros, moveon. So she push her attacks on wall street and did fine. But among the important people she had already been retired.
Two things do seem to be of interest. Bill Clinton is popping up to defend some incumbents, as Lincoln. And the mass strike process, which is starting to be called "the french revolution effect". If you are going to use the last phrase, you should ask what Lafeyette did wrong back home.
inertia/mass is always fun. just acceleration is fun too. No good physics reason we could not have a 1-g constant acceleration spaceship. It would get around the neighborhood nicely. But think of all the physics you should recheck! And not even just physics. I hear something about biological effects of zero-g not being quite right. Figure that one of the virtues of the universe is that there always be new stuff to discover. And then think about all the eminent talking heads who said there was nothing left to discover, circa 1900.
My thoughts about copper mining in particular are probably based on some light connections to Butte Montana. Here is a link with just a little bit about some issues there.
A way to evaluate capitalists might be on a dynamic between looting and doing something actual generally useful. Somehow resource extraction unexpectedly ends up more on the looting side for me.
regarding roses and growing food for local needs, yah, this was part of why I would ask that question about hard currency. I think if you worked on it a bit, you could make the local food point very strongly. You also need to note all the expert western advice would be to go for cash exports. Now at this point, I would like to think the chinese know better, and even better, would not be pushing that line. But...
Also, food security is part of sovereignty, but that gets a lot of push back.
On the foreign aid point, I do not buy the general analysis.
Looking at current history since say 1400, pretty easy to figure out the world has been dominated by imperialism one way or another since, with the US being an occasional bright spot. An explanation of accidental failure of development programs is pretty naive. Empires do not go well with lots of things we locally like to value.
On better ways to develop, how about a good summary link. I figure Africa cannot bootstrap on its own. But I favor among other things high speed rail development corridors. One major Russian faction would do this. Chinese would fall in line. Also India. If we did glass-steagall, the development faction would be in charge in Russia. We would have high speed rail from the US to Africa. So, this month? July? A good tactical orientaton.
best I know are that copper mines are pretty nasty. I doubt that the chinese are, or can be, a lot worse than your favorite raw material western capitalist. But I really like the claims of surplus electrical power and training the locals to run things.
Anyone's primitive accumulation is ugly. Is it avoidable? Maybe, but not with a monetarist system.
As far as roses in africa, I believe you and I suspect it is stupid even from the get-go, but if I were to look closely I would ask how desperate the local government was for hard currency and why.
So this is coverage of a December new york times artice and the LPAC article was in April, kind of late. Doing a search on larouchepac.com on china and afghanistan give a number of hits this year. Now the way things work, everyone important has known about the mineral deposits for a while. So, if you feel like saying something interesting, try speculating on how this might be driving a lot of recent moves in the area.
Don't like LaRouche? In this case, you might try to remember top spook types in the 80's characterized his organization as "the best private intelligence organization in the world". Ah well. I am sure MSM meets all your information needs. Anyway, the recession is over and Obama is doing a wonderful job, for someone.
ah well. I do not see where I talked about a "US government cleanup plan" I did talk about some paperwork BP had to file with the feds to demonstrate they could cleanup this sort of thing. So I guess this is a BP plan.
As far as jumping randomly, incoherently, I guess you should go back to your sound bites.
As far as some coast guard plan not being implemented, probably because Obama has left BP in charge. I suspect we would agree this was yet another bad Obama behavior but asking "why" invites more complexity than I think you tolerate well. But I am sure it is SEUI's fault.
It seems quite useful to think the post-fdr era is "current events". And current history, post 1400's. I wonder how I should look on someone whose opinions are offered based on a few years of sound bites. Oh well. I am sure the domestic unions are the direct cause of the bailouts of the speculators, including the foreign speculators.
But on cleanup. To get permission to drill this well BP had to show a capacity to immeadiately deal with 300k barrels of spill a day. So their plan was not real great but it was workable if you spent a lot of money. Never been an attempt to implement the plan and no Obama pressure to do so. But the Brits are telling Obama not to hurt BP.
it seems useful to view BP as Prince Phillip and Shell as Prince Bernhard (deceased goodwin vioation). I wonder how one might speak of an ex-member of goodwin violation.
Talk to an insider and the Brits pretty well run the whole oil business.
If you think east india company policies, a little price fixing is not what you worry about.
Try this. 1970's oil shock. the arabs stopped pumping oil? Published stats do not show a decrease in production. anacortes refinery had tankers backed up into the sound that could not be unloaded. So, price fixing but the real deal was the arabs get a lot of money from everyone and they ship it to the western banks in London and NYC and it props up a dying financal system.
On sin taxes, a few random thoughts cross my mind. "Intend" is often tricky. For most of the last century, the relevant intent was the tobacco people, mediated through southern politicians. I think I could make a good argument that the sin taxes have yet to cover the social costs. Since the sin taxes are never supported by the tobacco companies, but are forced by the government under some sort of general welfare approach, I wonder how you manage to support the sin taxes. Can the tobacco companies be doing the right thing if they do not support sin taxes
Considering recreational drugs in general, like smack, and suppose you will embrace public health measures, and making a few hypotheticals.
Suppose we know who is taking the dope and how much. Suppose there is a cure for dependence, not necessarily convenient. Maybe some meds, some restraint, and some feeling real bad.
Suppose a high density of recreational drug use is undesireable, a public health thing. I have done some drug culture. Drug culture, even in peace and love days, can be easily conjectured as a potential public health issue. I suspect now it could be argued as a national security issue.
so at a certain point the local druggies get rounded up and "cured". All very transparent and even closely predictable. Then they go home. Maybe next time when the local usage stats get high, they will just quit for a while.
do you wish to assert that your dying young is not going to have some sort of social cost I have to pick up?
I question the dimbulb argument. I have a very nice IQ. No doubt I am a dimbulb here and there anyway. But tobacco has often been a big issue in my life. And I come out of an era where tobacco company out and out lies are well established. I wonder how I should process your remarks.
Lastly your argument would also support giving out smack on the street corner. Somehow, I suspect that you would find making that argument inconvenient.
game theory stuff often does not impress me. so I am fine with protectionism. and I figure economic liberalism or whatever they are calling it now can be properly characterized as evil. Oh well, big topics.
But try this for protectionism. I do not know anybody pushing autarky? right now. Oh, maybe the North Koreans. Nor do I see a big complaint about some sort of international division of labor. I do see a lot of complaints about peope making money by looting, while just pretty much shutting down real production. I do think that bilateral trade agreeements between sovereign republics are likely to result in both parties coming out ahead. We used to favor that sort of approach.
As far as China, I figure if their labor power increases, everyone can benefit. Is the issue low wages? There are some numbers that say no. I figure it is pretty much economic policy. A very broad characterzation is the chinese want to increase their labor power. These days we could be a little more precise, but you get the idea. Do you care to take a shot at characterizing atlantic basin economic policy?
consider "invisible hand" types as relgious nut jobs. mathematical economists? look at Orzag's track record on fannie mae et al. what was it? 1 in 500k to 1 in 3 million that fannie mae would get in big trouble
talking head economists tend to be like a flea upn a flea upon a flea and it is your blood being sucked.
Nobody has to really know anything to realize the big questions in any field is what happens when there are big phase-shift like changes. That is a good way to approach your question.
as far as irrational economics, do you really want to start with the assumption that the universe is unawful?
Slashdot Mirror
In the american revolutionary war, people were split about the 1/3,1/3,1/3. So that is a relevant number set in terms of general support. It is important to realize that the "good guys" were pretty much outright terrorists as we define it now. For instance, in New England there are pretty no fancy houses from that period. Such houses pretty much belonged to royalists and they tendedto get burned out. Fire departments were sort of volunteer subscription services, but even if you were paid up, the fire department might simply refuse to respond. And that american phenomena of tar and feathering was popular back then. This turns out to be a highly unpleasant, sometimes fatal, punishment.
A different trigger point comes if you cannot publicly politically organize. At that point, I figure anything goes. On the other hand, if you can organize publicly, then the issue is not so much the government as the population.
Some posters worry about what you get when you win. This is a good worry. In the american revolution period, the cultural level of the colonies were the highest on the planet. For instance, literacy was higher than now. Public discourse was much more sophisticated and profound. A little later, the douglas/lincoln debates went on for maybe four hours. I do not have the attention span anymore.
The way this stuff really works in this period, the financial people find that to keep going a while longer, they need so much austerity on the population that a representative government cannot do it. So something gives. At that point, fascist mass movements are a big deal. But our american exceptionalism seems to say we will not tolerate that or a military government. That does not mean anybody gets to live happily ever after. So the OP is asking the wrong question. It is not how or when to become a revolutionary--times like this, it gets easily to the point where you have a 100K people in the street and the police and military sit on their hands. Things end up changing rather quickly. But change to what? That is a good question. People who are serious need to ask what happens post-Obama, which is a lot sooner than 2113.
Sure the invisible hand is some sort of religious thing. But last I heard, the dominate economic advisors in the white house were followers of some israel guy who figured economics was irrational and you can get people to do anything. Sort of true, but sort of misses the point that economics is a physical thing. So it needs some consistency with the universe, else everyone dies. The easy point is that money has no intrinisic value and economic value is physical. So much for monetarism and a few thousands years of human stupidity. Don't worry about which popular economic model is least worthless.
I have some familiarity with the guy. I think he first came to my attention with something about evaporating black holes. Way back when. Go his name attached to the theory and it is still a pretty well accepted theory. I do not have much use for black hole theorists. They end up wanting to introduce unlawfulness into the universe and often have a belief in physical singularities. Warps them all over the place.
I notice you really liked to do an appeal to authority of some sort. On the other hand, you did not deign to offer an opinion on any aspect of terrestial human extinction events. But Hawkings must have good intentions, so let us all praise his arguments. Oh, and he is a bit of a popular celebrity in a way. Maybe he will eventually attain the status of Elvis and we can hope for a second coming.
I do not recall proposing government money for mitigation. I do want to push for manned space exploration, but not particularly for some sort of contingency planning. Perhaps you like straw men arguments too. To be fair, some of my letters are MSE, so I would have to admit to sometimes doing risk mitigation, and I suppose this might fall under that rubric.
So, given the great validity of your arguments, I suppose the question is: Just how slimy are you?
please remember that we are willing to spend money on saving speculators.
I RTFA as much as I could tolerate. The near-term examples I saw Hawkings using were global warming and nuclear war! This guy is pretty much a nut job. Giving oil supplies and the usual warmist assumptions, why would anyone honestly claim that global warming was a human extinction event. Yeah, I have seen it done, but come on. Nuclear war is always a good boogie man, but I suspect a spasm still would not be a human extinction event. Hawking actually cites the cuban missile crisis, apparently as a close call to a human extinction event. For perspective, there was a near event about 70K years ago. Might have reduced the population to say 10k. A really big mt st helens event in Indonesia. Nobody really notices anymore. Now astronomical events are fine as human extinction events. People worry about silly local rocks, but we are close to solving that. On the other hand, there might have been a stellar nova a 100 light years away and tomorrow we will be deep fried. I applaud the possibility that Hawkings is apparently trying to think, and space capability is what is needed, but we are not getting clear thinking from this guy. Of course, if he is lying through his teeth, I can respect that.
I just go to say it.
I was hearing some other doomsday scenario and recently googled a bit around a kind of volcanic event. Oh, it was associated with Obama's oil spill.
About 70k years ago there was a big volcanic event in Indonesia. Seems it pretty well covered the planet in ash. Estimates of surviving human population range from 5k to 15k.
A near extinction event for humans.
Tell me about how your doomsday scenario is in fact an actual human extinction event coming on in the next 200 years.
You seem to be a fine example of what the "deniers" complain about around fearmongering. Hmm, troll? Worse?
RTFA, seems they are going to be limited in what they censor on the popular sites. Now in the USA there is significant pressure for censorship at public libraries. A reasonable solution on sex censorship, at least used at Tacoma Public Library, was to do sex censorship, but only of images. I think this is a lot better than some sort of secret commercial censor ware. Now in a way the pakistan stuff is a bit similar, but affects private citizens at home.
In the totality I think there some significant similarities between sex issues here and religious issue there. To push some of the sex issues consider text or cartoons about underage females on your home computer. A lot of vocal types start talking abut summary execution. Sort of interesting.
Now Pakistan still has some sovereignty. It has some democracy, if that seems important. Is it a republic? Not sure but I am inclined to think so at least somewhat. Is it a theocracy? I do not think so, so it starts out better in my head around this than say Israel or Saudi Arabia. Yemen Iran. Taliban. Etc.
Here is some little history. These days the treaty of westphalia gets quite a bit of attack from evil sorts. But this was a real big deal in religious freedom and sovereignty. Maybe you would be wise to work with a resolution of these two items and realize different countries really need to have some differences to function right. Of course, liberal economics, oh now called things like globalization and transparency, is hostile, very explicitly, to sovereignty. But maybe you should spend some time thinking about pushing Westphalia in SW Asia?
no real knowledge, but I was a member of acm for 40 years and I would poke around there they have a lot of sigs, with publications and conferences and I would expect there are local knowledgable people that you can actually meet face to face. Also, the format stuff for their big journal is all on the web.
A little plug for acm. they have some real nice online library stuff if you are a member. Perhaps most of the people on slashdot are eligible for membership. they certainly have some prestige For instance, if you were looking for some equivalent to a CS nobel prize, you would be looking for their Turing Award.
On the other hand, it is IMO pretty rare for anyone to actually try to do a device that might do breakeven as constructed.
Back in the 70's, getting break even was known to be pretty straight forward. Some simple linear pinch device, but say two clicks long. This might actually go back to the 50's.
which what? google. most people on shashdot know that you cannot find a picture of the roof of the white house. One place a naive person wOuld look is google maps, but it is just grey. Several place like that around and it is pretty public that it is that way. In the WH case, it is at least air defense missiles. No one is upset. But I would be surprised if there were not a lot of lethal stuff to use against demonstrators. Might be be some push-back if it were easy to know about. Was it Ike or McArthur who got his start killing a lot of veterans who were prtesting about not receiving their pensions?
Anyway, I was surprised not to find easy hits abut DC government protection troops. It is the sort of thing that is pretty easy to know and there is always someone who is interested, so it would seem to be expected on the internet and easy to find.
So maybe I am alarmist, but I can see pretty easy not being able to publically politically organize this year. Then a lot of people are going to be interested in troop dispositions and whose orders and what orders they will obey.
Try it this way. Suppose all the world's stock market crash deep and the plunge team printing presses do not "solve" the problem. What happens next?
Nw I am not saying stock market crashes bother me
Actually I have usually thought he had the goods, so the dems promised him the presidency "next time".
But, you may be a child of a time when the Bush-Gore? election manages to happen and not destroy the country. It is credibe to say some really unpeasant things abut that election. The jfk election was very close and there was a lot of worry that we had come so very close to a constitutinal crisis. If the winner of the electoral college was not the winner of the popular vote, it did not seem clear that this would be tolerated.
I do not think you have the right idea about constitutional crisis. So I looked a bit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_crisis#United_States
short version: you are saying the american civil war was not much of a big deal.
Here is a kind of today speculation about constitiona crisis. Make a judgment about how long the eurozone will last. From that, you might then ask if the US economy will go down competey in June or in July. At that point there could be lots of troops in the street. Not so good. For a constitutional crisis, figure the troops are actively fighting each other.
Not credibe? Well Obama got the stimulus package through by beating up congress with the expectation of troops in the street before that year was out if they did not vote for the bill.
Hah, fun. I was going to mention there were aways, pretty much forever, a lot of troops in D.C. for the obvious reasons. The last time I noticed was when they were omitted from a sort of silly press release where they were the obvious counter-example. googled a few times and they did not turn up. oh, an air defense unit, but nothing about anything with serious capabiity to kill protesters. Maybe google suppresses more than WH air defense capability pictures.
I admit I was pretty young and actually believed what I read in newspapers. I believe the explanation was he chose to avoid a constitutional crisis. Now as it happens I figure watergate was more about some sort of treason, but treating it simply, consider Nixon's motivation there as driven by his experience with the dems in the jfk race. Kind of fun.
Useful to realize that there was not much in the press about stealing the election.
Pretty hard to figure that any of this is demonstrateable. So there could be 50 year old news articles. Do you really want to treat the news then as more truthful then now? And these were sort of opinion pieces.
Hah, you may be right.
But here is some uncited history.
So there are reports, some fairly old, that green US soldiers have issues about firing their weapon during combat. Now the study you could probably find has had some debunking attempts, but you can bet some good studies have been done.
When I was in basic doing bayonette stuff you were "encouraged" to loudly yell "kill" as you stuck the bayonnette into the dummy's gut.
I understand the miitary was the initial developer of what we think of as video game tech.
The early commercial developers came out of the above environment.
Commercial gaming is going back to DC looking for government contracts.
I put this together in the following way: People have always the intent that games affect behavior. The effects intended are not always what most would consider socially positive.
As to reality, I figure the miitary has real good data, but good luck seeing it.
From a different angle, suppose I was greatly endowed and had nothing I thought better to do so I had sex 40hr/week for a few years. Or just watched porn that much. I doubt there are any good studies, but I suspect it might not be good for me.
Let us start with the observation that vote fraud is as american as apple pie. Consider jfk vs nixon. The vote fraud in Texas and Chicag gave the race to jfk. Nixon knew this AND had court room style proof.
My observation is that these statistical type arguments do not do well in a court room. So stat expert could this have happened by chance?
The really relevant thing at this point is that a lot of incumbents simply cannot get elected, on one hand, and on the others, people get elected that no can believe could win, and even after the fact, there is no explanation possible, at least publically. I think of Rogers in texas and most recenty Lincoln in I think arkansas.
Rogers was an unknown, but real clear about impeaching obama and wn the dem CD nminatin in a three way race. Might have got twice the votes of the dem hack. Lincoln is an incumbent dem, but has not been properly obedient to Obama and serious in closing down the speculators. So big money came in against her. Soros, moveon. So she push her attacks on wall street and did fine. But among the important people she had already been retired.
Two things do seem to be of interest. Bill Clinton is popping up to defend some incumbents, as Lincoln. And the mass strike process, which is starting to be called "the french revolution effect". If you are going to use the last phrase, you should ask what Lafeyette did wrong back home.
inertia/mass is always fun. just acceleration is fun too. No good physics reason we could not have a 1-g constant acceleration spaceship. It would get around the neighborhood nicely. But think of all the physics you should recheck! And not even just physics. I hear something about biological effects of zero-g not being quite right. Figure that one of the virtues of the universe is that there always be new stuff to discover. And then think about all the eminent talking heads who said there was nothing left to discover, circa 1900.
My thoughts about copper mining in particular are probably based on some light connections to Butte Montana. Here is a link with just a little bit about some issues there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butte,_Montana
A way to evaluate capitalists might be on a dynamic between looting and doing something actual generally useful. Somehow resource extraction unexpectedly ends up more on the looting side for me.
regarding roses and growing food for local needs, yah, this was part of why I would ask that question about hard currency. I think if you worked on it a bit, you could make the local food point very strongly. You also need to note all the expert western advice would be to go for cash exports. Now at this point, I would like to think the chinese know better, and even better, would not be pushing that line. But ...
Also, food security is part of sovereignty, but that gets a lot of push back.
On the foreign aid point, I do not buy the general analysis.
Looking at current history since say 1400, pretty easy to figure out the world has been dominated by imperialism one way or another since, with the US being an occasional bright spot. An explanation of accidental failure of development programs is pretty naive. Empires do not go well with lots of things we locally like to value.
On better ways to develop, how about a good summary link. I figure Africa cannot bootstrap on its own. But I favor among other things high speed rail development corridors. One major Russian faction would do this. Chinese would fall in line. Also India. If we did glass-steagall, the development faction would be in charge in Russia. We would have high speed rail from the US to Africa. So, this month? July? A good tactical orientaton.
best I know are that copper mines are pretty nasty. I doubt that the chinese are, or can be, a lot worse than your favorite raw material western capitalist. But I really like the claims of surplus electrical power and training the locals to run things.
Anyone's primitive accumulation is ugly. Is it avoidable? Maybe, but not with a monetarist system.
As far as roses in africa, I believe you and I suspect it is stupid even from the get-go, but if I were to look closely I would ask how desperate the local government was for hard currency and why.
Best I can tell the people actually doing the nation building in afghanistan are the Chinese.
http://www.larouchepac.com/node/14136
So this is coverage of a December new york times artice and the LPAC article was in April, kind of late. Doing a search on larouchepac.com on china and afghanistan give a number of hits this year. Now the way things work, everyone important has known about the mineral deposits for a while. So, if you feel like saying something interesting, try speculating on how this might be driving a lot of recent moves in the area.
Don't like LaRouche? In this case, you might try to remember top spook types in the 80's characterized his organization as "the best private intelligence organization in the world". Ah well. I am sure MSM meets all your information needs. Anyway, the recession is over and Obama is doing a wonderful job, for someone.
ah well. I do not see where I talked about a "US government cleanup plan" I did talk about some paperwork BP had to file with the feds to demonstrate they could cleanup this sort of thing. So I guess this is a BP plan.
As far as jumping randomly, incoherently, I guess you should go back to your sound bites.
As far as some coast guard plan not being implemented, probably because Obama has left BP in charge. I suspect we would agree this was yet another bad Obama behavior but asking "why" invites more complexity than I think you tolerate well. But I am sure it is SEUI's fault.
It seems quite useful to think the post-fdr era is "current events". And current history, post 1400's. I wonder how I should look on someone whose opinions are offered based on a few years of sound bites. Oh well. I am sure the domestic unions are the direct cause of the bailouts of the speculators, including the foreign speculators.
But on cleanup. To get permission to drill this well BP had to show a capacity to immeadiately deal with 300k barrels of spill a day. So their plan was not real great but it was workable if you spent a lot of money. Never been an attempt to implement the plan and no Obama pressure to do so. But the Brits are telling Obama not to hurt BP.
it seems useful to view BP as Prince Phillip and Shell as Prince Bernhard (deceased goodwin vioation). I wonder how one might speak of an ex-member of goodwin violation.
Talk to an insider and the Brits pretty well run the whole oil business.
If you think east india company policies, a little price fixing is not what you worry about.
Try this. 1970's oil shock. the arabs stopped pumping oil? Published stats do not show a decrease in production. anacortes refinery had tankers backed up into the sound that could not be unloaded. So, price fixing but the real deal was the arabs get a lot of money from everyone and they ship it to the western banks in London and NYC and it props up a dying financal system.
thank you for a response.
On sin taxes, a few random thoughts cross my mind. "Intend" is often tricky. For most of the last century, the relevant intent was the tobacco people, mediated through southern politicians. I think I could make a good argument that the sin taxes have yet to cover the social costs. Since the sin taxes are never supported by the tobacco companies, but are forced by the government under some sort of general welfare approach, I wonder how you manage to support the sin taxes. Can the tobacco companies be doing the right thing if they do not support sin taxes
Considering recreational drugs in general, like smack, and suppose you will embrace public health measures, and making a few hypotheticals.
Suppose we know who is taking the dope and how much. Suppose there is a cure for dependence, not necessarily convenient. Maybe some meds, some restraint, and some feeling real bad.
Suppose a high density of recreational drug use is undesireable, a public health thing. I have done some drug culture. Drug culture, even in peace and love days, can be easily conjectured as a potential public health issue. I suspect now it could be argued as a national security issue.
so at a certain point the local druggies get rounded up and "cured". All very transparent and even closely predictable. Then they go home. Maybe next time when the local usage stats get high, they will just quit for a while.
do you wish to assert that your dying young is not going to have some sort of social cost I have to pick up?
I question the dimbulb argument. I have a very nice IQ. No doubt I am a dimbulb here and there anyway. But tobacco has often been a big issue in my life. And I come out of an era where tobacco company out and out lies are well established. I wonder how I should process your remarks.
Lastly your argument would also support giving out smack on the street corner. Somehow, I suspect that you would find making that argument inconvenient.
game theory stuff often does not impress me. so I am fine with protectionism. and I figure economic liberalism or whatever they are calling it now can be properly characterized as evil. Oh well, big topics.
But try this for protectionism. I do not know anybody pushing autarky? right now. Oh, maybe the North Koreans. Nor do I see a big complaint about some sort of international division of labor. I do see a lot of complaints about peope making money by looting, while just pretty much shutting down real production. I do think that bilateral trade agreeements between sovereign republics are likely to result in both parties coming out ahead. We used to favor that sort of approach.
As far as China, I figure if their labor power increases, everyone can benefit. Is the issue low wages? There are some numbers that say no. I figure it is pretty much economic policy. A very broad characterzation is the chinese want to increase their labor power. These days we could be a little more precise, but you get the idea. Do you care to take a shot at characterizing atlantic basin economic policy?
"some benefit" vs "how big of a disaster"
people say lots of things
consider "invisible hand" types as relgious nut jobs.
mathematical economists? look at Orzag's track record on fannie mae et al. what was it? 1 in 500k to 1 in 3 million that fannie mae would get in big trouble
talking head economists tend to be like a flea upn a flea upon a flea and it is your blood being sucked.
Nobody has to really know anything to realize the big questions in any field is what happens when there are big phase-shift like changes. That is a good way to approach your question.
as far as irrational economics, do you really want to start with the assumption that the universe is unawful?