Youtube comments of (@TheDavidlloydjones).
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No, I don't.
But if you're right that everybody shut up about it, then I guess nobody else did, either.
What do I do now? Am I supposed to run around in circles like a chicken with its head cut off? (Yes, chickens do that. The one I saw was the same cockerel that had been bullying me, a four-year-old, in the same yard the day before. Difference was, it didn't last long, didn't cluck, and didn't, in fact see me: I was the one doing the watching.)
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Paul,
I had a lunch with the Japan head of Mobil Oil in 1977 at which we discussed what the Rockefeller Oil companies as a group had been doing to head off -- really, genuinely to solve the problem, long term -- in California in 1967, ten years earlier.
The actual laws needed, primarily cap and trade to ensure at least faintly efficient use of capital, should have been started in the 1960s. Here we are sixty years later. I'm 79 years old. And we still haven't gotten to step one.
Oil company interests? Nope. The oil industry of 1967, or 1977, or 1980, has vanished. It's been totally replaced, as has all of all other industries. It's just that we decided in the past sixty years to replace the bad with the bad, even though the oil companies -- or at least the main ones -- knew "This is no good and we've got to replace it with something different" way back then.
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A Hangul note, for around 42:00 : I once took a class in Korean at the Asahi Culture Center in Shinjuku, where I was the only white face. The instructor was showing off the power of Hangul by showing everybody how to write their names, all Japanese until he got around to me. Then he wrote up the equivalent for loid joans, and read it. I said it was not bad, but in Welsh Ll is a single letter of the alphabet, pronounced, more or less, "HL." He made just the slightest adjustment to the Hangul and had Lloyd-Jones in perfect Welsh.
I think it is likely that the Koreans are so good, so much better than the Japanese, at learning new languages because their writing system is so good: a syllabary written in Hangul can be almost perfect, whereas one that tries to do it with Katakana for the pronunciation guides will be hopeless.
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@Youtubedeletes
"Violence is as American as cherry pie."
Actually America is no more violent than dozens of other places, but there are rather more guns there because of the intense commercial lobbying of the gun industry and its front organization and suckers, the NRA.
Legitimate gun owners' organizations, e.g. hunters, wildllife conservationists, or military trainers, are conspicuously absent from the phoney "second amendment supporters" in this money-making effort.)
Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy were shot and killed.
TR and Reagan were shot and mercifully survived. FDR, Truman, Ford, and several serious candidates have been shot at, RFK killed.
I don't think it's very clear which side your God was on, anonymous "Deletes."
The main stream media are overwhelmingly staffed with sane people, people quite unlike you. My guess would be that they might tend to support strict restriction of arms to trained and licensed members of well regulated militias.
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Calling Mao "the founder of Chinese Communism itself," at 0:38, is incorrect.
Mao was one of the leaders of the southern, largely rural, grouping of the Chinese Communist Party. This grouping of the Party became important after the Kuomintang's murder of many of the Party's leaders, including most of the urban and northern leadership, in 1928. In the course of the so-called Long March, the retreat of the survivors of this group to Yunnan, Mao emerged as one of the top leaders -- but even then required the permission of other Yunnan leaders to marry Qiang Qing. During WWII the Japanese crippled the Kuomintang and the few remaining urban Communists.
Like George Washington, Mao Zedong was the tallest of the revolution's leaders.
The tale of the "tactical retreat" from Pusan leading to the invasion at Inchon, at 6:11, is utter fiction. After UN forces, British, American, Turkish and Korean, were pushed south to the Pusan perimeter in 1950 they were subsequently victorious, and the North Koreans retreated.
The subsequent invasion at Inchon, a brilliant success for the US Marines and Navy, was conducted by entirely different troops, and General Douglas "dug-out Doug" MacArthur claimed it as his victory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Pusan_Perimeter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Inchon
https://www.history.com/topics/korea/inchon
MacArthur's previous record consisted mainly of his defeat in the Philippines: he had relied for his security at Bataan upon the big gun emplacements built by his father a generation earlier; the Japanese Navy shelled the hills above the guns, silencing them with rock slides. MacArthur fled by motor-boat.
After the Marines' victory at Inchon, MacArthur bloviated about invading North Korea and was fired by President Truman.
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There is an error here, treating the Holocaust as a German event. The Holocaust happened in Poland, and most of the pertetrators were Poles, neighbour turning against neighbour.
Tha Nazis, led very largely by Bavarian Roman Catholics, gave the Poles permission and opportunity to become their worst selves. Polish Roman Cathlics took that opening when it was given.
In all cases, Poles, Bavarians, Roman Catholics, we're looking at minorities. But we are seeing minorities tolerated and permitted by their majority cousins. Let's identify them correctly, OK?
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Greenland was important 100 years ago, when people started thinking about flying between North America and Europe and, the Earth being a sphere, Greenland was in the middle.
That was a hundred years ago when planes didn't fly very far.
Today it's a curiosity. Like Iceland and Alaska and Siberia, it has a harsh environment, and has thus produced a population of survivors, people who, given the chance, turn out to have high IQs, mental qualities useful in other environments, too.
Donald Trump trying to pick on Greenlanders is an absurd mismatch of wits.
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I visited Bed, Bath and Beyond at both their new locations at College and Yonge in Toronto, the below-ground trial and the huge above-ground when the flashy new building opened, when they were new. They looked totally clueless: utterly routine product that you could buy anywhere -- half a dozen large trusted companies within a ten minute walk -- at simply inane sky-high prices.
I was the only person in the place both times. not even any visible staff, and I saw exactly nothing I was tempted to buy. I bought new pillows and pillow-cases recently, at their competitor in the building next door.
Sears has not been a department store for a generation: I don't know when the switch happened, but they saw the writing on the wall and converted themselves into a landlord for individual businesses which disguised themselves as Sears departments. I.e., where Sears once sold pillows, now there would be an eager small investor running her, often a young lady, own pillow stand. That looks like a good idea to me, and it may have been. One problem is, they were constrained to working in their own old, usually multi-storey, building, while an investor who thought, say, pillows were a good venture had the choice of going anywhere. I dunno.
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@fairwarning4267
I doubt that you're a patriot, and you don't seem to know anything about liberalism.
Liberalism, a large group of philosophies that emerged across the West in the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries, is what put an end to the Middle Ages. It is not satanism, it is humanism.
Far from being the enemy of humanity, it is one of humanity's best efforts so far at expressing itself, developing itself, and protecting itself -- against ignorance, stupidity, disease, and all its other enemies.
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No surprise here. The Red States are the ones where all the productive people have left. All the whiners and losers have stayed behind. Naturally, and they get the most Federal transfer payments for unemployment, remedial ed, and the two sorts of welfare for the rich, military bases and farm spending.
The farm program, originally to bail out the family farm, today helps agribusiness. The largest farmers in America are Coca-Cola and ADM, the former Archer, Daniels Midland. Military bases? They follow the senior votes in Congress: they tend to be in places where the losers and whiners have been electing the oldest, most tired Republicans for a generation. Think Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama: red, old, tired, and full of unemployables ready to sign up for the government job.
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IBM has vast numbers of patents, but the sale of their machines and the renting out of their software to people who use other makers' machine are both businesses which depend on patents owned by others.
IBM was originally a rather nasty and not altogether honest company named Computing-Tabulating-Recording Corporation, but they realised early on that there was more money to be made by going straight and, perhaps more importantly, locking in the government as a customer.
So they changed around, changed their name, wrote echange agreements with everybody, "our patents are free to you if yours are free to us," and put a lot of energy into making tabulating machinery essential to America's decennial census.
By WWII, half of their business was with the US government, and everything that later became computing was "IBM and the seven dwarfs" -- even though those seven other companies had thousands of patents, too.
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Biden is being ver-ree canny: he gets to make half-a-dozen speeches to the whole media audience, time after time saying the same thing, be calm, I'm the boss, everything's going back to normal, be calm.
Never boasting once. Just being quietly but clearly in charge!
And then, at a time of his own choosing, after everybody has gotten used to the fact that he's won, only then will he come out and make The Big Speech.
Acceptance, not proclamation of victory! Damn, but that's smart!
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@neilprintz8428
Neil,
I dunno, I can't take this buzzword-of-the-day thing seriously. Where did "cancel culture" come from? Women's Wear Daily? Some afternoon TV show with a bunch of Anaheim housewives in the audience?
Whenever "people" say that X is "a thing," the way cancel culture is a thing right now, my tendency is to tune out.
Kaleigh McElvaney seems to me an interesting character in exactly the same way as Sarah Sanders was. Both of them are strong women, both with a solid twenty or thirty IQ points on poor Donnie, and both of them with the same very difficult job, making sense out of a totally incoherent policy program.
They have a basic simple problem: Trump's "program" is the dumb shit that half-wits talk in bars all the time. It's the meat and potatoes of Fox programming -- all the stuff that twelve-year-old Roman Catholic boys believed in 1970. It's nonsense because it doesn't make sense in the real world. You can write novels about it, and Ayn Rand and any number of pessimistic mitteleuropisch novelists have done so.
That is not the kind of thing you can hold a pep rally for in the White House Briefing Room.
The Evangelicals have a different set of problems but the same hard situation: they've backed themselves into a corner. They've voted for destroying their own pensions, health care, and even their furshlugginer soy-bean markets. All in the name of a white, blue-eyed Jesus. At the margins, 12~20% of all families, the kids are just looking at their parents funny.
I come from a little village where there is a Camp Zion, where they have Holness Meetings every summer. The people who go to those meetings are perfectly nice people. But they didn't vote for a narcissistic failed real-estate hustler to run their lives when I was a kid.
All across America something like 10% of the people, a third to a quarter of the Republican base, have made a mistake, and if they don't know it, they very certainly feel it.
This doesn't make them suddenly Aristotelian logicians. It leaves them more like chickens with their heads cut off.
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Jon,
Tsinghua Unigroup (紫光集團): Hunh? How did Tsing (or your historically interesting "Qing") Hua become Zi3 Guang1, Purple Rays?
And a quite different query: It's certainly correct in a formal sense that they "defaulted" on their bonds, but what really happened is, they failed to roll over their bonds. Bonds don't normally get paid off; bond-debt is normally a form of long-term "equity-ish" capital that gets refinanced every now and then at rates that will reflect market conditions outside the company concerned.
This means that failure to roll-over, leading to failure to reply, reflected earlier decisions and some broad concatenation of internal and external conditions.
What I want to know, then, is who owned the bongs and refused to roll them over? And why did refusing to refinance them make sense to them, given that it involved a huge immadiate lodd (modulo tax write-offs, that is...)?
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Christopher,
You don't seem to be paying attention here, boy. Nobody has taken away your right to say anything you want (although maybe you should try some WD-40 on your caps-lock key), but what you're sounding off about here has nothing to do with the subject of the video: Trump's stupid random tariffs.
And it's not a left-right problem. All your loud "COMMUNIST" nonsense is irrelevant. It's a 17th-Century vs 21st-Century problem: Trump's ideas of economics are the barstool wisdom of the pub where they tie their horses up three hundred years ago. He's waa-ay out of date.
We understand economics better today -- not perfectly, but better. Today we know that slapping random taxes on people if they buy something you think they shouldn't is a stoo-pid way of growing an economy, a stoo-pid way of creating jobs, and an infantile way of behaving.
Trump, in these videos, is taking jobs away from A and giving them to B -- and he doen't even know he's doing it, that's how far he is from reality.
So get yerself a can of WD-40 for your keyboard. Then a beer for yourself maybe. And then maybe sit down, listen to the video again, paying attention this time. And see if you can think it through.
Poor Donnie can't.
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Jon,
Your comment three or four minutes in, that the British never intended Hong Kong to be more than a trading post, is spot on.
My maternal grandfather, an energetic and intelligent man and a textile manufacturer, in the English Midlands, died wealthy, a pounds multi-millionaire at a time when the UK pound was worth five US dollars. He started out poor, and the Mechanics' Handbook of his boyhood was my daily reading, a couple of pages a day in the toilet, for some years. Good sound technical reading which has helped me in my own business careers. As a teenager he invented, developed, and patented an improved way of connecting the ends of any power-take-off belt, then invested the income in his own factories, and Bob's Yer Uncle.
He had four wives and twelve children, and WWII didn't help the textile industry much, but he still managed to pay for a good deal of my education, and I'm grateful to him.
One of the memories of my childhood was my mother reporting what my uncles were worried about, all those Australian cops hired to keep down the Hong Kong textile mills. It didn't work. The last of our English mills closed in the 1970s. The Hong Kong folks who put them out of business have since had to worry about Vietnamese, Malaysian, and other Asian competitors. Some of them financed by my daughter the engineer...
One lesson is that drunken, crooked, superannuated Australian cops are not the best people to hire, even for dubious work.
A better lesson is that the parts of the family who moved onto other industries have done very well, thank you very much, and we wish honest hard-working Chinese well in everything they do.
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A very frequent cause of bankruptcy is people confusing good and bad. "Debits" sounds like debt, which it isn't, and "credits" sounds good which it may be -- or not.
This video shows us a classical case of this confusion in action. Loyalty is sweet and good, so a loyalty program ought to be an asset. These folks have found dollar numbers at the bottom of their programs' tally sheets, so that must be a bankable asset, right?
Not right.
These loyalty programs are services owed by the airlines to past customers, and those footings are the worst case of how much they might have to pay out, in services, if those customers come back to cash in. (When those "miles" went on the books they were reserves against income, i.e. tax reductions. Here in this video that are called "income" when in reality they are the future expenditure of flying customers free. Bookkeeping flim-flam in both instances. ）
One more example of why Warren Buffett says he never invests in airlines. No, they're not banks here: they're beggars rattling their very empty cups.
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@Baka_Oppai That's mixed in my experience. When my wife and I moved to Japan we found it pretty easy. Kana takes a few days: you just write them down on a card and carry it with you, then look them up every time you see them for a few days.
The Kanji can be harder, and being lazy I never really got beyond the grade school seven hundred or so. (On the other hand, I could amaze people by being able to point to a lease, reading it upside-down, and saying something like "Yeah, but I'd like to cut down on the guarantee money. My record's pretty good after all..." What they didn't realize was that I'd read hundreds of leases, and of course upside-down is no harder than sideways with Kanji, while it might have been the first or second time even a landlord had negotiated one -- let alone with a foreigner!)
With Chinese, though, reading even a lot of Japanese has been no help: for months it just supplied me with a headful of incorrect pronunciations!
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I'm not sure that's true. Trump's entire career has been a downward slope, starting with the years he spent destroying his father's and grandfather's fortunes and very much impairing his siblings' inheritances while he was at it.
He started out rich and loved, and he's never gotten back to where he was when he was five years old.
He has confessed from time to time in offhand ways that he ran for President as a promotion. I think of it as a way, his typically flamboyant way, of pretending to be a New York Republican for the sake of the New York banks. Fail, but another horse came along just in time, lo! the Evangelicals.
And so it goes. He's on the skids now -- but he would probably have been on the skids had he lost the election, too. Suppose he'd lost, given a sweet and sucky concession speech, and gone off to Moscow? He'd have been hit by service-servers on his stop-off in Scotland, Oleg Derispaka's thugs at the airport in Moscow, and a flock of warrants, bills, and sour, incompetent, unemployed children when he got back.
He's a loser every step of the way. You can tell it from the fact that he has no friends.
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The back story here, to my mind, is that Brexit is a totally stupid idea, while Russia and China are, over the long run, natural enemies.
This means that England is an obvious colonial outpost for China, its gateway, its Hong Kong, into Europe.
But MSNBC have a point here. England now has an Indian Prime Minister, and the extraordinary, large, well-educated, and very well organized Tata family, already great and powerful, are poised to dominate the economy.
India and China could get into a bidding war for England, with India starting out a couple of steps ahead in the game. (Um. That's not what MSNBC say here. It's what they should have said. 😂🤣)
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@skydragon23101979
One the Hitler War was over in Europe, Russia would have turned on the spigot to Mao through Manchuria. Exhausted Britain would still have wanted Hong Kong back, so there's no knowing what to do with that branch of the hypothetical.
The long short of it is, the democracies had the A-Bomb -- eventually, somewhere -- and Japan didn't. The Japanese A-Bomb program, set up in the Toei Theater Building in the Ginza, was going nowhere. If America had not come into the war, the A-Bomb project was also running in North Bay, Ontario, and would simply have been ramped up there instead of at Los Alamos. Remember the Manhattan Project was European brains, with some American additions but not a dominant fraction, running on American money.
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@enerzise3161
Good try, but you are simply making stuff up out of thin air. Lincoln was a Unionist and a Founder of the Republican Party, hence a Republican as part of his definition -- but before Mark Hanna turned it into the party or business.
Even as the party of business, it was the party of Carnegie, a Pacifist who refused to roll armor-plate for the Navy.
Your version of Lincoln's learning German is a flat-out 180-degree lie. The Germans of Illinois were Lincoln's anti-slavery allies and supporters. It is no surprise that you post anonymously: any honest, i.e. old-time, Republican would be ashamed to know the person who wrote your dishonest post.
Reparations? Lincoln's promise to the freed slaves was "Forty acres and a mule." At today's prices, call it a good suburban house and car. What'll you have, a quarter of a million? Or a half?
The second half of your post, however, is correct. You have the Betsy DeVos program for the destruction of the education system quite right. Extreme Right.
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@Curunir
I think there's an answer to that: Blagojevich and Kerik were both guilty as hell, but they are both the types who appeal to Trump's hardhat tough-guy followers. His pardoning them is clearly an appeal to the barstool Democrat vote, Blue-collar Pabst Blue voters.
Milken was certainly guilty on a whole host of technicalities, but he has a wide following among financial types, including me: I think his insight into the irrationalities of the market were valuable. He's given a ton of money to good charities, paid $600 million in fines, put in his time in jail, so he's entitled to some sympathy. Color me 50-50 on that one. (Incidentally, I know of no evidence that Milken has ever been a Democrat: he's a pretty hard-ass floor-trader type, 95% likely to be a Republican. But in many ways a good guy.)
DeBartolo was a straight out crook, trying to buy a gambling license. My guess is he appeals to Trump because he owns a football team -- going for the barstool vote again, doncha think?
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No, Norman, it's not "First" at 3:34. The flim-flam has gotten underway well before your quite correctly mocked "free groups." We veered off into pure fiction earlier with the apparently realistic specification of "three-dimensional Euclidean space."
The very basic problem here is one of the normal magicians' misdirection. Saying the soothing words "three-dimensional Euclidean space," (yes, yes, we all know what that is) lulls us into imagining there might be some other kind of space. There isn't. Three-dimensional, omnidirectional, space -- floors, ceilings, planets going "around" in their ellipses, and all that -- is the only kind of space there is.
Other uses of the word "space" are other meanings of the word.
An eleven-dimensional space-time construct of banana-theory* or whatever physicists are putting in grant applications for this month is not space. It is a construct, so called because physicists imagine they have constructed, i.e. made, something when in fact they have merely dreamed it up. They're very good at dreaming stuff up because the big money tossed around in the field since atom bombs became dangerous attracts a lot of talent. Physics is kinda like Hollywood without the attractive women so of course a lot of imaginative men turn up to sample the wares.
*"Banana theory." Oops. I remember now. It's string "theory."
This is the discovery that if you got an inconvenient infinity, (these days renamed an N.A.N. for "Not A Number") by dividing something by zero, a no-no, you can get rid of it easily: you just replace the zero with a little itsy-bitsy.
We can't call our little itsy-bitsies "points" because physics is already full of fictional point-masses which are inconveniently zero in height, length, and breadth. Let's call them strings. We'll make them too small to see. They'll be much smaller than the wavelengths of light, so they'll be permanently either or both unseeable because invisible or invisible because you can't see 'em. X-rays? Gamma-rays? Nope. By the time the wave-length of your illuminator becomes short enough to see these strings, it, too, will have turned into strings. So there. Take that, audit committee.
Now, strings vibrate. Harmonically. Harmonic vibration has been studied by Legitimate Academics for at least five thousand years now. Wonderful: we have a notion that will appeal to funding committees. And thus we have all the physics since Congress stopped being willing to fund a big hole in the ground in Waxahachie, Texas.
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Sal really buries the lede here: the big point is, Matson invented container shipping. He gets around to it eleven minutes in, but given a truly historic fact of this imporance, I'd have thought it was the main thing to be said about excellent Matson.
First they built a one-forty-footer roll-on-roll-off lighter to serve around the islands. Then some guy on their senior staff said, "Hey, this forty-footer thing is neat. Let's do it everywhere."
There was a small problem at the time: the docks at Long Beach were controlled by a ver-ree militant Communist union. But Matson had another bright thought, "Hmm, maybe Communists like money." So they went to the union with a two part offer: first we give everybody in Long Beach right now a life-time job at a hefty raise; second, we get your leader a membership in the Bohemian Grove.
Bingo! Problem solved: Long Beach automates like crazy, Matson switches to all-container ships and the industry follows, and Long Beach becomes as dominant in peace time as it had been important in war.
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Al Jazeera have badly miscalculated the motives of the characters in this little play.
Nieto isn't desperate for a deal before he leaves office. He has the brains to know that any deal that gets signed now isn't going to be through the US Congress until next year, by which time the incoming Mexican Administration may no longer support it. This means that Nieto's only urgent need is to keep Donnie Fats from doing anything toooo stupid on his watch. So he has flattered Donnie with this phoney agreement to agree, later, perhaps, somewhere down the line.
Donnie at the same time doesn't really care about policy because he doesn't understand policy. His understanding of economics can be writted on the back of a business card witha thick Sharpie. His economic advisors are a bunch of total losers, the intelligent greedhead Mnuchkin being the sole exception, and nobody's litening to free-trader Mnuchkiin. It's all in the hands of Lighthizer and Navarro, a pair of the best minds of the pre-Adam Smith Sixteenth Century.
Evenett, the commentator, does, however, have one thing right: the whole thing is trivial. Canada will give up the horrible horrible 300% tariff on dairy" because it doesn't matter in the least. Nobody pays it because it only applies above the quotas -- and both Canada and the US operate on a coordinated quota system -- a notion far too compllicated for Donnie Fats to comprehend. Donnie will then crow about the success, and everybody who understands it will laugh behing his back.
The usual. Just like Korea. The fart of the deal.
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An oddity for you: when my father graduated from college, in pharmacy, in the 1930s, his first job was translating English-language pharmacy texts into Welsh. He lasted two weeks in the job, he told me, and quit, believing the whole thing was useless.
My former partner's first job, when she first left higher education because of the civil war, was translating English language texts into Tik-Monjiaang, ("Language of The People," aka "Dinka"). Exactly parallel story: she quit within weeks, believing that the whole effort was going nowhere.
(Today, a generation later, both efforts, in Welsh and in Dinka, are back in operation -- at scales comparable perhaps to that in Catalan in this excellent video.)
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There is a statue of King Sejong in the middle of Seoul, and people used to put flowers around it. In formal terms he is called the inventor of Hangul -- but I imagine he did about as much for it as King James did for the KJ Bible ("the only good work ever done by a committee"), i.e. called a bunch of wise men together to do a necessary job.
I was impressed by the logic of it. The way their "alphabetical order" follows positions of the lips and tongue is impressive, but there's more: I was taking Koran lessons at the Asahi Culture Center in Tokyo, and at one point the teacher wanted to show off how you could write foreigners' names in Korean. He used me, the only non-Japanese in the room, and asked me my name, then wrote it on the board, then read it, part by part. "Here's the L ...loid jones, is that right?" I said "Not quite. It's Welsh and in the Welsh alphabet, LL and DD are single letters, hl and th, with slightly different sounds. `Lloyd' is more like `hloyd' maybe." So he smudged his example on the blackboard, and pronounced it in perfect Welsh.
I think that one reason the Koreans are so good at other languages, while the Japanese, equally intelligent, are so universally poor, is that their writing system is so good at getting English, Chinese, Russian, every damn thing, correct. The Japanese may not be able to get L and R right because they can't write them properly in kana.
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Nicely done.
One thought for you: isn't it highly likely that artificial intelligences will be more moral than human ones?
Humans have done a whole lot of the fairly complicated stuff -- penicillin, sewer systems, feeding eight or ten billion people -- but we screw up the simple stuff, e.g. getting into fights over borders.
Wouldn't a machine like Deep Mind be able to play a few million games of any political conflict and figger out the Pareto-optimal?
Query: how are we going to like its rules?
We, humans, have basically two kinds of rules, the Kantian, or emotional: the Folden Rule in all its different wordings, and the Millian, or "rational."
The Kantian only works if the other person likes and dislikes the same things as you. A Kantian sadist and masochist will reach suboptimal series of actions, shurely?
Our other morality is the Millian one, the greatest happiness of the greatest number. This one breaks down right out of the gate. Which? Greatest happiness, or greatest number? "Choose one" is what the Mills didn't face up to saying.
My guess is that machine intelligences will come up with Pareto-efficient sets of strategies -- and the majority of humans won't like that very much.
:-)
-dlj.
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Bad start: Inflation, in this case in Russia, emphatically does not mean, as you claim, that "the government is increasingly running out of cash."
It's exactly, 180 degrees, the opposite: inflation occurs when the government creates more and more cash. In the classical 17th century Rule, "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." Too much money chasing too few goods.
You may have a subjective truth: governments print more and more money because they feel as though they need it. They may believe what you say, that they're running out of cash. That's usually because they're spending too much, often for a particularly stupid war, as in Russia's case right now. But the feeling if false; the fact is they're swimming in cash. That's what inflation is. Too much cash.
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Bella,
I doubt that he really has an agenda: his behavior is much too squirrely for a person with an agenda.
I think he has a bunch of rules of thumb -- "win," "stick with your friends," "use deodorant" and so on -- and these help him somewhat, modulo the fact that the meanings of key terms like "win" and "friend" keep changing every damn day.
A good rule when you're confronted with bad behavior is "Hate the act, not the person." As with Trump, so with poor Lindsey, I think our attitude should be personal sympathy for the poor stupid little bugger, but strict awareness that they are threats not merely to our interests but to the entire American experiment, the idea of a democratic republic, conceived in liberty and trying to become multi-racial, peaceful, wealthy, well-educated and decent -- all of which are works in progress. At best: i.e. when you don't have a bunch of clowns pulling in the opposite direction.
Cheers,
-dlj.
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It's a mixed record. Remember, the United States has been anti-imperialist for much of its existence.
The US took part in the Opium Wars against China -- but to its credit, it gave half the extorted settlement money back -- and used it to found what is today the University of Beijing. But only half. Still, there was substantial goodwill left there -- all of which Trump has spent his time in office destroying.
The Monroe Doctrine, far from being any imperialist land-grab, was a protection of Latin America from Spanish, Portuguese, English and French interference. It allowed Bolivar and the other Latin revolutionaries to move forward without being crushed by their former European overlords.
Did America interfere? Sure, but it's worth remembering that these have been odd interferences. Bush sent the Marines into Haiti to restore an elected Marxist-Leninist, Aristide, to power. Maduro is only President of Venezuela right now because the CIA protected him from his own caudillo wannabes back in the Obama Administration.
Your paradigm: When Reagan became President, almost all of Latin America was ruled by militaries, caudillos, or fascists. Eight years later, thanks to his benign Administration, there was only one dictatorship left: Cuba.
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Tommy and Ben,
Two factoids for you:
First, a dim memory that I can't back up: I think I remember a survey from back in the 1960's, when I was a magazine editor in New York: the average of all Americans' estimates of the number of Americans who are Jewish was 25%!!!
Second, a feeling again: I have the impression gathered in that period, just after the Six Day War (about which my employer, American Heritage, put out a book, "Terrible Swift Sword," produced in six days of 'round the clock editry), the impression that between the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the Six Day War of 1967, America's soi-disant "Christian" right wing had made a 180 degree volte-face. These children of Gerald L.K. Smith and his crypto-fascist bretheren of the 1930's had suddenly become supporters, near worshippers, of Israel.
The dogma-crafters among them came up with a lot of phoney baloney theological guff about how Israel was sent for 1,000 years as a sort of doormat to some stupid Armageddon of their imaginings, a bloodbath which is somehow going to be wonderful for them and theirs.
Their dogmatists and preachers quite apart, there was a psychological mushroom cloud visible out there. Evangelicals' antisemitism exploded and blew away. A thick layer of society's dung-heap, people for whom antisemitism was fine as long as "the" Jews were weak and hence contemptible, had to change their tune for the armed and victorious Sabra.
Somewhere out there behind the round-cornered black and white TV screen, there a was a friendly allied nation of a hundred million, who knows about these big numbers, maybe billions, of Paul Newmans astride their tanks!
The first shoots of today's America...
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Jonathan,
Only half right. America has some things to be proud of in its relations with China. First of all, America's relations with China started out as a straight and honest trader. I have heard it said that there were 13 ships from South Carolina in the port of Canton on the day the Declaration of Independence was signed. Your original China Clippers. They weren't selling opium, as the English were later to do, nor slaves. Just straight, honest commerce, cotton for tea and silver mainly.
Later, in the nineteenth century, as Britain, Germany and France were destroying China on straight imperialist grounds -- teaching the lesson that Japan learned and copied with even greater viciousness -- the United States, for the most part, stood to one side, honestly, and perhaps somewhat stupidly, interested in teaching Christianity while sometimes, though not often enough, opposing the very principle of imperialism.
Despite its fine principles, the United States managed to get itself involved in the Opium Wars on the wrong side, which is a damn shame since unlike Europe they had sound principles. Teddy Roosevelt did one small, though perhaps insufficient, thing to try to rectify the damage. While the European powers imposed huge indemnities on the defeated Chinese after the Boxer Rebellion, the Americans returned half of their share of the ill-gotten money as grants -- to found Yenching College, the basis of today's world-class BeiDa, University of Beijing.
America's largely good record continues with Nixon, with the excellent elder Bush, and then with Clinton and Obama. Only the ignorant thug Trump has spoiled America's record, carrying out a record of simple juvenile delinquency, the cost of which we do not know.
Kevin Rudd's sketch here is completely sound and is what we shall have to try to reconstruct once this ugly Trump interlude ends. There are difficulties no doubt, rights of investors, America's imagined loss of "intellectual property," (this consists mostly of us showing them how to make the stuff we want to buy using their cheap labor and high rate of savings) and what-not. These are minor.
The big problems are that Navarro is a lunatic, Lighthizer a fine mind from the sixteenth century, and Trump a sad blundering halfwit. The good news is, the Chinese are grown-ups and can make allowances for these obvious facts. The sad news is that right now China is taking advantage of them. They are very busily making friends and commercial alliances around the world, some at America's expense, and all of it brought about by the Trump farce force at work.
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Joel,
That's true -- but it's a general truth about everywhere.
I've climbed Watts Tower twice, walked through the Fillmore at 2 a.m., checked out 125th in Manhattan, Blackstone Avenue in Chicago, and Wayne State, the "ivory tower in the ebony sea." Same same.
My class on the other hand? Wey-yull, Conrad and Andy both served hard time, but most of us haven't been caught...
'Course Watts Tower can get you into some serious criminality. The last time I visited, during an overnight layover at LAX, I only got to the second level. The folks occupying the third handed me down a fine spliff.
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Hugh,
If you think Trump is a businessman, I suggest you Google up "Trump, Plaza Hotel" and then follow the threads of your choice for an hour or so. Quit when you've laughed yourself back to sanity.
Spoiler alert: Trump loses his airline, his father's and grandfather's fortunes, his yacht, his wife and children -- and the Plaza Hotel. He is kept personally above water thorugh the kindness of strangers, and the favors bought by his father through fifty years of paying off the likes of Ed Koch. That's why Trump is a famous New York liberal Democrat, remember?
Trump has never made a cent in real estate, and he's still carrying $1.9 billion in unpaid debt from Atlantic City. The undeclared forgiveness of this debt by the various hidden purchasers of the paper is of course a violation of the Income Tax Act -- and a coming bill for tax (the forgiveness is taxable income), penalties, and interest payments running back to 1991 when his funnypaper started going bad -- add it up, and your looking at a deadbeat walking.
Non-payment of taxes through non-declaration of this imputed interest is the crime that he keeps on committing. A President Pence, or President Biden, or President Pocahontas -- or President Klobuchar, my favorite hope -- can pardon him once, but that only gets him through one year. He's still up against the next April he has to either file and pay or lie and lie and lie again.
This is a man with no past, no present, and no future in business.
Acting? That he can do. Also pout, whine, complain, accuse, and make funny faces. But business? No.
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This guy is really first-rate, but I've got a slightly different question. What I want to know is, What does it cost us that we don't have an intellectual bridge over the very tiny but ver-ree deep chasm between the areas of industry where the quantum view is useful and the rest of real life where we live in billiard ball physics at voltages between about one and the latest in high-tension transmission lines?*
As theories go, the Standard Model is pretty good. It gives us replicable numbers out to twenty significant digits or so, and it lets us mix the chemicals and what-not in ways that make an advanced industrial economy tick over nicely, thank you very much. So it has some problems? Like e.g. a total 100% inability to explain Bell's Inequality and a 99.44% likelihood of drifting off into mindless blither when anybody tries? So what?
That's my question. Where is it costing us spondulix that we can't explain the two-slit-experiment? Where there's money on the line is where we'll find the intellectual band-aids to get us through the next generation of our view of physical reality.
________________
* There is a good fix for this supposed chasm, using the explanation that quantum reality is everywhere, it's everywhere, all the way up.
I.I.Rabi famously calculated the likelihood of a normal masonry brick levitating a foot (a measure of length used in the United States, Liberia and Saudi Arabia) in the air in any given second. For an encore, he did the Heisenberg uncertainties relevant to trying to drive a ten-foot truck through a nine-foot gap. Both calculations come up with numbers like once in ten to the Q times the age of the universe, with Q being, uh, rather large numbers.
The excellent Jim El-Khalili, who is well overdue to become Sir James, has some good lectures, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwgQVZju1ZM&ab_channel=TheRoyalInstitution, on a parallel theme, that we see quantum effects at human scales in biology. (Google him: I think he might be in the running to be the Carl Sagan of the present generation of public science.)
Neither of these life-rafts of sanity, however, comes with an answer to the intellectual challenge of Bell and those pesky interference patterns.
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Uh, holdonasec, fella. Where did that interest thingie come from? You're making stuff up and slipping it in.
Yes, there might be a calculation like that. It just isn't the one you stated. Sticking the word "finance" in there is not a license for you to make stuff up. "Finance: If I have two apples, and I give you one, you will have to repay me the apple in full," is all you're entitled to say to parallel your "Math: If I have two apples, and I give you one, I will have one apple left."
Anything else and you've just failed logic because your parallelism is bogus, OK?
Not saying you can't get a job on Wall Street with your version. The problem is that every now and then -- 1884, 1929, 1932, 1987, 1991, 2008... -- Wall Street just falls down in a great big heap of slush and the taxpayers have to bail it out.
So be very careful, and be aware when you're making stuff up. Don't drink your own Kool Aid®, and try to make up better than that if you expect other people to drink it and get away with it.
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You were doing fine, right up to that first period, Red.
'Course a lot of people on the left and on the right can get their facts straight, too, Red. But that's not the pose you want to strike today, is it?
Competent? Incompetents? Both kinds are everywhere, Red.
Did you skip school the day Mrs O'Malley taught about that rah-rah marketing rally the drinks folks had up in Boston Harbour?
Sumpthin' about the the big business interests over in London trying to make the locals' drinks sell for uncompetitive prices.
First, the, ahem, rather enthusiastic new republic folks kicked out the London stooges and then they set to building fast -- and stunningly beautiful -- clipper ships, to take over the Chinese tea trade for themselves.
It's a tough sail, but if you have a commanding technology, you can get to tea country faster around Cape Horn than you can by way of half a dozen middlemen round India. And Africa. And the the Barbary pirates that the Americans' Jefferson had to help the poor losing Lloyds of London grifters* with.
What's your theory of how to build a new country, Red?
The financial base of finance is finance, Red, is how it seems to me.
__________________________________________________
* Every American and every business operator, but I repeat myself, knows that insurance is an important part of business.
Those Hessians in London knew how to sell it, but they take a thick slice off the top. The working people in the new republic had to buy it, but they did't have to like the guy whose life of luxury they're supporting.
Then, hmmm, Lordy me, but this John Hancock guy figgered out a bit about insurance.
You might know about him. (From a teacher a few years after poor Mrs grade school grind O'Malley, perhaps?)
His name is on that Declaration of Independence you may have heard about.
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Mention of Hayakawa's three-and-a-half yen radio reminds me of a landlady I had in Japan. She had a large rock, about the size of a Vokswagen minibus, in her garden, and she had recently, in 1975, had it moved from one side of her front door to the other. For this she had had to pay a labour gang ten thousand yen which you can think of as a C-note of a good dinner for four. OK, I checked: 2,307.27 New Taiwanese Yuan to you, Jon.)
"Ten thousand yen!" she would cry at me, "Ichi-man yen...!
So piteous: Before World War Two she had bought the rock in the mountains of the north and had it shipped down to Tokyo and brought out to our suburb. All for five yen!
A two-thousand-fold change in prices -- (and though she didn't include the calculation, probably a 200,000-fold change in the distance.)
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Ephesians is in the Bible, Megan? Who knew?
Gee, thanks, Megan, So good to know that Trump has your powerful intellect on his side, Megan.
Now I know what a great Christian Trump must be,, Megan, to have a deep religious scholar like you on his side, Megan.
What a blessing you are!
Uh, Megan...
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@gammasmash1924
Fine, Tim. And people with guns have been responsible for exactly 100% of all mass shootings, 100% of all individual shootings, and 100% of all suicides by guns.
Don't you think you ought to be a little less full of yourself for mocking a city council which has as least tied to reduce the number of guns floating around out there?
The rates of all these evils, this, that, and the other thing by gun, are far higher in the United States than in any other faintly law-abiding contry.
Don'tyou think this is in part because the NRA staff has been taken over by a bunch of loons, living in luxury on the money they are paid a.) by a deluded membersip, but b.) by gun manufacturers who are happy to distort patriotism and a whole lot of frontier romanticism and faux anarchist preening into profitable sales?
Best wishes,
-dlj.
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@tomgreene7942
My wife and I crossed Russia and Siberia (No, they're not quite two different countries -- yet.) by plane to Novisibirsk and then the train several days to the coast, and we had the chance to chat with two of our guides.
One, a young woman from Intourist, back in the west, took us around a museum and invited us to hate on photographs of ugly subhuman Chinese on its walls; she seemed genuinely puzzled that we didn't guy her shtick.
The other, an older man who had served in the Army during WWII, but apparently without quite enough servitude, told us how much he loved life in Siberia. The pay -- back in Soviet days, anyway -- was high, and you could go hunting and put meat on the table just walking distance out of town. Best of all, he told us with a smile, "They can't send you to Siberia."
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Nahum,
That doesn't work: America stayed out of WWII as long as it could -- just sat back selling arms to the Allies and raking in the money.
Those Focke-Wulfs flying for the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain were manufactured by an subsidiary of the American company ITT in Germany -- and when the company was later bombed, after Pearl Harbor had forced the US into the war, the American taxpayer paid $27,000,000 for that oh-so-sad damage.
Maybe you'd like to think Germany was America's unsinkable aircraft carrier during the Battle of Britain? No, it wasn't, but it would make more sense than your idea.
The name "Air Strip One" for England, the idea Claire Knight has sensibly stolen and adapted to the Pacific here, was written by George Orwell in his famous and important novel "1984," published in 1949 -- well on into the Cold War, a completely different proposition from WWII.
Sorry 'bout 'dat -- but you could have Googled it up yourself and avoided showing your ignorance in public, couldn't you?
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Ayn Rand's "Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" were common reading among Paul Ryan's staff all the time he was in Congress. They are cult reading for boys in the las couple of years before they discover girls -- but so-called "conservatives" have funny ideas about women, so there's a lot of Ayn Randism out there.
These people have other distractions, of course. They spent the entire decade of the '50's, while Europe was building the mighty machine it is today, emoting over making the marigold the national marigold or vice versa. LBJ kept things running o the Hill, and Ike blessed it all.
There's nothing new about these guys. There have been lots of individual right-wingers good at whatever they did, but America has never seen a minyan of them together.
. **#**
The policy of the Obama-Clinton Democrats is free enterprise armed to the teeth. You know, the Lions Club after the second drink. There is no viable operating policy to the right of that for anything bigger than, oh, how about Delaware?
The United States is the only country that has ever tried to run an industrial and post-industrial or electro-informational economy on those lines. All successful modern political-economies run on social democratic lines.
. **#**
To understand the small scale stuff, e.g. three hundred squabbling small town politicians, just run the paragraphs above through your Vonnegut-O-Tron.
You do have a Vonnegut-O-Tron, don't you, Charlie? The man was from Wisconsin, even if probably from down South in Eugene Victor Debs and Abbie Hoffman country...
You're welcome.
Next question?
-dlj.
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His crime was nothing fancy, just theft/fraud -- but his real crimes were managerial.
FTT as a form of collateral is One; having anything at all, let alone FTT, any single collateral "asset," as a major item on your balance sheet is Two; doing business with a cusomer, Alameda, for a company in which you have fiduciary reponsibility is Three.
None of these three is particularly criminal. All three are major league stupidity, and everybody involved, anybody who ever had the chance to point out to SBF the extreme dumbness with which he was conducting himself, should be barred by public opinion, not any government, from doing business anywhere, ever, again.
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Doug Richardson
I forget the exact psephology, just which state(s) got switched, but yes, the Greens already proved that in 2016, didn't they?
That seems less of a likelihood this time around, I'd guess. If the election is even faintly fair it will be a numerical replay of Reagan-McGovern, or what was that FDR one, "As go Vermont and Maine, so go Vermont and Maine"?
A few people are still musing about the possibility of Trump stealing it, but even at this late date they don't realize how stupid he is.
I met a lady online this morning who lives in Orange County, California. I don't know whether she wears running shoes but she was little and old. She seemed to believe that the President is a genius. He isn't. He's the loud proud kid who scrapes into Mensa by a hair, so they make him Chairman of the Comic-Book Committee just to make him shut up.
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Doug Richardson
I don't have a horse in that race. 2016 is over and gone.
I think the key thing about both Biden's VP search and the Democratic primary race has been the huge field of talent the Democrats are showing off. Trump, by contrast, has only had three, perhaps four, capable people in all his circles all along, and the only one who remains, Mnuchin, has still managed to make a fool of himself remarkably often. He's a right-winger, but he's competent, and, together with Powell at the Fed, the only thing keeping the damn country afloat amidst the shit-storm.
The Democratic Presidential primary candidates are a fine show of cabinet material, eight down to that sweet but also intelligent spiritualist lady. (I can't think where I'd put her in any Cabinet, but I'd certainly have her, Marianne Williamson, in for coffee every now and then, and she should be a fixture guest at state dinners...)
All those possible vice-presidential ladies? Every one of them is fine Cabinet, Senate, Ambassador, Governor or other public service material. I very much hope that the excellent Stacy Abrams will be elected to the Senate and, if she succeeds there, then become President down the road. She is clearly a first-class intellect, a capable organizer, and through and through a very decent person.
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If you think Hong Kong has no public goods, you need to look at an aerial photograph of the border.
The Hong Kong side of the clearly visible line is all parks and forest land. The, uh, "Peoples'" side is trashy housing and broken-down commercial sites.
As for all the people puking and mewling about the service industry, you simply need to thin a bit more about what goes on inside a factory: every factory I've ever worked in has had aisles full of fork-lift trucks providing transportation services between locations where workers provided labour services at machines which dod punching, drilling, folding, bending, and other such-like services. Upsstairs there were always rooms full of people in whirts and ties. They provide financial and planning services, sales and warehousing services. Hell, even coffee and snack services.
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The first, stifled, laugh was a clear laugh at him.
The second, larger, laugh was more serious. After Trump's try at a recovery line, the big smile and the "I didn't expect that reaction," came a larger and more generous laugh. Here's the kicker: it was laughing "with" him, but sympathy at that point was the feeling "Poor Donnie, he just can't help it," or "Oh, the poor guy, he just doesn't have a clue."
Sympathy is not the nicest thing in the world when it's compassion for you as a wounded, incompetent, lost baby.
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Anonymous @softmechanics3130
You wouldn't happen to have a fact to go with your half-baked opinion, would you? (My apologies to the good and useful number 0.5.)
Germany no doubt has a thicker and deeper loam of older industries, but I think you will find that South Korea, like Japan, is an avid importer of German machines, technologies, advanced chemicals -- and of course luxury automobiles.
When you do the homework you obviously don't know that you haven't done, you will find, too, that South Korea exports machines and advanced technology to Germany.
The cutting edge of the world's industry knows no boundaries, though there are some residual frictions at some "national" "borders" here and there.
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It's really simple: Trump's impeachment must be an event which brings Americans together again. This means it will have to be bipartisan.
Republicans at the moment are wandering around in a Fox-filled bubble of unreality. Quite literally, the truth will set them free. What they need is a solid year of hard investigation by enough different committees to cover the waterfront -- and to involve a large enough number of Republicans to make a difference.
Not right away, and not by a narrow squeak, but over the long run, on the basis of fact, and by a huge bipartisan majority, then Trump needs to be thrown out on his ass.
After that, there will no doubt be bankruptcy courts, his tax trials, and probably a number of criminal trials. These should be allowed to play themselves out, and then whoever's in power should pardon him. He'll be broke, and he will have lost his generous government pension.
Then we'll see if any of his "friends" will rent an apartment for him, to supplement his Social Security.
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But he's up against a real conundrum: his career so far has been a good deal more honest than his father's. His father started out as an anarchist but then bowed down to the Christianists on getting the government into your bedroom in order to woo the extremist "Evangelical" vote.
Rand, the kid, has avoided that, mainly by avoiding rural peckerwoods as a constituency, and indeed some of what he has done reflects a genuine spirit of libertarianism. Dentists certifying themselves is not perhaps the happiest development I can imagine for the health of the people, but at lest one can understand his principle.
Now, however, he has had thoughts of being a national figure. He might if he stays principled and if the GOP splits, into a Blue Dog Democrat majority and two principled reactionary and libertarian minorities. If he doesn't do that, and if the GOP doesn't evolve in that or some similar way, he has no future as a Republican without running on the government-in-your-bedroom ticket.
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@CeeJay611
Well said, but you're still left with the problem "...but if the salt hath lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men."
The Priests at the time of the reconstruction of the First Temple faced a similar problem. Jerusalem was ruled by a flaky Establishment and religious observance seemed to them false of heart. Their response, in despair, was the one Biblical text most flawed, the pamphlet demanding reform, magically, but quite falsely, claimed to have been "found" in the wreckage of the Temple being torn down, the cobbled-up book of Leviticus. Later this was movingly quoted by Matthew (5:13), above.
As in Leviticus's time, we have corrupt and incompetent White House -- and Trump's incompetence has probably been America's salvation -- and a louche religious machine. A loud but stumbling fifth of the population, a heavy chunk of America, is not working properly.
There are two heralds of good news. The ship is sound and the passengers are decent. The Constitution is resilient for all its flaws, and the American people(s) are decent and concerned. CJ611 is an example of the latter.
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At 4:28 $700 billion in debt??? Uh, no. That's insane. It shows that the people responsible for this video have not the faintest clue about money, debt, business, or, well, anything in the real world.
Google is your friend: "NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Interstate Bakeries, maker of Wonder Bread and Twinkies, filed for bankruptcy court protection early Wednesday.
...
The company, which operates 57 bakeries throughout the United States and employs more than 33,000 people, listed assets of $1.6 billion and liabilities of $1.3 billion. It filed under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, and said it intends to continue normal operations."
$1.3 billion of debt They were 538 times too high...
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@kenrussell1093
Ken,
This is not what your "the deep state" want removed. The stuff that corrupts the understanding of history is the bread and circuses, the ancient aliens, and other stupid distractions. I also don't think you understand the etymology, the genuine meanings, and the current misuses of the term "deep state." The Deep State means Brookings and the civil service, the people who keep things running. Right now Brookings is full of future Undersectretaries and Colonels with Marshalls' batons in their backpacks, every one of them a liberal; this time next year it will be full of Republicans writing their memoirs, and it will still be the deep state.
A quite different topic: I'm not sure what you mean by "how complicated" was the effort to bring Japan down. E.g., one of the things they teach early on at West Point is "the country that makes the most steel wins."
Imho. the problem with Japan was Versailles and the Shandong Peninsula -- and before Versailles, Britain's criminal blockade instead of any armistice.
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Excellent, though I think the figure 300,000 for the Nanking Massacre may be high. There is no reason to reach for the sky here: it would have been Japan's Guernica if the number had been 5,000.
It is certainly not true, though, that "The only reason why the US Dollar is still widely accepted, is because it’s the only currency which oil is allowed to be traded with." Oil is traded in all currencies and currency-baskets, and oil is far from the only commodity in which the US is a successful exporter, rendering credibility to the greenback. The dollar prices posted in newspapers may represent spot prices for various fungible contracts but they have only the most tenuous connection with the way major long-term oil supply arrangements are made.
Donald Trump was a stupid little twerp, but at least five, perhaps more, of the world's ten most hefty universities are in the United States: the dollar is not toilet-paper yet.
The West tends to have false views of our history with China, and this sort of corrective propaganda, while imperfect, is a partial corrective. Obviously, China's return is the best thing that has happened to the human race lately.
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Lissen up, Wildberger, this habit of yours, making your written points beforehand on posters, is ver-ree non-standard.
To be accepted as a YouTube Professional(tm.) you should write everything on the blackboard in chalk while your audience watches the back of your head bobbing on camera.
If we haven't seen twenty minutes of you writing on the blackboard in a 26-minute lecture, you can hardly call it a lecture, can you? It's from the Latin, "Lectum, -toribus --toribilis, `the back of the head, as on-camera'" surely?
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Michael,
Well said!
In 1968 I was the office boy/administrator of "The Commons: An Institute of the Independent Sector" in Washington, D.C. This was an attempt by all the mainline churches (and a smattering, because that's all we could get, of Jesuits and Maryknolls) to create a RAND-style research operation dedicated to the obviously necessary social change then underway. Sadly, it failed. Despite or because of the overtly K Street style? Who knows. We did a bit of good and then winked out.
So yes, you have the times and the atmospheres dead to rights.
In part this is because the "today's church" we all see is not really a church: it is the brash, profitable excrescence of the Junior Falwells and his type. I think that tens of millions of copies of Ayn Rand have soaked into the ground (700,000 copies in Hungary, for instance, the last time I looked a few years ago). America's view of humanity has been polluted by this evil woman's writing, and the people who fell under her spell now pay their mites to things one would have called covens rather than churches in the past.
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Not true, Frederick. The wee bit of apparent truth in your claim is that business corporations, most of which are small, received the largest cut in nominal top marginal tax rates. Since nominal top marginal rates are paid by almost nobody this is lovely sounding rodomontade, but means almost nothing in dollars and cents.
Its only small virtue is that it's good housekeeping to make your nominal rates reasonably close to the actual rates people pay after all the deductin's done.
What you're presenting here is a very popular line at your Rotary Club and Chamber of Commerce dinners. These are hard-working folks, and they deserve a pat on the back from time to time. Pity you choose to do it with flattering half-truths. If you were a wee bit more responsible you would tell them that Trump is a half-wit robbing and wrecking the joint. It wouldn't make you the hardy-hardy-har hero of the moment. It will build the reputation for sense, perhaps even wisdom, on which the long-term success of your practice depends.
Do you want to be popular now, or do you want to build a professional practice to pass on to your children? Do you want applause now or your name on a firm that will be respected for thought, good judgement and vision a generation from now?
Trumpism will give you the first of these. Thinking it through is harder work, but it gives you a shot at the second.
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Vidkidxyz,
"Cultural Marxism" is a term invented by California rightwingers around the John Birch Society, the sort of people we used to call "little old ladies in tennis shoes." It has nothing to do with Marx, and it's only "cultural" in the sense that struggles over Puritanism, patriarchy, authoritarianism, and so forth are sometimes called "culture wars."
It's really just a content-free, all-purpose, finger-pointing term. It means that A, the person who utters the phrase, doesn't like B, the person they are aiming it at. That's all. Nothing more.
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@tokensharma3738
Isadore Rabi at one point took that notion seriously and asked (something like) "If a single particle can go zipping along without inhibition, why shouldn't an ordinary clay brick just jump up in the air?"
Then he did the math. One problem is that in a clay brick there are a whole lot of particles zipping around in different directions, so they cancel each other out. Thre's a bit of vibration going on -- the temperature, see -- but you don't get more than a very few close to each other heading in the same direction at the same time. And all of them? Wey-yull, let us calculate...
Turns out that with reasonable assumptions all the particles in the brick are going to get together and head in the same direction just by chance, uh, every now and then.
Rabi's informed guess is, a normal ceramic brick, like what you buld a house with, will jump one foot in the air, quite spontaneously, roughly once in every ten-to-the-sixty-fourth-power -- 10^64 -- times the age of the Universe.
Plus or minus, obviously.
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Sorry, I got lost at "You can see three dimension, up-down, back and forth, left-right."
I can look up and down, back and forth and left and right. (I can also look off at 4 degrees to all of those, in an infinite number of directions for each.) But I don't see an up when I look up.
And if I got to the corner of, say, 44th and 5th, I think I'll find four different buildings. Uh, at any time of day. So that -- oh, it was only a metaphor you say? Fine. What was it a metaphor for?
Dimensions, you say?
o. Very small o.
-dlj.
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Timothy,
Half right. but the source of the rot is the Statehouses -- which are responsible for the gerrymandering. right now Democrats in the House represent over four million more votes than the Republicans do, but the GOP have the majority of the seats. Why? Fix at the State level.
There have to be redistrictings every ten years on the basis of each new census, which means the lines will be redrawn in 2021. Whoever wins the 2020 State elections gets to draw the lines until 2030.
It gets worse. ALEC, a right-wing policy shop has hugely disproportionate influence in the States because it puts out legislative templates which lazy legislators just love. a lot of this stuff is just boilerplate. Here's how you finance highways, here's what you do about school superintendents' pensions, and so on and so forth.
If it's highways, Joe State committee Chairman just has to cut and paste in the names of his biggest contributors wherever he feels like it, and deliver it to the floor. work saved, and everybody's happy.
The problem is that ALEC is also screwing the unions, overtaxing the poor and undertaxing the rich, and doing all the usual cheapo disgusting stuff.
If the Greens and the Socialists would pay a little bit of attention where they live, down there in the State elections, they could probably get a few people elected. Instead, they waste a lot of time, money, and votes on primping on TV in the Federal elections. Occasionally they do real harm, as in 2,000.
Long story short: all politics is local.
Good luck and best wishes,
-dlj.
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*****
Canada is the Canadian version of Canada.
The United States was formed for "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
Canada's founding principles are "peace, order, and good government."
Canadians think that liberty and the pursuit of happiness are none of the government's damn business, and government should serve, not supervise and interfere with, life.
As you can see, Canada and the United States are opposites.
A fun result of this, however, is that it turns out that peace, order and good government are the best way of getting life, liberty and happiness. They work much better than the direct grab.
Cheers,
-dlj.
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Elenrai
Elenrai: Agreed on your first point. My long-time partner's English was her eighth language, and she would make fun of my inability to understand songs in Jamaican English which she understood plainly. From her vantage point, like yours, the difference was like NooYawk to Jaw-jha, minimal.
On your second,, you're right again, but lose, pronounced "loooz" is the opposite of find. That's what you want here..
Loose, pronounce "luce," is the opposite of tight, and is a common error among people who pronounce route "rowt."
Loose usage makes you lose face.
:-)
-dlj.
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Steve,
You assume that the violence today is not the legacy of the British yesterday.
The fact is that in India, China, Uganda, and Ghana, at minimum, the English made war against cultures every bit their equals if not their superiors in civility, law, and culture.
The Brits, of course, "........had got
The Maxim gun, and they had not."
-dlj.
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Jeremy Yarbro
Jeremy,
What you say is correct, but a wee bit limited, surely? There is clearly something we don't understand here. Something we don't know.
Bel's very amazing good work shows us that we can eliminate what we call "hidden variables" as the source of what we don't know, but that gives us only the small consolation of there being one less class of things, as defined by our limited knowledge, about which we don't know what we don't know.
That still leaves some unknown territory, I think you'll agree? E.O. Wilson's good comment, in his semi-biographical "Consilience," is to the effect that we don't need bigger more expensive experiments in physics because our problems are epistemologicical. Here we have an example of that. We haven't even defined the class of things we don't know, now that we've gotten "hidden variables" out of the way.
Cheers,
-dlj.
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Chip Cooper
Chip, Yes, quite.
The point is that "hidden variables" is a phrase which implies a given way of looking at things: you have these objects, or fields, or whatever, and you plug variables into your model, and you get a result which reality confirms, thus affirming the consequent of your theory. This is not a proof, and to suppose it a proof is a fallacy, but it is a comfort.
In that sense of the phrase "hidden variables," Bell has shown to everybody's satisfaction that no, there aren't any, and no proof involving them can make sense.
Now you are talking about variables that are not known, i.e. in a sense hidden, and clearly there is something unknown going on. It's just that your unknowns are not the hidden variables of the current way of thinking.
They're like Rumsfeld's Chinese Fortune Cookie, unknown unknowns. And don't take it for granted that they're variables.
:-)
-dlj.
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"whomever has the best chance"? Uh, no. She's illiterate, and illiterate in a particular way, the way of pretentiousness. "Whomism," the habit of spreading whoms around at random to sound like a teacher's pet, is the habit of exactly that, the teacher's pet.
For the record the way normal people talk, "whoever has the best chance," happens to be grammatically correct. "Who" is the subject of the verb "has." The whole thing is a noun-phrase, and is the object of the particle "by" or "to" elsewhere in the sentence.
Why would this "Judge" lady be falling into hoity-toity teacher's pet phoniness? Seems to me it's a fault of everything about Fox: its opinions are bought and paid for by the rich, and are aimed at gullling working people -- and pretension is one of the tools of the con artist, which this woman is.
-dlj.
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.
"Realize the Emperor has no clothes"?? That isn't how it works.
The way it works is, obese, cigarette-smoking, welfare-collecting, old white geezers who voted 70-30 for Trump have a death rate well north of 7% per annum. Damn near a third of that cohort of 2016 will be dead in 2020.
The people replacing them in the electorate are younger, smarter, radically radically radically less racist, and likely to vote the mirror image 70-30 for Warren, or (my favorite) Klobuchar, or Biden, or J. Random Not-Trump.
Trumpies will go to their graves laughing at how Trump is sticking it to "Libturds" or whatever their brilliancy of the day might be. Almost all of the dead people who have beeen caught voting in the past generation have been Republicans, but their total doesn't add up to a hill of beans. 99.99% of them will die dead.
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You'll notice that "power" is a word Pat tends to avoid. Among sales professionals, it's known as the key word for selling stuff to schnooks. Anybody using "power" as a come-on is demonstrating that they think their audience are losers, and this guy wisely avoids letting that thought out.
Hey, it's even possible he doesn't think that...
His seven steps here, aka a testing and simplification feed-back loop, is totally sound, imho. 'Course Ross Perot said pretty much the same thing in four words, "Act, optimize, optimize, optimize."
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Sun, Pei. and Chan speak three different languages: Cantonese.
I enrolled in a Toronto High Schools Extension course in Cantonese a few years ago, and found myself the only non-Asian in the class. All the others were Asians, immigrants from half a dozen countries, and all, invarious senses, Cantonese-speaking. Part of the game was they thought they could get an easy Matriculation paper, to pad their resumes. but quite differently, they all spoke somewhat differently.
The vietnamese, for instance, hypothesised that their "Cantonese" was that of a couple of hundred years ago. Others said that the Guangdonghua of Taiwan was different from that on the Mainland.
Everywone agreed that Cantonese today changes with remarkable speed, that Hong Kong and Guangdong are entirely different cultures, and that different North American cities tend to have slightly differing Cantoneses.
There was some feelng that since Toronto is stunningly rich, Toronto-Cantonese might be a good standard for them all to learn.
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"Toll" is a noun. It's singular form or "number" is "toll." Its plural number is "tolls," made by adding a S.
"Death toll" is a noun-phrase or noun phrase, made by modifying the noun "toll" with another noun, called a noun in apposition, "death," which modifies it.
Because the noun "toll" is singular," the noun-phrase "death toll," heard at about 8:49, is also singular.
To say "the death toll in these battles "are" anything, using the plural verb with a singular noun doing the verb, is nonsense. It is evidence that the speaker, or the writer, or the documentary itself, has lost track of his or its subject.
In a sense, we can say "The narrator," or not to personalise things, the notional author speaking through the film, "doesn't know what he is talking about."
I write this not to be pedantic or clever but to make a very very important point about "history," the stories we tell ourselves about our past. This video, with it's emotion-stirring so-called "music" and bombastic background sound effects, is written and distributed for effect. It tells a take that we share among ourselves as part of the mythology by which we live our lives.
Was the death toll of all these battles "absolutely enormous"? Or were it?
"Were" feels better to the speaker's mouth and throat, and so it better serves his poetic purpose in carrying forward this bit of speech or narrative.
I don't think there is any great political error being made here. There is nothing nefarious about saying "were enormous" when the fact is that the sum total of many many small battles and three or five big ones was enormous.
But we can learn something very very important from this absent minded error. It is something worth teaching in the classrooms where this and many other good and competent films and electronically mounted scripts will be used to teach our children.
It is that history is a body of stories we tell ourselves and each other. Sometimes it is a coherent story, supported in detail by precise and voluminous evidence. At other times, by contrast, it is rodomontade with which we thrill ourselves and exalt a moral tale with which we inspire.
Here the tale, which is important, and moving, and in a sense profoundly "true," is that of the sacrifice of the Soviet peoples during WWII.
Other histories tell other moving stories. Some of them are equally true.
Many of them are not.
This is a very important lesson for us to teach our children. The facts -- "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic," (plural ==> singular, deaths ==> statistic), as Stalin is said to have remarked, supposedly quite offhand -- are one body of things that we can pass on to our children.
The fact that "facts" change in the telling is another and quite different lesson we should be teaching them assiduously and with care, thought, and discussion.
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The Mongol Spot is a pink spot on the outsides of the buttocks; it fades around a person's mid-thirties -- the normal age of death, way back when. It is said, I don't know with how much authority, if any, to be a genetic inheritance from some Mongol horseman. Maybe even more than one.
In France it is said to be found as far as Langue d'Oïl but not Langue d'Oc , but the all the people have been mixing it up since the railways, military conscriptions, and the occasional revolution recently..
The Japanese are of course One People, genetically unpolluted, from Hokkaido to Okinawa, so it is ridiculous to imagine that the Mongol Spot was found everywhere up to that wall at the end of the Odakyu Line, an old Empress's property line, so naturally nothing at all to do with breeding, uh, genetics.
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@JRobertMorse
I think I got the whole thing. You're quite right that the historical books record periods of slavery and other ugly parts of the primitive life of the Hebrew tribes.
You're also quite right that interpreted sensibly the Bible endorses the moral equality of all humans. Your word is "broadly," and I'm not quite sure what you mean by it, but it is obvious that if we are in God's image then we are in some very essential sense the same, and hence equal.
You do have one small thing wrong, however. "Hon," for honourable, is usually capitalised, and I think that's a bit excessive, even for a Yale, or is it Harvard, Professor.
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@Indicteronomy Perfectly true -- modulo only the fact that Marxism is basically Victorian-era demands that the workers get all the goodies of upper-middle-class Christian society.
Some Chinese leader lately, I think it may have been Deng Xiao-Ping his good self, threw up his hands in despair at the notion "Bastard peasant Taoism is going to end up being the belief system of the masses."
I.e. we are not going to succeed in imposing this European system on China; we are the waves but they are the ocean depths...
I think this is highly likely. Confucianism for the bureaucracy, Taoism for the masses, and varities of Marxism, none of them taken very seriously, for the educated elite.
The interesting question is, will we come up with anything better? Different, even?
It seems pretty clear to me that the West has rejected Marxism on simple epistemological grounds. Neverthless that division -- varieties of idealism for the educated, technocracy for the operators, and every dopey thing imaginable for the masses -- is pretty much where we are today, isn't it?
Can't we do better somehow?
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@Indicteronomy
Nothing the matter with Taoism. It just seems to me to be a lot of happy-go-lucky Let-It-Be. With upturned corners at the edges of the roofs.
Critiques of Marxism include that there can be no such thing as a science of history; or that it's a Bad Thing given what soi disant followers have done; or the wonderful Yeah, that's right, and I'm glad I'm on the winning side.
My own is the wry "There are only two things wrong with dialectical materialism, the dialectic and the materialism. The dialectic is mysitcal hooey, belief in fairies, nonsense; the materialism is Victorian-era magnets-and-billiard-balls physics."
I think of this as an epistemological attack in that I'm claiming that both knowledge about it all, e.g. the silly dialectic, and the information needed for it to work in its own terms, are nil. Not there. Nonsense.
Maybe I should just call it my Brutalist Attack. Can you get more brutal than there being only two things wrong about two things?
Cheers,
-dlj.
E.O. Wilson did a wonderful piece on the dialectic back around WWI, and it gets reprinted from time to time. I think I last saw it quite oddly, tucked away in the back of a paperback edition of "To The Finland Station." In it he has Marx fumbling around in his study, trying to leave to go to a meeting. "Jenny, Jenny, Where has the dialectic gone? I put it right here. Did you move it while you were dusting. I need it. I need it. Everybody's waiting for me at the coffee house..." and so on.
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It's Yarvin, not your "Jarvin ."
My observation is that the distortion of people's names is a stupid insult of the schoolyard type, though often found, too, among soi disant adults of the MAGAtty variety.
It wouldn't surprise me if your Ed.D. is a doctorate in education. Your type have been able to get footholds in education more and more in the years since, say, Betty Friedan, as highly intelligent women have been able to find jobs in places beyond the primary school classroom.
Lemme guess. Pepperdine? Thirty Red Bull labels and you worked your way through college cleaning out the football team's lockers someplace?
The white beaches of the Gulf of Mexico, (Excuse me, Gulf of America to you, right?), but you couldn't even make it in remedial med?
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It's a constant: the policy of all Republican Administrations is making previous Republican Administrations look humane, intelligent, and decent.
At least by comparison, this is generally true. Both Bush and Reagan, intellectual midgets, are giants by comparison with Trump. Both Bushes made Reagan look like a pacifist, and Reagan reminded us the Eisenhower had, with LBJ running his program on the Hill against GOP opposition, been a civil rights hero.
They want us to look backward, and in this respect, they succeed.
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Naked Dave,
It's a Japanese company, and still largely run by the very competent Toyoda, with a D, family. On the other hand, they learned a good deal of their business from two Americans, Henry Ford and most importantly W. Edwards Deming. (Google him. Everybody!) America gets it right sometimes.
America forgot Deming from maybe 1945 to 1990, a crucial generation, and is only getting back in the game now. If it wasn't for all the immigrant brains, American industry would be totally, like really totally, down the drain instead of just badly wounded.
Things are not as bad now as they were in the double-dip recession of 1991, and the rationality of the Obama years has helped America a lot.
What happens next with this ignorant burbling dumbnutz in the White House, nobody knows.
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Anonymous troll "theawecabinet" is passing on a current rightwing lie to the effect that the United Nations is asking the United States to "get rid of the 1st Amendment." It isn't.
An obscure subcommittee within the UN has tut-tutted about hate speech but has said exactly the opposite to what this troll has claimed, i.e. it has emphasised the importance of freedom of expression. (Google up "United Nations, 1st Amendment" if you're interested. But it's dull, because it's the usual stupid lie.)
The Supreme Court of the US has ruled over and over that the First Amendment to the Constitution does not grant absolute "freedom of speech." Legal limitation on, and punishment for, speech are common in the United States, as they are in the many countries which, unlike the US, have democratic governments, universal adult suffrage, and civillian control over their police and military.
It will be nice if the United States ever advances to their level of modern popular governance.
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I hope everyone is quite clear that he is lying here.
His daily "briefing" yesterday was every bit as crazy as the ones before. I saw it, and his light, sunshine, bleach, injection and other stuff was just totally nuts.
Everybody thinks he was a great TV performer because The Apprentice was a success, at least back in its early years. We've got to remind ourselves, a.) that was fairly scripted, b.) that was very tightly and competently produced and directed, and c.) it was sharply edited before it went on the air. Scenes were re-shot, cut, moved around in order, to give the appearance of continuity.
None of these things is true of real life in the White House.
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@Supertomiman Shanghai is a huge city built on an unpopulated mud flat. It replaces no traditional culture. It introduces inland Chinese, refugee European, and sophisticated Northern Chinese cultures to an area where there was formerly nothing.
Mixing with the culture and linguistic accent of the surrounding provinces, Jiangsu, Anhui, and Zhejiang, the sophisticated urban mix of Shanghai is producing a new culture. At the same time, the surrounding older ones are prospering. Nearby Suzhou, for instance, was a nondescript backwater before Shanghai's prosperity enriched and enlarged it. With wealth has come the rise of a proud, distinct, and flourishing Suzhou niche culture.
Long story short: you're on the right track, cultural change, but you're headed 180 degrees in the wrong direction. We're seeing vibrancy and flourishing, not exhaustion and extinction of the many cultures of China.
And a footnote: Welsh, which was clearly headed for extinction in my childhood, has recovered nicely, thank you very much. Romany is doing the same -- and I'd never even heard of Occitan until it popped up as one of the options on Notepad++ - everywhere in the world.
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@Supertomiman
Quite the contrary, that Shanghai skyline is uniquely Shanghai's. Nowhere else will you see several of those peculiarly Shanghai skyscrapers, the ball-shaped one, the one with the dipped air-flow gap, and several others.
What we are seeing here is the unique genius of Chinese engineering -- quite different from the Graeco-Roman blocks that typify the original American skyscrapers which started the genre a century ago.
Certainly it could be in the UAE -- but it isn't. That's all: there is a factual world out there, and it coesn't care much about your theories.
I guess it's a tough life, being an anonymous, opinionated Internet troll that reality won't comply with. Sad.
Now there is a global culture, you're right -- but note its individuality: everybody who pays attention and isn't carrying your particular set of grudges knows Shanghai from the UAE, and can tell both of them from New York or San Francisco -- equally international and equally unique cities.
If you're bored by it, you've certainly got a problem -- but it's your problem, not ours, much as you try to bore us with your repeated whines in text here.
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Hey, get reasonable, folks. Impeaching Trump is up to the Republicans. Democrats should be overjoyed to have him there, bashing everybody with his likkle wattle. Bash, Bash, Bashbashbash on the GOP. Bits and pieces flying in all directions.
If the Republicans had a whole wit to rub together, they would have started impeachments proceedings around about the time George Bushlet uttered those wise words "Strage shit." I.e while he was still on the platform at the Inaugural.
If Democrats take the House, devoutly to be wished, then it might be nice to start up an investigations committee. My idea is it should be very careful. Very, ver-ree, careful.
Benghazziiii-iiii careful...
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China doesn't need to retaliate: Trump is attacking China by hitting America on the head. "Look, look, we're ruining our own economy so we won't buy as much from you" is the Trump attack. Sure it hurts China. It reduces the wealth of the entire world. But it hurt Americans and America first.
The only reason for retalisation during a trade "war" is to impress home constituencies. There's nothing an angry electorate likes as much as the sound of war. Smoke. Noise. Anger. Poses with flags!
It's impressive, but it's stupid. The smart thing for China to do, faced with America going nuts, is simply to be patient and wait for it to pass.
This is a storm of stupidity -- but it's a storm in America, and the rest of us just have watch and try not to get rained on. We're going to be hit a little bit, everybody, everywhere -- but it's the American worker, the American farmer, and the American taxpayer who are going to take it in the nuts.
Sad.
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@AuroEsium
Accusation without evidence.
You are repeating the evidence-free accusation of "China Uncensored," a wildly irresponsible, dogmatic, YouTube propaganda channel out of Taipei, I would guess. Not a good source. Pull yourself together.
Mainland China certainly has a problem, the problem of all authoritarian governments: information is slow to travel where there is censorship, authoritarian government, and an Official Truth. The Chinese are heavily technocratic, which is good in this situation, but a one-party government is exactly the wrong way of getting free exchange of information.
This, however, has nothing to d with the World Health Organization, against which you are directing your unsupported bile.
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@gauravbansal148
A capital gain both shows a profit and reduces yield -- in strict inverse proportion incidentally. Modulo the fact that you don't get the capital gain until you've sold the asset, and which point its yield to you is nothing...
As we learned in 1991, 2008, and every now and then back to 1884, people in, uh, "financial risk management" need to be bailed out by governments every few years. Imho, the main yield of financial risk management, so-called, is talking points for the salesmen, who actually make the money in securities markets.
And my GMAT score was 750.
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Why should higher dimensions be limited to 360 degrees? Why are we supposed to impose a three-dimensional ukase against "overlap" to higher dimensions?
To take a simple example, a hypercube wraps around through, uh, "space," from our point of view. That looks like overlapping to me. OK, why then should the overlap by which all the polytopes with shallow angels overlap -- or maybe inter-lap in on themselves -- be disallowed?
Put differently, what would we think of a Flatland mathematician objecting to almost all the polytopes in three dimensions because of the well-known Flatland "fact" that there are only two sides to an anything? (Or, alternately, they might think there are any number of edges, but no sides except in their imagination. But they can't imagine more than two sides, so all higher dimensions, in their opinions, would be limited to one hypertope, the free-floating sheet.)
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@bobbymak6964
"Bingo!" Bobby. Spot on. (Her good word, you earned it.)
Her students will end up commanding "boats," as US Naval officers call them. One of her students, fifteen years after graduation, can say "Look, I'm just a 35 year-old kid driving a boat for the Navy, but I've got more shit here than everything dropped in WWII." (Yes, I have now told you order-of-magnitude the hitting power of most of the old Spruance class destroyers. They're out of service now, but there were 31 of them, and yes, that's what at least a bit more than half of them carried. I have no idea what the Burkes and Zumwalts carry now, but I think a sound guess would be, uh, more.)
His students? He's a slick San Francisco broadcaster and I-net hacker. He is very good at teaching journalists how smart he is (and he is very bright). But no, he's a decade away from being one of her students and that might put him fifteen years short of commanding an out-of-date destroyer.
So yes, you gotit, Bobby.
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There was an old and interesting theory, started by a guy named Hobshwme, that the entire British Empire was just a scheme for the English Lords and Ladies to rob the English working class, running the money and the blood through a long involved and meaningless path all around the planet. The most convincing bit of support for this, to my mind, is that a whole lot of other people who never had the planetary empires did as well or better than the English on the whole through those centuries.
This comes to mind as I watched this video: can this whole fracking thing be just a Ponzi scheme, with the oil, the drilling, the steel, the huge exchanges of real estate and licenses and laws and all the noise and what-not, all of that as meaningless as the British Empire?
If this video is correct, the crash to come is going to be reeeeally weird!
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@rohithbs5065
A year later, this aged very poorly. The Big Fact is that any country at war can operate purely in the "real sector," i.e. outside of economics, for several years. Add in the fact that Russia can get by financially on whatever China decides to give it in exchange for oil, or for anything else it chooses to take "in trade," and economic sanction is a cat scratch or maybe even a dog bite, but it's not a killer.
There's more, of course. A great deal of all economies is invisible and outside governmental control. Many Third World nations are uninterested in the democracies' interests, but eager to get whatever they can gain by playing footsie with Russia. Economic sanctions have never been a big winner anywhere, the British Navy's blockade of Germany in 1917-18 being one of the few exceptions, and that was done at gunpoint, not by pushing paper.
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Famous sub rosa story in Washington. When Ed Applewhite was a comptroller of the CIA in the mid-sixties, his main job was giving MacNamara his daily briefing on "the numbers" that MacNamara had thought from his Ford days were the foundation for everything. At one point Ed famously asked "Sir, may I make a personal comment?"
"Hunh, Yunh? Gmph" or equivalent puzzled assent from Macnamara.
"Well, sir, I don't think those numbers mean what they seem to mean."
That was Ed's last day of briefing Macnamara.
(Applewhite went on to other, distinguished, careers of service, on some occasions displaying extreme personal bravery. A magnificent man, and a good friend. Serving his country well, even in retirement, right up to 2004, the last time I saw him.)
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Elizabeth,
Thanks, but I don't think we'd all fit.
Maybe back off a bit, and we'll come over for coffee? Lemme see now, fifteen million or so of us, four at a time, fifteen minutes per group, 12 hours a day, six days a week?
Just a little over 1500 years, knocking off Christmas and Easter, and being a wee bit flaky about leap years. Assuming you don't extend the rash invitation to our kids, that is...
But it's a nice thought, so good on ya!
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@Ji_hadJoe
Jonny,
" Sorry to be 'that guy' but I suspect there are..." you write!
And you say I am putting spin that would make a politician blush on things. That's all you've got is your "I suspects," a population larger than Greater London, no doubt.
The fact remains the Leavers were voting for hundreds of millions of pounds in candy-floss, unicorns and rainbows that simply don't and can't exist.
I don't live there at the moment, though I'm planning on coming back for the Festival of Britain in 2051 (assuming they hold the real one, not some stupid imitation dreamed up by Mrs May), so I don't have a cat in this fight.
I'm tempted to hope that you crash out -- so all the stupid gits who voted for Farge's Dream can find out just exactly what it all means.
The world is round, which is why a global economy is the same way it has been for the last seven hundred years -- normal. The redistribution of the gains is a different question, and the working people have been screwed over -- but rational economics has produced the wealth, class-biased politics is what has given it to the disgusting fascistic Rees-Moggsies of this world.
In real life I wish you all well, but if you crash out I won't have a hell of a lot of sympathy for your suffering. You, with the help of David Cameron's stupidity, brought it on yourselves.
Cheers,
-dlj.
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Sorry, Raymond, credibility lost is gone forever. Every American Administration for a hundred years will be paying a credibility premium in every agreement they manage to reach, simply because Trump has shown that the US cannot be trusted.
In London there's a group called the 1837 committee, I think it is. I forget the exact year, but it's named for the year that Mississippi defaulted on its bonds, back before the Civil War. Today this open, voluntary, and completely happy-go-lucky committee meet every time a Mississippi bond issue comes to market. They knock off a few bottles of good red, remind each other that Mississippi is paying, and come to a consensus on how many basis points they'll tack on the new round of funnypaper. Needless to say, that few basis points, over many decades, has cost Mississippi far more than that original bond issue was worth.
Trump is going to be the same thing, only gold plated.
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The "Web" was not "invented" by Tim Berners-Lee.
If it had a single father, "inventor," if you like, that would be Vannevar Bush somewhere around 1942-45.
The packet-switched Internet that we use today came alive in several, different and unconnected, places in 1989. ARPA-net seems to me to have the best claim on being "the" Internet of that time. It became dominant among the originals, all of which either joined up to it and each other, or evaporated, by February 1972.
At the point Senator Mike Mansfield tacked the notorious Mansfield Amendment on something-or-other, making it illegal for the military to corrupt civilian projects with their money. since everybody desperately wanted, and arguably needed, to be corrupted, ARPA added a D for defence to the front of its name. Problem solved. Today's Internet is the ARPAnet of to February 1972, or the DARPAnet from mid-December 1971, with about four or five weeks of overlap and confusion about the names in there.
Time Berners-Lee, working in Switzerland, made valuable additions to the front end on people's machine, ten years later. MCI developed Joseph Lickleider's advanced switching systems, and proclaimed that an employee of their had done what his teacher, "Lick," had in fact done.
That employee until recently repeated the MCI propaganda that he had invented the Internet. Recently he switched to claiming to have been "an" inventor of it.
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Too many people leap to the dopey assumption that "The Chinese are taking over the world."
The opposite is the truth: China is succeeding by adopting much of what is best of the west. They've adopted the British Industrial Revolution. 19th-Century German applied science, and a few dribs and drabs of Anglo-German Marxism -- Hegelian hooey married to billiard-ball physics and the best of Victorian-age charitable social policy. They tried Leninism for a while but it was crushed in blood by Chiang Kai-Shek in 1929 and its remnants ground into the mud by Stalin over the succeeding generation.
One might have thought that the reforms of Deng Xiao-Ping would have some relation t the thought of the English industrialist Freidrich Engels. This didn't happen, because Engels never stirred any knowledge he might have gained in his factories into his politics. I think he has only made two contributions to world history, buying Karl Marx a few years' groceries and writing some hilariously self-parodic sections of The Communist Manifesto, in which the manifesto denounces bourgeois prigs exactly like, wait for it, Freidrich Engels.
The current main program of China is Xi Jin-Ping thought, essentially Western supply-chain management writ large. Very large.
This he may have learned during his stay in Kansas in which case it would be a curious mix of political strains: the political economy of the American Midwest is pretty much Stalinism, "socialism plus electricity equals communism," moderated by the Shredded Wheat practicality of Vice-President Henry Wallace, a stumble-bum Red but to hi credit a sound agronomist. It would make perfect sense if America's "Red States" had been given in honour of Wallace's love affair (at a safe distance) with Stalinism, but the seems not to have happened. Neither are they called red because of their budgets, always in deficit and bailed out by Washington.
Perhaps it's because so many of their politicians are so perennially apoplectic from jumping up and down denouncing the socialism and the Washington on which they are so totally dependent.
But China didn't export all this red stuff to us. It crossed the Pacific from America to China, and Eurasia via the Trans-Siberian Railroad, but mostly from Marx in the British Museum.
They aren't going to conquer us because we have already conquered them. What happens next is, the Trump interlude fades into the mists, and sensible people get on with the Great Mixing.
Here's the History:
The Gunpowder Years: 1400 to 1945, with raggedy edges at both ends. Europe conquers the world, including a number of cultures superior to its own, through the wanton use of gunpowder.
The European War: 1908 to 1998, from the North African Naval Crisis through the rise and then collapse of Imperialism, Fascism, and Marxism. Huge death resulting in developing peace.
The Great Mixing: 1868 to 2150, from the Black Ships introducing America to Japan (already acclimatizing itself to Holland, Korea, and Britain) through the admixture of China and America, Adam Smith plus Buddha, etc. etc.
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I dunno, Tim.
Could it be it rakes thirty years off his actual age?
Try it yourself, Tim.
Not now, Tim. Thirty years from now.
But buy the leather jacket now, Tim.
My own black Chinese "Marlon Brando" one, fifteen bucks in 1998, goes for six hundred bucks today.
If you wait for thirty years, Tim, well, you won't have Peter Fonda's money. If you want to look biker, Tim, you'll be dressing up in vinyl.
Tim Hanner, fashion plate!
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Allowing capital gains to be discounted by inflation is a perfectly reasonable idea -- provided they be treated like all other forms of income. Tax them yearly on a January to December year, and on a progressive scale.
As things stand, though, this is a glorious example of the carnage Trump and his fellow gangsters want to wreak on the Republic. The calculation of capital, which is often reflected in both capital gains and in the resale price of companies, is already weighted very heavily in the owners' favor because it treats "depreciation," a bookkeeping entry, as though it were a valuation of capital goods, which it isn't. This means that a prudent manager can happily make money both from running machinery on the books at zero, which makes ratios look sweet, and from buying used machinery that is heavily discounted because it's been largely paid for by the taxpayer. What the hell, if it's unfair, the intelligent people behind this dope Trump will find a way of making it more unfair.
Taxing capital gains as income, the sound Canadian standard of "a dollar is a dollar," is highly unlikely to happen under Trump, but the guy has done us all one more favor. He has shone his bright golden light on one more thing that needs to be fixed.
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Anonymous " the bish "
There is nothing "straight up" about Gym Jordan.
He is a loud and inadequate personality of a very common type, the small man overcompensating for his obvious inadequacies.
His type typically act through more capable others, in Jordan's case through boys to whom he becomes a coach and symbolically through the powerful-seeming figures whom he worships.
He has no understanding of logic, of the US Constitution, nor of basic American values. He is not a warrior for the Constitution; he is a small-bore enemy of it, serving larger, more capable enemies of it, plus of course their bloated, blundering avatar or convenience, Trump.
There are no "MAGA WARS." America is great in many senses, less so in others. "MAGA" is a slur on America, paralleling Trump's common claim of the country being in constant crisis. It's a just a stupid slogan, nothing as majestic as a war -- and it's not even his: he stole it from Reagan, a man who was his superior in intellect, in humanity, in business acumen, and in legality.
I wish you well in trying to pull yourself together. In the short run, you should probably stop posting your anonymous garbage to the Internet. You're making a fool of yourself and polluting the general discourse.
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But, David, you're not quite right about Britain "suspending elections for ten years." Byelections went on regularly, and there were seven while Britain was at war.
In every one, the main candidates were the National Government and the Commonwealth Party.
The National Government was supporters of the War Cabinet, i.e. "the Churchill Administration"; in the large, it was a formal, go to meetings together, alliance of Labour and the Conservative Party, with individual Liberals involved.
Commonwealth was a temporary alliance of Independent Labour and the Communist Party with, I imagine, some Trotskyite/ist involvement.
The results: Commonweath 7. National Government Zero. A 7-0 shut-out.
This, incidentally, should have warned Churchill that he was on ver-ree thin ice -- and given that back in his first election campaign, in Hammersmith, a multi-member constituency, as barely an adult, he had cooperated with Labour and written sympathetically about them -- this is the Keir hardy era, remember -- it is surprising how oblivious poor old Winnie was in '45.
The Communists, foolishly, took this to mean England was on the cusp of The Revolution. It was nothing of the sort. Independent Labour simply walked away from the thing some time around Portdam, and the Communists went back to drinking too much with coal miners.
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There's a very bad, and very stupid, mistake at 2:59. It says "From 1970 to... the US imported most of its oil from Saudi Arabia and Russia." This is beyond false: it is kindergarten illiterate.
This is so ignorant and crazy, I hope somebody can get through to Bloomberg, fire the author and his supervisor, and replace this with a corrected video on this important topic.
US corporations make huge profits from Saudi Arabia, but the US has never imported any significant oil from there, nor from Russia. Both of them sell to Europe, China, and Japan.
The US is self-sufficient, and I the years when it wasn't, it imported from Venezuela, West Africa, and Canada.
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If your turnover triples, from $13,000 to $39,000, while your number of stores only doubles, from ~9,000 to ~20,000, there is no statement more false than what you say in the script at 1:19, "This increase in the revenue... has largely been driven by the increase in the number of locations."
This is the exact opposite of the truth. Increase in revenue has far outrun the increase in the number of locations. Duh.
Wall Street Millennial, you are in the wrong line of business. You are spouting nonsense.
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Steven
For the majority of them tthere will come that moment when they suddenly start saying "No, I was never involved in that stuff. It was only my stupid brother in law. If I ever said anything nice about those weirdies it was just to keep peace in the family," and so on and so forth.
The Evangelical "churches" are dying before our eyes. Trump's rallies are getting one or two thousand people where they used to get fifteen or twenty. Poor Kevin McCarthy has to spend all his time explaining that he didn't say this, or he didn't say that, or, hold on a second, I'm not sure which I didn't say i didn't say yesterday...
The cure? Just as with flying saucers, Scientology, the hula hoop: "That was then, this is now" and "No, not me. That was my dumb brother-in-law."
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The "nothing but a gangster" around 3:10 is stupid Western propaganda. He was a robber, it's true, but he was always well-read, in literature, poetry, and politics; he had good taste in music; and he always had an effective sense of humour, rough when he wanted it rough, genteel when he wanted it genteel.
When he was in the Kremlin under Lenin, he was a hard working, but more importantly highly efficient and effective, bureaucrat/administrator. In his gangster days, he was probably the person who ran the gang's payroll and grocery budget.
A wicked and eventually paranoid man, true enough, but not a fool and not merely a thug.
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OMG, we were young! (I was at the Lab for six months in 1971 and 1972, mainly hand-holding the politics of ARPA's disguise as DARPA, to comply with the Mansfield Amendment, but also having a lot of fun hacking, playing weird variations of chess and whatnot.)
The closest thing I ever knew of as an "operating system" was DDT, Dynamic Debugging Technique, which is no doubt hiding in a closet somewhere deep within EMACS today. I learned LISP from a book, and by chatting with McCarthy at 55 Baud on teletype. A disk-pack the size of a birthday-cake was 180K and the first program I ever wrote was "PING," the text of which was "PONG." "PONG," of course went "PING," and when the screen gave me four of each I had answered my own curiosity: How deep is the stack on this thing?
Cheers, to everybody: I'd love to hear from anybody way back then.
-dlj.
david DOT lloydjones AT gmail DOT com
No hyphen in "lloydjones" for my address: I signed on to Google while they were all still at Stanford and their system didn't have a hyphen in it yet.🤣😂
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@sharondavid-melly1498
My boss, John Brademas (D-Indiana) was a Deputy Speaker -- and for that matter I've been "Speaker" in a number of studenty things, including head of the city-wide High-Schol UN Assembly, which put a photgraph of me in the Speaker's chair of the Provincial Assembly out in the local daily, the Globe and Mail. A bit of a giggle, really. But from my Washington years I know a little bit about the whole thing.
Yes, Nancy was an excellent Speaker -- but that's because she is tough, very smart, and decent. She was certainly the best Speaker since Mister Sam, Sam Rayburn.
Newt is intelligent, but aggressive more than tough. He is stunningly dishonest in a succession of interesting and differing ways. Through all his early years, for instance, he pretended to be an independents and futuristic politician when in fact he was the bought and paid-for pet of the guy wh made those excellent Cannon Mills towels.
(One of the interesting side-lights of American politics is the number of men in business who make absolutely first rate products, but then indulge in infantile and ignorant versions of right-wing politics -- undoing in the public world all the good they had done in the private. The guy who made Smucker's superb jams is another. Buy their jam. Don't buy their founder's damfool politics. Henry Ford was perhaps emblematic of the type.)
John Bohner and Paul Ryan are no Einsteins, but they are both decent human beings, at least once Ryan got through his teen-age Ayn Rand fixation which lasted into his forties. Both are also well informed, sane, and thoroughly competent at their jobs.
Kevin McCarthy? A wondrous being! The original gen-you-whine fool. Incompetent, stupid, and ignorant. A man with an idyllic smile, he lights up a room. This beautiful half wit wanted to be Speaker, was willing to humiliate himself without limit to get the job. He did so and he got it. Then showed the rest of us -- though he never figgered it out himself -- that he didn't have Clue One about how the job worked or what its purpose was.
The present two, Jordan and Scalise?
Forgive me the horrible insult: they are typical of the current Republican Members of the House.
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Léon ,
The fake Christians still delivered 62% of the white vote for the anti-Constitutional, lookin' fer a chile-bride, half-wit.
Trump is not America's problem: America's problem is an electorate in which 37% or so of the people are vindictive, reactionary, often racist, haters. They worship a Christ dead and bleeding, not a Jesus alive and teaching. They believe they are saved and you are't but you need to be for some reason. This is a medieval, authoritarian, patriarchal and wicked set of beliefs. It is the real harm, and Trump is just a small bit of the result.
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@Méxidomi
There is no evidence that Trump is rich. There is a great deal of evidence that he is poor or worse, far underwater. The guy has lived first by destroying his father's, grandfather's, and siblings' fortunes, then, briefly, by making a lot of money in TV, and then all along by borrowing and making shady deals, mainly with Russian gangsters. His expenses have always been huge, his income flaky and unpredictable, his bankruptcies and business failures frequent and large.
And he still owed billions from Atlantic city, the forgiveness of which he has not yet declared as taxable income. That's taxes, interest and penalties all growing worse every year since 1998.
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@Méxidomi
Mariposa,
He failed at every business he ever touched.
The only good and thorough piece of work he has ever accomplished is the destruction of fortunes: his grandfathers', his father's, and his siblings'. After his older brother died, his remaining brother and sister were unlucky enough to find Donnie in charge of their inheritances. Sad.
Vodka? Failed. Gambling? Failed. Real estate? Deep under water. Clothing? Steaks? Ice? Boardgame? University? Loser, loser, loser, loser, loser.
The man has had only one success: as a TV actor. He played the part of a loud-mouth fake businessman, unlike any successful businessman in the real world. The only thing the TV people had to do was tone down his orange a bit for the cameras and shove him on. Bingo! He played himself.
Intelligent: he's the kid who scrapes into the bottom half of means, so the other kids put him in charge of the comic book committee to shut him up. "He is so intelligent," you say? Just so: so-so.
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The core value of Western society and culture is scientific rationalism.
On the scale of millennia we owe that to the Hebrews, the Greeks, and the Macedonians in the centuries before the Romans arrived on the scene.
On the scale of centuries, we owe it to the Mohammadans, or Moslems, who kept those Hellenic values alive through the Dark Ages of the West. For a thousand to 1500 years, depending on locale, the Roman Church ("The Holy Roman Empire: not holy, nor Roman, nor an empire") imposed savagery and ignorance upon every bit of Europe that the Vandals and other northern bronze age illiterates didn't get.
To the south, during those terrible centuries, Arab, Peloponnesian, and half a dozen other peoples inspired by the writings of Mohammad, kept civilization alive on this side of the planet. (Elsewhere, several lively, intelligent and humane societies were doing pretty well across Asia.)
The roots of our culture were kept alive through the trunk of Moslem culture. We owe them .
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The question for you professional commentators, Tim, Bill, and Charlie, is not "Is Trump guilty, cluck-cluck-cluck?"
It's what is the responsibility of the commentariat to get objective information through the heads of the third of the population whose brains have been rotted out not just by Trump but by Fox, and by Ayn Rand.
{A couple of Ayn Rand notes for you all: "Atlas Shrugged" had sold 700,000 copies in Hungary by the time the Communists went down. Paul Ryan -- who may very well be responsible for the defenestration of Tucker Carlson from Fox, used to make the book "recommended," at minimum, for his Congressional staff.
{I read all of her stuff in a three or four month binge when I was 17, and adored her for a summer -- exactly until I met some grown-ups when I hit university. I suspect the same thing has happened to Paul Ryan. He's outgrown her. I also suspect that she is the subterranean influence accounting for a great deal of America's current sickness, as, perhaps, in Hungary.}
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The Obama-Yellen recovery from the GOP debacle of 2008 ended when Janet Yellen left the Fed. The last day of her term was January 31, 2018, and the Dow was at 26,700. It dropped sharply over the weekend, has touched that peak a couple of times since, but has been running on fumes plus the fact that Jay Powell is a competent guy. Yellen Lite.
Trump has goosed the market upwards a couple of times with a.) massive tax relief for the rich, and b.) tax relief for the "return" of corporate profits "held" abroad. Those are bookkeeping quotes: these were called foreign as long as that relieved them of American taxes. Trump gave them tax relief and the companies that own them stopped calling them "abroad." Both of these reliefs are sensibly called sugar highs for the economy. The money released has very largely gone into corporate stock buy-backs. This artificial stimulus is probably the major reason Trump's Dow has not crashed back to the 6800 where George Bush II left it.
The gyrations Liu is talking about? It's called a tug-of-war, Trump versus America. Trump is no ignoramus. He knows a great deal. Most of it is wrong. For economic advisors he has Peter Navarro, a fool; Wilbur Ross, certainly a crook very probably in bed with a whole lot of Russians; Larry Kudlow, a TV personality addicted to crazy economic cults and always wrong about everything; Steven Mnuchin, a failed Goldman Sachs financier; and a whole lot of random greedheads.
Many of the greedheads have enough brains and mother wit to be appalled by Trump. They are happy to have their taxes cut, and don't mind at all if the courts are filled with half-wits. (The bad news for them is that there is a solid minority of Federalist Society members who have actually read the constitution, and most of them actually support it. But you can't have everything, can you?)
There's also a real world out there. Tariffs are bad for the economy. Threatening people is bad for the economy. Smashing alliances is bad for the economy.
So the war continues, hurting not just the US but the whole world's economy. Sad.
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At 2:00, a line is one dimensional, a square is two-dimensional? Agreed. But then "The space we live in is three-dimensional, and so on..."? Hunh?
People are always saying "You can go up and down and front and back, and sideways, so that's three." But I can go sideways in a whole bunch of different directions. Left and right, and east and west are all directios. Down is a pointer in my local gravity field, and up is a wavy moving line which varies with the phases of the local Moon, mostly.
We face great puzzles (and huge wastes of money) in academic physics, and it seems to me this is largely because we don't talk sense to ourselves in the most elementary ways. Keeping mathematical degrees of freedom from getting confused with physical dimensions, and physical dimensions and directions from getting confused with each other might be a start, wouldn't it?
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Rob and his extremely intelligent, hardworking, and ambitious brother Doug, haven't changed a bit since they were BMOC drug wholesalers, spoiled brats, and exploiters of the baser instincts of their classmates in high school.
All the economic and psychological factors of the Poujade interlude in France apply.
They have a made, and now largely lost, only one honourable conquest: the very great conservatism of a number of hard working immigrant groups, largely people who were upper class in their former homelands, and now to their very great irritation often find themselves often treated with a grating kind condescension by liberal-mined "helpers" in their new.
The Fords come easily to contact with people of colour through their contacts in the drug underworld, and through football. Until now the bonhomie of these worlds has passed for racial egalitarianism -- falsely.
The beginning of Rob Ford's meltdown was his firing by Don Bosco High School as a volunteer coach of their football team. The good administrators of the high school were flattered and pleased to have the Mayor volunteering to help their boys, even if he did turn up drunk and make a fool of himself. All good fun.
The parents, however, were appalled. Minority parents in particular were horrified at the Mayor's claims to be protecting minorities from delinquency. Religiously observant African parents do not see their children as liable to become delinquent: they see a drunken, drug using fraud who hangs out with minority drug users as a threat to their children. They, over the resistance of the school administration, got him fired.
Ford Nation -- the thousands of people who eat hot dogs and free pop at their estate (for their father was wealthy, and they are spoiled inheritors) -- still exists, though diminished. It is fueled by the resentments of white lower class people in Mississauga, and by ordinary people who go for their good cheer, and anti-establishment chatter.
How much the "Nation" has been diminished remains to be seen.
-dlj.
david.lloydjones@gmail.com
May 20, 2014.
P.S. A pleasure to touch base with Woody Wilson. I met my first wife, the excellent Susan Schmidt (now a heavy hitter in US Japanese language education) at a speech Carl Kaysen gave there in 1967. The speech was good -- worth the bus from Washington for me, the plane from Boulder for Susie -- but meeting her was better.
:-)
-dlj.
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+Dan Stevens
Dan,
Lol! And very largely right, imho.
I fondly remember a time, back in the late '60s to mid-70s, when the only place in the world where you could get a decent Russian word-processor was University of Wisconsin.
My friend Roger Levien produced a monthly newsletter for the RAND Corporation, " Russian Computer Industry News." He printed 1,600 copies, 800 in English, which were distributed out of Langley, and 800 in Russian, which were the only way Soviets could find out how their industry worked. Through Gvishiani's network, I would guess.
Back then, too, the Russian and Greek Orthodoxies were largely kept above water, and under the same budget and friendly eye, in the Bay Area. The idea was to keep them safe from the KGB and the Greek Colonels' thugs.
The intention was that the Greek Socialists should learn civility at Berkeley, while the Russians should sing a lot, keepin traditional and very beautiful chants alive at their Church in the Haight-Ashbury, and learn Business Administration at Stanford.
Sadly, things worked out exactly backward. The Greeks learned business administration, badly, and the Russians seem to have adopted Berkeley's well-known level of, uh, je ne sais qoi. Both groups aquired extraordinary levels of kleptomania, which they put into astonishingly widesperead effect on their returns home.
In the Russians' case I think this was their misinterpretation of capitalism under the Bakuninite dictum that "Property is theft." (A friend in Toronto hired a bunch of Russian acountants for a while, and they were brilliant: they had spent their whole professional lives keeping three sets of bokks, for the Gosplan, for the Party, and for the real world. This last set kept private to themselves, so they could keep the other two sets faintly coherent, even if aetherial. He had to fire them: they couldn't handle the notion that in Canada it is normal and possible to make money legally.
The Greeks, on the ther hand, seem to have adopted Pete Seeger's notion that you don't rob banks, you steal them. The Russians, when they went back, stole not just banks but whole industries.
In Kurt Vonnegut's immortal words, " And so it goes."
Cheers,
-dlj.
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Alex Sytinskiy
Alex, all people make mistakes, and we're all sometimes ignorant, lazy, superstitious, and thoughtless. Part of the time.
This doesn't make us evil. It makes us human.
We're also kind, curious, sexy, compassionate, brave, loving, intelligent, musical, thoughtful, and a few other things besides. You might even say we're pretty good, all things considered. About as good as elephants, puppies, cats, ocotopuses, all of the rest of evolving creation.
"All men are evil" is always and everywhere a piece of delusion, given you free of charge by somebody who will sell you the cure.
It's free of charge like that first shot of heroin the dealer will give you to try it. Not a cheap deal to take.
"Here, take this magic water, and it will cure your evil. It only costs ten percent of your income for the rest of your life. Come and visit me on my knees at my marble palace. Any time." That's what the "All men are evil" racket is all about.
Don't buy it.
Cheers,
-dlj.
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Pretty sad apology by White House spokesman Deese. His repeated references to US "leadership" are quite simply incorrect. I'm putting it politely.
Some in the US would like to lead. The fact is the US is crippled by know-nothing Republicans, lunatic "religious" figures, and outrageous business lobbyists.
Deese and the White House would serve America better by being frank about how they have tried and failed to lead. Cap and Trade, after all, is an American invention, dating back to work in California -- the settlement between PG&E and the Environmental Defense Fund (a Rockefeller front organization), in 1977.
As with Obamneycare, we find the left adopting the business originated solution, and unlike Obamneycare, a giveaway to the insurance industry, Cap and and Trade makes sense. It is silly of the White House to, uh, whitewash, America's failure here.
-dlj.
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But Gil, the US is the country with the hundreds of millions of guns out there.
All countries with heavily armed populations, e.g. Switzerland, Israel, the US, have disproportionate suicide rates and disproportionate rates of suicide by gun. Rural Canada has a regretably large rate of gun death.
Guns are dangerous everywhere.
Only with guns can drunks, fools, crazies, and the depressed, shoot people, themseslves or others.
A well regulated militia would be very careful about its membership, and would keep its guns in the armory, or at least under lock and key supervised by trained personnel, it seems to me.
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Bonita,
Yer welcome.
I just took a look at your YouTube channel, and suddenly saw where you learned to write those solid paragraphs of long run-on sentences. This is a style characteristic of the Info Wars end of the Internet spectrum, and I think you should take care with what you learn from those folks. Many of them are nuts, and some of them are dangerous nuts.
Ron Paul and his son are very attractive folks, and their friend Karl Hess used to be a drinking buddy of mine when we both lived in Washington, D.C. , many years ago. They're right about freedom, which makes it odd that they hang out with the anti-abortion folks who want a Federal policing of everybody's sex life. They are seriously out of contact with reality whenever they get close to monetary policy -- but that's an olde American habit that goes back to Jackson in the 1820's, so there's nothing new there. It's cute except when it's tremendously wasteful.
I have a suggestion for you, a one year project. What do you think of reading three magazines a month, maybe at the reading room of your local library, to see what light it throws on your understanding of the world?
I would suggest that you read The Economist, Scientific American, and The New York Review of Books regularly for a year, and turn them over in your mind.
The Economist is "liberal" in the English sense of the word, i.e. it is a moderate conservative -- about where Presidents Obama and Clinton were.
Scientific American is pretty non-political, except that it follows and supports orthodox liberal (in the American sense this time) positions on science and education funding. In science -- including energy, nuclear weapons, feeding the world, and global warming -- they are just flat out trustworthy. The very opposite of your playful Pauls, Ron and son.
The New York Review of Books is moderate left, except on civil liberties. There they are in that point where the ACLU and the Ron Paul libertarians meet, left and right are the same, and human rights are not negotiable.
Add in Ebony for your social news and Flare or something for your hair, and you're all set.
:-)
Enjoy!
Best.
-dlj.
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Bonita,
You have a nice mix of right and left there. I approve! Note that Ludvig Von Mises was an excellent man, upstanding, decent and brilliant. The Ludvig Von Mises Institute, in Auburn Alabama, by contrast, is emphatically not. It has been taken over by a bunch of fascists and weirdies, and are a disgrace to the man's name.
Who is Robert Pape?
Gold and silver are not money, they are commodities, just like copper and lead.
Cheers,
-dlj.
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whyamimrpink78
Why,
You and the rest of you just need to take a look at Canada. Medical care comes from doctors, nurses, hospitals, etc. etc. Same as anywhere else.
How do we pay for it? Out of taxes Just like schools, police, whatever...
How do we afford it? Well, for starters we don't add 25% on top for the insurance industry. We cut out hundreds of millions of dollars that American "health" expenditures divert into politics.
And we subsidise medical -- and all other -- education, which cuts down a wee bit, anyway, on doctors' feeling that they have to rip off the public out of revenge for their huge sacrifices.
-dlj.
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I think you have lost your thousand dollars. Remember, all the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but No, not all the people all the time.
The guy is getting found out, and while Whee The Peepul like a good laugh, or a good bit of defiance, or even just a good loud scene, we also wake up to reality from time to time.
Trump is brash, bright, aggressive and noisy. Some of what he says is even true. Even a blind pig...
But he's a loser. A stone, pro, experienced, practiced and proven loser.
Sorry about your thousand bucks.
-dlj.
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Ken Ya
Ken,
(Later) Looking around I see there a set of YouTubes for this same course, 18.03, in 2011, and another one that may be interesting, I don't know yet, 18.09, "Eigenvectors and Eigenvalues" in 2011.
This last one is slugged as Linear Algebra in some places but on the first page of the course it talks a bit about differential equations.
Anyway, over the long haul I need all of Linear, all of Eigen, and all of Differential, But you might want to check out the availables. Let me know what you think.
-dlj.
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Eyeglasses.
Sewing machines.
It's didn't all start with Sputnik.
As for ARPAnet, it is a copy of Usenet (not the later e-mail system of the same name), Digital Equipment Corporation's system for talking to its own customers.
The key technology involved is packet-switching, developed by Bolt, Beranek and Newman, today's BBN, contractors to DEC.
Dick Bolt of BBN sold the idea for a second time to Johnny Foster in the JFK White House and Joe Licklider in the Pentagon. Together they got ARPA involved.
In mid-1971, when I was user #300 on ARPAnet, there were seven nodes, five in the US, and two in Britain. At that time, Digital Equipment claimed, possibly with a bit of exaggeration, that their Usenet, using identical technology, had 400 nodes and 10,000 users.
It didn't start with the Pentagon. It isn't a government initiative. Vinton Cerf was the major developer of TCP/IP, a later set of (excellent and necessary) software which made it easier for the linking of different networks to grow.
One fey "origin" of the Internet is Vannevar Bush's 1945 Atlantic article http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ . Others run back to H.G Wells and, naturally, Roger Bacon.
The most relevant intellectual basis for it might be the hypothetical plans developed by the Carnegie Corporation about 1964. These were first instantiated in a dormitory at MIT and at the library and campus of the then emerging tech powerhouse University of Waterloo, both in place by 1965.
-dlj.
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Giant Cheeseball,
Not bad -- but not necessarily correct.
I'm happy with two, both of which are zero, the reason being that zero is not quite like other numbers, it's a class by itself in rather the same sense that transcendentals are. That's why we don't allow it to be a divisor, or say that if it divides something then the answer is NAN or not-a-number, or "It's not a number," or something of that sort. Since not-a-number is not a number, clearly there is a difference in zero's being or kind for it to be able to produce it [or a whole lot of them :-) ], don't you think?
Cheers,
-dlj.
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+Race Card'Over'Played
You lose. Your own article proves you wrong.
If you want to prove a point with a Fact Checker quote, maybe you should read it first. The article you send me above proves conclusively that your point is false, and that Trey Gowdy and his committee are wandering around in a fog of misinformation, if we look at things charitably.
The money paragraph is the second one:
"As usual, Trump wildly exaggerated the figure. A key point that Republicans on the committee have tried to make was that Ambassador Chris Stevens — who perished in the 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities that left three others dead — did not directly communicate with Clinton on her private email system. (Generally, ambassadors would send messages through the chain of command.) So none of these came directly from Stevens to Clinton, “asking for help,” as Trump put it."
The rest of the Fact Checker's report then goes into how badly the press also reported things, how deluded Gowdy is, and so on.
You simply have no excuse for deluding yourself, and trying to put one over on me and anybody else who might be reading here.
-dlj.
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Race Card'Over'Played
I assume the word you're looking for is "bitch" or perhaps "Bitch." Very fashionable among 4-chan half-wits, I gather. While you're figuring out how to correct your spelling, you ought to work on controlling your caps-lock key as well.
Don't worry. You'll be able to use a computer in a couple of years if you pay attention.
The 550, or 600, or whatever number Trey Gowdy's meth-head staff have pulled out of their asses this week, is the total number of e-mails about all maintenance -- new light-bulbs, tires for the sub-consulates' cars, home-leave for translators, and so on, over the previous six or eight months. You would have known this if you had read your own story.
The idea that there were hundreds of e-mails about the terrorists' attack is simply a stupid invention of rightwing propagandists and random assholes like yourself.
Now, go back to thinking about how your keyboard and your fingers might work together.
Cheers,
-dlj.
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FWIW, here in Toronto the thing that destroyed the Ford Brothers, while the fat one was still Mayor, was the Moslem thing. It's not that his supporters are great humanitarians (although Canada is probably a generation ahead of the US in phasing out racism: there' still some, but the 16%% racist figure that was put together responsibly in 1988, and felt reasonable to me, felt then like the US today).
The deal is, before he made his anti-Moslem pitch, ford Nation might say "He's an @zzhole, but he's our @zzhole." After his rant there was a huge shift in the electorate, as maybe 10% of the whole, 25% of his supporters said "What a stupid @zzhole." With the "stupid" being a genuine judgment that the guy just wasn't functioning at a normal level, he was just a dope.
This may be what brings Trump down, the feeling that, What the helll, it's normal for a few folks to be racists, but ya gotta be some sort of stoo-pid to actually let on.
What I wanna see is some commentary on his policies: that health care thing, cribbed from the Heritage Foundation, and pitched straight to the top half of taxpayers, iis perfect: "Professor Flubbble W. Bubble of Trump University has estimated that..."
-dlj.
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IWashMyOwnBrain Thanks.
There's one other side effect to ll of this: just when the Sicilian Mafia had pretty much accomplished its long-term goal, getting all its kids into law school or medicine, and going at least as legit as everybody else, along come the bloody Russians.
So we haven't gotten rid of the Mafia the good ol' fashioned way, by including the best and getting rid of the worst. (Bill Gates calls it "revise and extend.") Instead we've still got it, only it speaks Russian now instead of Sicilian.
My Sicilian in-laws, on the other hand, are doing fine. Suddenly their grandparents turn out to have been from Milan, and my nephews win scholarships to private schools.
Milan, take note. Not even half-measures like maybe Rome, or quarter measures like Naples. I had them checked out by my local Sicilian "investor": They are from the next village over from Castello Gondolfo of "Godfather" fame. My connected friend says of their people "They are not of us, but they were never against us. They are good people." Reassuring. I guess...
Cheers,
-dlj.
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Evan,
There are two important lessons to be learned from Donald Trump..
Trump is the son of a very competent and very wealthy builder in New York. He helped his father from an early age, learned the business well, and became a very competent builder himself.
Lesson to be learned: it's an advantage to have a very competent and wealthy father, but even if you don't, or more likely especially if you don't, it's a good thing to learn a trade and learn it well. Now if you're starting out poor you probably have to learn a few extra steps if the trade you want to learn is "How to build skyscrapers and massive massive housing projects..." Donald Trump won't teach you this part.
The second thing to be learned from Trump is that he has failed in a lot of businesses, wasted a lot of his own and other people's money, and generally invested ver-ree suboptimally. This gives us an opportunity to learn something important: judgement. I have my theories on why Trump failed in these large and important ways.
Your mileage may differ. Judgement is like that.
Trump doesn't teach this lesson -- but he sure supplies us with the raw material for learning it.
-dlj.
P.S. I skipped through to the end. It's a common idea that you can learn all the wisdom of China from one book. So be careful.
Your back-notion, that there is a lot to learn from classical China, is of course correct. Well done! Modern China, too.
-d.
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One other thing, Evan, you need to learn content as well as motivation.
One of the best books for entrepreneurs -- keep your seven but put it in your top ten -- is the classic "My Years With General Motors" by Alfred Sloan.
Sloan, together with the DuPonts and only a few other people (plus a few hundred thousand hard working employees, of course) built General Motors out of an ill-assorted and malfunctioning random collection of dreck -- and they made it into the greatest corporation of its time.
It went downhill from maybe 1955 forward, peaking with Eisenhower, perhaps, but that's another story. Their current product looks good to me. I'm your classic Honda admirer, both the car and the man, so that's high praise. They may be back to being winners. Just goes to show you, you need an Obama to come and bail you out after a bunch of complacent, or arrogant, or both, Republicans have screwed the pooch for long enough.
Anyway, Sloan's business autobiography is a study in character, in systems engineering, and in business development. I re-read it every few years.
Every winner should read it at least once.
Cheers,
-dlj.
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I think you were both sick to start with, before Hillary ever came along. You probably have Trumpitis, a hormonal upset that leads to irrationality, hot flushes, and running around in circles, stopping only to post silly messages on the Internet.
Hillary is intelligent, well-qualified, sane, and measured in her judgement. If that's not obvious to you, that's your problem.
See a doctor about your sick feelings, Barbara. Or just take a pill.
-dlj.
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Andrew Bishop
What do you think, Andrew? Being polite to the furriner? The very frequent group dynamic of nobody wanting to make waves?
One possibility might be that they all assumed that it was a Chinese dialect other than their own -- which in fact it very well might be. I don't know.
The dialect thing is interesting: on very professional or competent language programs, e.g. Memrise (some of which is incompetent, but most of which is good), among people all of whom have spent their entire lives in Beijing, there will still be differences in pronunciation audible to us -- but perhaps not noticed by them.
The difference between the BBC English of today and that of my childhood is huge -- which I expect might be denied by people who have lived in England and never noticed the change taking place, but is obvious to me, returning after a gap of fifty or sixty years.
Putonghua, like BBC English, is an artificial and official language, and will both change and become more standard over the next fifty years, I imagine.
Cheers,
-dlj.
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Chip Cooper
"While you're funny, his correct reply to this question would be, "Not at this scale.""
Chip,
The subject of the discussion was not how to tell an enquirer the time of day*.
The subject of the discussion was whether or not there is one and only one correct way of looking at any particular situation or phenomenon.
As for stirring up trouble on the Net, I'm not sure bots, or even human intervention, are called for. Isn't the Second Law of Thermodynamics good enough for you?
Cheers,
-dlj.
* Since the asker's speed as a fraction of c is in question, I'd guess that it's location might be, too. If the asker is Alderbaranian, who are we to say it's size and mass?
-d.
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Frank Underwood If that's a question, the answer is "right up above at 12:14, where you say 2. Stop playing off your pathetic life as a reason America is failing."
If you are then saying "Oh, I see where I said it, but it was only an invention which I am attributing as a form of argument," then my question remains: OK, within the confines of this discussion, just what failure do you have in mind?
And are you saying America was a failure in te past, when CEOs were paid lower multiples of line employees' wages? Or that it would be a failrure in the future, if Americans divided their incomes the way Europeans do, rather than the present way, which seems to be more like Russians and Chinese?
Best,
-dlj.
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I don't think that "wife of an ex-President," particularly an ex-President with spectacular sex baggage, is the best qualification for the Presidency.
Since the Republican charge was the Democrats' boast -- "Eight more years of Obama" -- Joe would have been the better candidate.
Next time around everybody should strive to field the best candidate they can.
For the Democrats, Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan) looks awfully good to me: the future of American politics depends upon smashing the Evangelical-GOP machine and realigning the parties. The Clinton-Obama New Democrats are a perfectly sound conservative party, but there is nobody on the left, and a howling mob of fools occupying the GOP.
Stabenow is the person most responsible for the current farm program -- half way toward repairing the income support of the Red States. She understands the big issue -- that what was perfectly sound when the Socialist Party proposed it in 1920 was only passable by the time Eisenhower enacted it in 1953 -- and total lunacy today, when the largest farmer in America is called "Coca-Cola Limited," and the second largest is some guy called Archer-Daniels-Midland.
Half of all Evangelicals don't vote. This is not because they are stupid or lazy. It's because they think the whole thing is a load of what they shovel out of the barn.
At the same time, the two most important Christians in American politics in the past hundred years have been Rebekkah Baines and Ms Lil Gordy, LBJ's and Jimmy Carter's mothers. Both solid Evangelicals -- but of the type who read their Bibles to find out about Jesus. They didn't listen to talk radio to hear the latest from the paid GOP staffs in the church offices down in Dallas and Tulsa.
Cheers,
-dlj.
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All three points correct, and, uh, obvious and elementary. But what about American stupidity?
My favorite is Chrysler, whose "pioneer" head in China -- years after they had subcontracted out the Jeep market there -- took two years to figger out that the head of the Party in his plant also happened to be head of the union -- and also happened to be his secretary. Like, Duh. Sleepwalk much?
How many of these companies' staff in China can, ahem, read and speak the local languages? Think that might have anything to do with it?
And then there's the question of the wily Orientals' suspicious numeracy. All these western companies have their books audited by Big Three auditors who are paid by and serve management. Hel-looo... You've lied to yourselves on your books, and you haven't gotten caught. Way to go Western business geniuses!
So no, Bloomberg, your three little reasons are not the only three reasons Chinese competition rides you out on a rail.
-dlj.
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NatureGirlWOO
His father employed him as an assistant in every money-making venture he ever played a part in, then died and left him $200 million in government subsidized apartments.
Trump has never made a cent in real estate on his own. His only two real estate ventures not done with his father were the Plaza Hotel and Atlantic city. For a Google giggle, search on "Trump, Plaza Hotel" and follow through. He was like a kid in a candy store, paid too much for everything, and ended up losing the hotel, his yacht, his airline, and most of his inherited money. Atlantic City I assume you know about. Total grifter. Only his youth, his father's political connections, and general sympathy spared him from personal bankruptcy.
He didn't build any empire. He inherited an empire, and he turned it into part shares in a few buildings here and there. He's not even on any Top Ten list of Manhattan developers. Luckily his daughter married real real estate money.
He loses money running golf courses, and he loses money at every bit or retail and branding he tries on his own. There's a good chance the "Trump University" fraud will break him entirely.
The only money he has ever made has been on TV. He plays the part of a loud, pushy, imitation wannabe businessman. Easy job: he's just playing himself.
Cheers,
-dlj.
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Devin,
I think you're using "governmentintervention" like a mantra of evil. The fact is government intervention very often causes huge increases in the general wealth, well-being and freedom.
The elementary example is the traffic light, which tells people unambiguously when they have to stop or when they have the state's permission to start. All enforced by jack-booted men with guns. Bossy, bossy, bossy -- but a huge net increase in everybody's mobility hence freedom, and safety, hence well-being.
In due course, a generation or so after everybody else, the US will end up with a Canadian style single-payer health insurance system. If you're lucky you'll get Canadian style independent medicine. In the worst case you'll end up with the current US-style of commercial and bureaucratic medicine. Either way, insha-Allah, you'll end up with socialization of the insurance function.
This will make you richer and freer. Hillary, even now, is entitled to a good deal of the credit.
Best,
-dlj.
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+Devin Waddell
Devin,
"Failed policies" is the whimper of a guy who didn't invest when Bush left the Dow-Jones at six thousand and change, before No Drama Obama brought it back up into Clinton-type territory, north of 16,000. Better luck next time.
Trump does not have better sense in business. Trump has not made a cent in business since his father died. The old man was an excellent developer of working-class housing, and made enough money at it to bail poor little Donald out every now and then.
For a Google giggle, search on "Trump, Plaza Hotel." And laugh. The guy has the judgment of a kid in a candy store, and the poor banks financed him because they thought Daddy was part of this "Trump Organization" thingie. He was -- until he wasn't.
Little Donald can't borrow in New York anymore without Daddy around, and has to hustle his funnypaper in Hong Kong and the Middle East. I'm not sure having a President in debt in those two places is a terribly wise idea...
Trump's claimed net worth now, a little over $4 billion, is less than his shareholders' and creditors' losses in his companies' serial bankruptcies. I.e. the guy is a net net business parasite. Luckily he was able to land an honest job, playing the part of a loud-mouthed businessman on TV.
This seems to have paid fairly well. He's probably unusual for a Republican in hiding his taxes because they show how little, not how much, he's worth.
There's a new free app called "Grammarly" out there, and you should take a look at it. It's much too American in its promiscuous use of the Harvard comma, but it would save you from the several errors that mar your post above. https://www.grammarly.com/
Cheers,
-dlj.
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The human genome is Africa plus small change. All the peoples of Eurasia, the Americas, and all the island cultures everywhere are descended from a few hundred, or at most a few thousand, bunches of people who came "Out of Africa" over the past couple of hundred thousand years.
That means all of the variety to be found around the world is also to be found in Africa. Some of the variety to be found in Africa is to be found al around the world. Most of it isn't.
That's why the tallest and the shortest peoples are Africans. It stands to reason that to the extent that the various intelligences are physiologically based, their extremes will all be found in Africa -- and some of them may be found elsewhere as well.
There has got to be a lower bound of stupidity below which people just can't get by. This will be pretty much the same everywhere, varying by environment. The stupidest possible Arctic dweller, necessarily being cunning at the hunt and at year-round planning, will be a while lot smarter than the stupidest possible Mediterranean happily pulling juicy olives off trees.
On the smart end, where there are no limits, variety produces variety. My own Dinka daughter, who has two very smart parents, is about half a standard deviation higher in IQ, as found by standard North American paper or computer tests, than either of us. Natural variation.
Our cousin Manute Boll, the former basketball player, was 7'7" (and pretty bright, too). We have variations in all the intelligences across both sides of our families, too.
-dlj.
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"They're the process modules," he says, portentously, as though he's explained something.
"Process modules" is scientific bafflegab for "I dunno, they're fings wot does stuff."
The whole question we want answered is obviously "What's the economics of all this?" That breaks down into money, energy, and the thermodynamics of liquifying gas, then turning it back into gas again late. Why?
Now if you'd tell us what "process" goes on in those "modules," you'd have taken the first simple step toward answering what are really simple, but interesting, question, get it?
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FYI: "A crore (/krɔːr/; abbreviated cr) denotes ten million (10,000,000 or 107 in scientific notation) and is equal to 100 lakh in the Indian numbering system. It is written as 1,00,00,000 with the local 2,2,3 style of digit group separators (one lakh is equal to one hundred thousand, and is written as 1,00,000)."
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@Ausf
" There are only two types of employee, profitable, and fired" you say.
A wee bit simple-minded, don't you think?
The boss' daughter is the obvious joke exception, but quite seriously, a large part of any organization's work is self-maintenance, of very indirect profitability, and speculation about the future, a great deal of which is waste.
Cynicism is generally the wisdom of the dolt, a cheap laugh, but rarely a useful analysis.
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daddyadam 1971
In 1967, I interviewed Col. James R. Corson, a war hawk. He was the real thing: if America had been able to produce 500 soldiers like him, the Vietnamese would have lost and the French puppets the US was supporting would have won. America did produce 500 of his quality -- but most of us opposed the war.
At one point he pulled an M-16 down off the wall on his stairs as we sat in his living room. "You lefties don't seem to understand this sorta stuff," he shouted at me, squeaking melodramatically as right-wingers tend to do. "I think I do, sir," I answered. "I can can take your head off ten times out of ten at 1300 yards. With a Lee-Enfield. Or an FN-C2."
"Oh," he said in a rather small voice.
We got down to chatting, first about riflery, at which we were both very good, and then about the war, on which we disagreed but I gave him full credit for his tactical skill and personal decency -- though not for the aims of the colonialist Saigon government he was supporting.
We became friends over the years, and worked together on a couple of national security issues where we were both on the same side, America's.
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@richardgorski23
Just for the record, Richard, the word you're looking for is probably "Democratic." The Administration of the United States is currently Republican, Richard, as it has been for the last three and a half years, Richard.
You can call me if you ever want to discuss politics, too, Richard, but this isn't that moment, is it? Richard?
Did your mother make it difficult for you, Richard, giving you that pesky two-syllable name, Richard? Sooo sad. Richard.
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Dan,
The idea that we have more sensory inputs to distract us today than people had in the past seems to me totally horseshit. If you go outside and lie on your back in a park at night, look up at the sky and listen to the million bugs around you, then try to list it all, you will realise that your cave people a zillion years ago were just as overwhelmed as you are -- or just as under control as I am.
The cave people could lump it all together, "stars. bugs. same old same old," or they could try to analyse them, "hmm, less Moon tonight, and the bugs are quieter. I wonder if the bugs are reacting to the Moon? Or is the weather colder and does that have anything to do with it?" I imagine they had different ways of looking at stuff, differing between people, and differing for each person depending on their mood or perhaps on their conscious aim.
Doncha think?
Uh, did you try thinking?
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DF AMO
Another word for them is "trolls." (And you look like one of them.)
The following is from the current issue of "The Bulwark," a Republican anti-Trump newsletter:
"Teenagers, some of them minors, are being paid to pump out the messages at the direction of Turning Point Action, an affiliate of Turning Point USA, the prominent conservative youth organization based in Phoenix, according to four people with independent knowledge of the effort. Their descriptions were confirmed by detailed notes from relatives of one of the teenagers who recorded conversations with him about the efforts.
"The campaign draws on the spam-like behavior of bots and trolls, with the same or similar language posted repeatedly across social media. But it is carried out, at least in part, by humans paid to use their own accounts, though nowhere disclosing their relationship with Turning Point Action or the digital firm brought in to oversee the day-to-day activity. One user included a link to Turning Point USA’s website in his Twitter profile until The Washington Post began asking questions about the activity."
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@elkslayer7399
The old Lee-Enfield rifle was accurate to 1,350 yards, which was the longest target on the Canadian Army ranges. At that distance, for the last half or third of the bullet's flight, you can see it, or at least the shock-wave around it is visible. Its path is a spiral, and I've often wondered whether the effect of the spiral was connected to the Earth's Coriolis in any way.
The bull on the targe, however, is a foot square, so the movement of the air which you judge by looking at the plant life very carefully is more important than the circumference of the spiral...
Canadian troops in Afghanistan have claimed sniper victories at well over a kilometre, but their refiles these days are nothing you or I would recognize, $35,000 assemblages of electronics and weirdity far different from anything in my time. The NATO FNC-2, itself from a planet different from the one the Lee-Enfield inhabited, was the most advanced thing I ever trained on.
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That Heisenberg would not have an answer on the resolving power of microscopes and telescopes is not credible. These are simply high-school stuff, so Hossenfelder has probably fallen for some cocktail-party version of Heisenberg's Ph.D. problems here.
The lessons drawn here, that thinking about the two limits in electron-photon terms could lead to one particular derivation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and that thinking about a question even after the exam is worthwhile, are perfectly sound. The assertion of him being saved from his ignorance by Sommerfeld, however, sounds like your pure, normal, average historical fairy-story.
Wien's Law, btw, states that "the black-body radiation curve for different temperatures will peak at different wavelengths that are inversely proportional to the temperature." ~ Wikipedia. That's a fine starting point for anybody who wants to follow the The Ultraviolet Catastrophe path into quantum mechanics.
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It's bitter because it's a straightforward split on IQ lines: Remainers are everybody with IQs over 95 with the exception of a ver-ree few over-refined but still bright fascists. The exiters are all of the stupid, plus the few dozen fascists, nationalists, and a few ancient Imperialists. (The few Exiters of normal decency and intelligence are represented by this guy Shriver, suddenly claiming to be on-the-fence and unpersuaded.)
The first group are bitter because they see many of their own failures starkly exposed.
The mass of the stupid are angry becuse their exploiters have hectored them into becoming that way.
It seems to me the main responsibility here is David Cameron's. He set up his referendum for reasons having nothing to do with Europe: he was simply trying to dish his own extremist Right. This crowd are Boris, Rees-Mogg, simply performance actors who had to go into politics because they failed their try-outs for Monty Python. The stupid twit he is, Cameron failed to realise that the majority of those who put him in 10 Downing Street are convincable, in the short run, given only enough lies by these charlatans. So he lost, and there's a good chance he's taking Britain down with him.
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When I started the coin laundry industry in Japan in 1972, one of the things I had going for me was the blindness of my potential competitors. The fish can't see water problem: Japanese decision-makers were utterly blind to important realities about Japan.
One of these important realities was working women. "Oh, no, Japanese women just get married and settle down," was the airy, i.e. empty-headed, sort of generalization I would hear. "But so and so," women that we both know, "is working," I would protest. "Yes, but that's just part-time."
Government figures confirmed what they said. Part-time work was defined as work that did not lead to a pension, and since women were not awarded pensions for most jobs, it followed that they were working part-time. Part-time for a job did not mean part-time for the worker. A working-class woman with a baby and a toddler might very typically deliver newspapers from 4:30 to six, scurry home to make breakfast, then off to an hour or so as a crossing guard, then to six, eight or ten hours of looking after a shop, secretarial work, or industrial production.
I once visited a tourist town, mostly a scenic collection of whorehouses out in the mountains, and my host pointed with pride to an array of multi-storey "tea-houses" by the river. "During the war, they produced the fuses for all the anti-aircraft shells," he said. By then the girls were spending their off-hours putting export gee-gaws into plastic packing, boxes, and shipping containers. That was forty years ago, and I imagine such, ahem, work-houses have been off-shored to Indonesia, Vietnam, and perhaps even India and Malaysia.
The actual facts were that women on average joined the workforce younger, left it older (because, of course, they didn't have pensions), and were employed at a higher rate in all age cohorts in between (because smaller proportions of them were students, business owners, or otherwise free not to work).
In the gig economy, I think we can expect similar degrees of unreality about the definitions of "facts" and in the reporting of conditions. In construction in Canada, for instance, the dangers of various sectors are misreported because of workers' natural care for each other. Vast swaths of injuries go unreported simply because, what the hell, it's just going to get the guy in trouble. Contrariwise, some specialities seem more dangerous than they actually are because if someone has a serious injury, e.g. breaking their back falling off a roof, people will rally around to get the victim added to some category that actually gets Workmens' Comp, rehab, or whatever is needed but not actually covered in their situation.
There are huge distractions and misdirections across industry, caused by good intentions, bad intentions, and sad, misdirected, incentives.
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@carmine6871
"Taxes on houses arguably make up a quarter of the..."
Somebody seems to have erased that argument and the evidence for it from your post, Carmine.
You did have an argument and evidence for it, didn't you, Carmine?
It is just terrible that such an unfortunate thing should happen to all your logical argument and evidence, Carmine.
Could you perhaps report the, Carmine? "We'd all love to see the plan."
By the way, you say " The top 20% of earners pay more than 2/3rds of all income tax revenues already. " What country are you talking about? If it's the United States the percentage would be 61% of the tax on about 50% of the income -- assuming you believe everything they and the Fraser Institute say about their income, that is.
<koff. choke>
Must have been something I ate. does anybody have a glass of water.
Oh, yeah, taxes: Considering that the bottom ten or twenty percent are bloody poor, that strikes me as a small step in the right direction.
Assuming they and the Fraser Institute are telling the truth, that is.
But of course we all know the rich are all honest and the Fraser is the very model of a modern major Institute.
Uh, Carmine?
The evidence?
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A thought for a future video for you: Didn't that Charles Crocker railroad guy owe a lot of money to a lot of English banks, uh, it is said?
And wasn't all the documentation on these, ahem, uh, koff, choke, alleged debts kept in a certain shack out thar on the railroad in the middle of nowhere?
An', Lordy-me, didn't the shack burn to the ground? With all the documents too, by some sad and unhappy coincidence?
And as a result, so it is said, the pore unforchunnit English bank didn't get paid. So in a way, Crocker got his railroad free an' for nuthin'.
Which makes it kinda a hole lot eeesier to be a railroad baron, don' it?
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Not mentioned in this very sound video: She has in fact used her police/military powers once -- on Fiji. Apparently the Indians, originally brought in as indentured labour, i.e. damn near slaves, on foreign owned plantations, have become the economic and intellectual elite there, and tough on the Fijians, whom you and I have never heard of.
Apparently they have the one Friend they need, and she lives in Buck House, whence she has stepped in from time to time to tell the legally elected, and Indian dominated, local Parliament to just cut it out with whatever they were up to.
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Trump is the stupid and slightly pretentious mediocre person's idea of an intelligent person.
What supplies the "evidence" that convinces these people of Trump's intelligence? There must be something.
He is big. He is energetic, and ambitious. And he started out with hundreds of millions of dollars of his grandfather's and father's money.
These give him the ability to impress, and in many ways. Sheer size contributes animal dominance, a Darwinian inheritance from our pre-human times. His energy give the often false impression of success. His ambition has forced him to learn a lot of clever tricks.
And his inherited money has given him to ability to appear well-dressed, well-housed, and -- sometimes -- generous. This last has let him buy admiration, ersatz friendship, and pretended love.
The net result? The very harmful arrival of monkey politics, of tree and pampas animal jockeying, in human society.
Does it work? Is a $7.8 trillion dollar budget deficit a sign of four years' competent occupation of the Oval Office? No, it doesn't, because no, it isn't.
He is a flamboyant failure, except as a successful dominant monkey, and he is a danger to our society. Multi-trillion dollar budget disasters are not the only disaster he can come up with. Large energetic animals can break all sorts of stuff they are allowed to come in contact with.
That's why, at last, it looks as though he's going to be stopped. America's friends are beginning to look forward to a sigh of relief.
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One of the first big pieces of "video" was radio-telescopy. (1962 to 1972, my time). A great deal of the information in this is apparently picked up interferometrically, with pairs of observing stations today being located in Earth orbit and out by Neptune or, if its not politically incorrect, maybe Pluto. In those days they had to settle for California and New Zealand, and a bunch of flyboys kindly schlepped the two-inch Ampex video-tape around for us -- by Phantom jet or some damn thing -- to get their credit hours in the cockpit. ARPAnet probably paid for itself in the avgas, the fuel for all those students' planes, it saved the taxpayers when they put this odd variety of SneakerNet out of business. Or at least they had to put their flying credits on somebody else's job sheet...
SneakerNet was when the 180K seven-inch floppy had replaced the ten-incher, and people covered the gaps between, say, Universities of Michigan and Utah (Mormons were pioneering whole swaths of stuff like computer graphics) by carrying physical floppies from Point A to Point B. The Ampex video-tape jape was the Airforce Academy's kind of SneakerNet.
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@keithtwizzy2700
Keith,
I have no interest in convincing you otherwise. It's not an interesting idea for me. Nor does the notion serve my health, wealth, safety, or any other secular interest of mine.
Let me take this space, though, to point out to you -- and to poor Vladimir Putin who no doubt has somebody reading your output -- that there's a Sudentenland 1938 aspect to all of this.
Putin now knows this -- though he apparently didn't two years ago when he apparently really believed that he could just walk in and take over the place.
You can find out about it simply enough. I suggest just Googlling "Sudetanland 1938," "Chamberlain appeasement," maybe even "prisoners' dilemma" and the games theoretical disciplines that you will find around it.
Spend an hour or so a day at this until you understand it, OK?
Then take a month or so to consider the question that governs the rest of your life, Which side are you on?
Good luck and best wishes.
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Because interfering with the tides by putting harvester propellers underwater is exerting a force against the Moon and bringing it closer and closer to Earth.
Consider the pachinko machines: all the pachinko parlours in the world are illuminated with electric lights (even though the machines themselves are hand-powered, to flip the balls.)
If all the roughly 13,000 pachinko parlours in the world have an average of, say, 750 kilowatts of electric lights and air conditioning, that would come to thirteen million horses pulling the Moon toward the Earth.
Slowly, slowly, spiralling in, that could be the end of us all in 4,177,934,427 years.
And between eight and nine months!
That's within a few hundred million years of the time there has been life on Earth. Plus or minus eight or nine months. And pachinko parlours are not the only thing consuming electricity. I forgot about all the other stuff. Oops.
Be careful what you wish for.
Also don't play pachinko.
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You're making it up out of thin air, silly Bates. You have no business slandering our judicial system: it makes mistakes, but is overall honest, competent, and morally rooted in our very sound society. Your ignorant spew is just your morning belch, without a single actual fact in it.
A few of the leaders are certainly going to jail for a while, dozens of street idjits are going to get a few months of severe warning, and hundreds of dummies have just been told where the limits are.
Good move by the good guys.
Thank you, Toronto and Ontario police services (and, I would guess, American informants and co-workers) -- and Big Thank-You to many individual sound and competent cops.
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Jonas,
You're pointing at an important bunch of issues. It would be nice if you could say something useful about them some time.
To stick to politics for just a moment, do you know the term "pulling up the ladder"?
The metaphor is of a person surely almost totally non-existent, one who climbs to safety out of lethal danger, but then pulls up the ladder behind them, to keep their friends, their family, and their colleagues from the safety of their now lofty perch..
I share Curtis Yarvin's disgust with a major part of FDR's legacy, but here is how it disgusts me:
Rural America lives in health and wealth on the planning and subsidies of FDR's New Deal.
Today, the farmers of whole square miles of subsidised and science-supplied agricultural wealth send their children to schools costing the house I grew up in per year. And then they vote to deny such chance of wealth to the urban working class, to the Vietnamese refugee who mans their fire department, to the Mexican who builds his son's or daughter's profitable medical clinic.
No "little monarchies" there. Simply successful thugs.
That, to my mind, is America's moral crisis, it's deep, all-weakening, rot.
That's the core of the current sin, not the little stuff -- the silly neon and the slick accounting of Atlantic City.
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By "human civilization" at 2:10, what he means is "today's Europe."
Uh, China and India, not quite so much...
North, Central, and South America's many civilizations? Um, uh.
(And no, the Tigris and Euphrates did not meet miles inland, the way the map here shows, thousands of years ago. "Real Life Lore" is just a game we play on YouTube.)
Um Qasr might not be a deep sea port on account of the fact that the Persian Gulf is not any deep sea -- but if we got into that maybe we'd have to take the video down and do it over from scratch, so let's don't, shall we?
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Great article. Note, however, that the Velvet Revolution did not "happen" in 1989. It had been trying to burst out for at least 20 years.
In 1968 a then well-known Czech "Futurist," (in this case the word meaning a follower of the French Betrand de Jouvnal) visited the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.cy were fobbed off on mecause I was known to be a perhaps de Juvenalian.
Their leader was killed in an auto accident in Czechoslovakia that winter, and we have all been around Stalinism just enough to be suspicious of the accident.
Somewhere in there they all visited Toronto, my long time home town, and I happened to meet them there. I took them to The Brunswick House, at that time a somewhat jazz-oriented drinking hole in what was still a very conservative city, and over a few still fifteen-cent a small glass draft beers they told me their plans: Velvet Revolution. 1969.
It was all very precise and detailed, somewhat idealistic with hippy tinges. But it was also highly intelliggent, decent, and democratic in outlook.
But it took 20 years to happen.
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Trump 20 to life!
I'd be very happy to see the feeble old con get three months in Rikers' Island, a check-in for dinner at some Airforce base Club Fed, and then supervised parole picking up garbage on a beach, Golf Coast or Pacific, please, not Mar-a-Lago, for ten or twenty years. Four hours a day, sign here, and see you tomorrow, Mister, uh, Trump.
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Calling the US a democracy in 1862 is off by about 103 years -- or by three if we want to be charitable.
At our nicest we can say that the US started to think about democracy with the 13th and 14th Amendments, after the Civil War. This made it into a theoretical, property-based, males-only, and quite limited democracy.
The serious attempt to put a government by male and female adults of all "races," i.e. colours, starts with the later civil rights acts, e.g. the LBJ 1965 one. This is still under constant attack by Republicans in several states, and is not very well implemented anywhere.
All the American democracies, the United States of America and its South American fellow-republics, are very recent works in progress. About a third of the human race, Europe the British Commonwealth, Taiwan, Japan, and the Tigers, can claim to be functioning, stable, and reasonably achieved democracies.
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Dave,
When I covered the space race for the CBC, back around Project Mercury, the folks at NASA told me the solution to everything: "mid-course correction."
It took me a while to figger out -- well, actually I shared an office with the guy who made sure we could hit Moscow at one point, so I wasn't the one who figgered it out -- that you do them thar mid-course corrections eight time a flight. Or eight times a minute. Or eight times a second... You know: Moore's Law.
The art of the deal is not one threat and one silly compliment. A winning negotiation is, your offer changes in mid-sentence, in response to the saccades in the other guy's eye.
Anybody building a system with a zillion parameters, and their strategy laid out beforehand, is strictly from Trump Land. Map it out, then hammer it.
From your fine explanation here, it looks like the Chinese are running language models the other way, the same way we run ICBMs.
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He and I lived in the same little "village," Ookayama, Meguro-ku, a section of Tokyo, in 1972. I was on the north side of the station while he was on the Institute of Technology side of the tracks, but we had acquaintances in common, so I've followed him over the years -- approvingly for the most part.
I only know what I've read in the papers, but it does seem to me he did some genuinely dumb things in recent years so I don't think it's all going to come back.
Net net, though, Jess, I agree with you. The majority of his bets are sound and they'll come back. He's a smart and decent man, and he'll be able to figure out where he made mistakes, I'm pretty sure.
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Okhan,
I sympathise with your sensible posts here about Turkey, but you're wrong about the US.
The US is going through a bunch of different crises right now, but it is fundamentally sound. The Constitution is one of the great works of mankind, and there are enough good and decent people who understand that to pull the country through the nonsense going on right now.
If you want to be reassured, just look at one basic brutal fact: the death rate among the people who vote 70-30 for Trump is a bit north of 7% per year. They are being replaced by younger, better educated, less racist, better informed, more optimistic, and more decent people.
Trumpism is the last gasp of the obese, booze and sugar-swilling, cigarette-smoking, cynical, tired, racist old whiteguys.
The US still has its share of the best technology, its share of the best education, its share of... Above all, the US has enough sound and decent people that it will pull through.
Depend on it.
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@seditt5146
I'm not kidding at all. Tesla claimed to have invented the high voltage coil, and he managed to get a patent on one version of it. Similarly, he took out patents on a whole bunch of trivial variations on improvements to the AC motor.
He made his career out of buying drinks for news reporters at the Plaza Hotel, and he was lucky enough to be on the scientifically correct side of a huge public debate, that between Westinghouse, the main developer of alternating current ("invented " a couple of generations earlier by Faraday ad the circle around him), and Edison, the highly egotistical but often successful inventor. Westinghouse was right, Edison was expensively, and rather stupidly, wrong, and Tesla promoted himself as the promotor of Westinghouse. In the real world, it was objective reality that declared Westinghouse the winner.
You've been taken in by the flim-flam, and that's a damn shame. I hope you are aware that part of Tesla's reputation rests in large part on the Big Lie, that he invented AC. He flat out didn't.
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This is false and idiotic. The very first rule of pistol handling is that you don't point a gun at anybody unless shooting them is one of the options. Gun play stops with childhood nonsense.
The use of pretend guns for pretend actions in movies is a very special case, and comes with its own set of rules -- or which a competent "armorer," i.e. disarmorer, is a small part.
Disobeying the rules and acting with irresponsibility is, quite exactly, a fault. The people who do so are guilty, of torts, of stupidity, and often of crimes. (Pointing a gun, real or imitation, for instance is the crime of assault.)
This is all well known, and you, anonymouse DeerDeer, are a fool to ignore it and spread lies.
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These people are making a mystery using the malleable material ignorance. How did hunter-gatherers "suddenly" turn into farmers? And more suddenly than industrialization, even... Well duh. I dunno. Ignorance makes it all a profound mystery.
The facts? Hunters and gatherers were different people. Men and women mainly. What did they do with the stuff they'd hunted and gathered? Some of it they ate and used. The rest they exchanged with other people.
Trade, steadily, the whole time, from the beginning of the hunting and gathering right up to today, is the link between hunting, gathering, farming, and then today's frantic making and selling.
Farming is what happens when the stuff you've gathered sprouts, or the tamer of the animals you've hunted give birth and you keep the tamer ones alive longer. (Hummock farming, a real industry right up to today in parts of Africa, is the kitchen-gardening of the gatherer. Hunters walking by can see what grows in your hammock and make an offer for some of it. Trade.)
This brings up an oddity, the information revolution. "Information" is when you think about what you can get for your spare sabre-toothed tiger meat that you want to exchange. Information has been around for a long time. It didn't happen yesterday just because Shannon didn't publish his Information Theory until 1948 or so.
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@Otzkar
Yes. But.
There are two examples which support your thesis, the honesty of the Quakers, as exemplified by Quaker Oats, and the trustworthiness of kashrut, as shown, unusually, by Hershey's chocolate.
The Quaker Oats people first got rich by refusing to negotiate prices back before the American Revolution. They said, first to themselves, then sotto voce to the public, "It is a lie to say the price is so-and-so when in fact you're willing to sell for a lower price. We're just going to say what our selling price is and that's that." People believed them, and made note of the fact that they didn't have to waste time haggling. Sales up. profits up. Prices? Exactly sideways.
Kashrut? Is kosher better? Well, yes, or no, or maybe. Kosher killing of beeves, which has been copies, centuries ago by Moslems, is less unmerciful than the ancient alternatives. The ban on pork was certainly wise before modern verterinary medicine, and still makes sense today in tropical climates. Other than those examples, it's pretty much of a wash, imho. Your moleage may differ. Anyway, about 70% of everything out there is kosher, whether it has a heksher on it or not.
The counter-examples, Otzkar, are legion. The fact is, volume production makes things cheaper. Henry Ford was right -- but not quite as right as he thought once Alfred P. Sloan came along and rationalized General Motors -- with its rainbow of different colored cars (using fast-drying paint pioneered by, General Motors again, Charles Kettering.) {The long and interesting Ford story also involves two or three brilliant engineers on his staff, and any number of stupid mistakes. But they're not central to this, very important, advertising story.}
Long story short: Net net, over the whole economy, advertising pays for itself. But. So does Consumers Digest.
What you say here, Otzkar, is a good precautionary thought. It's not a sound rule.
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@jld9822
Joel,
Of the two videos you suggested above, the Trump 9/11 piece is a moving and very competently presented bit by the President. It reminds us that he remains an accomplished television presenter when given professional writers and direction.
The Mark Levin piece is criminal and will have gotten people killed by now, weeks after it aired. The man is a nut job with politics bordering on treasonous anyway and now he has added a murderous psychopathy to his profitable political entertainment act.
You owe it to your family and to people close to you, Joel, to get informed. If you are going around maskless you could very well be an asymptomatic carrier and end up accidentally killing your parents.
No. I'm not kidding.
{Later: In your note to @jorgemtds you miss a small but important point: the virus certainly originated in Wuhan, China. Its main entry point to the US, however, was New York, from Europe. You already have "leaders" like Trump, in Hungary, Poland, and Britain. This is ironic because we can expect future outbreaks of viral disease from Central Europe where animals are still bred in conditions close to the families that own them.}
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But, but, but Tim, are you telling me all those MAGATypes only know how to break stuff?
That's, that's, that's, well I'm just so kerflustered, Tim. I would never have imagined such a thing possible of upstanding folks like the Trumps. Donnie, and Eric an junior Donnie. An' fer shure there are kinder people in there, too, you know. you know.
I mean they have a deep bench of intellectuals, Tommy Tuberville an Stephen Miller, and people like Charlie Kirk and Dinesh D'Sousa to give the whole thing a depth and breath of patriotism with that strong administrative competence America needs to run its guvvermint...
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Little known fact about Socrates (6:21): he was a reliable, trustworthy, leader of his men. When your army is routed, the survivors are the small groups who stick together. Socrates was a corporal in the Athenian army defeated in one of the major battles between Athens and Sparta. While the Athenians were running for the hills and getting chopped up retail by the Spartans, Socrates' small section of hoplites came out of it alive because he held them together as a coherent group rather than helpless scared individuals.
Lawrence, in his commentary on the Arabs' victory over the Germans in the desert, speaks admiringly of the German survivors, "They were magnificent," little groups who stuck together in the chaos and saved each others' lives while their army as a whole was being ground up to Hell.
Socrates wasn't any airy-fairy academic. He was a tough, Prussian, drill-master and both your leader and your buddy in the fight.
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@TheFront
"I hadn't even thought of that!" you say?
You don't need to think of it: it's not true.
The popular myth that the Divine Wind stopped one particular Mongol invasion "fleet" may or may not be true, but Japan's inviolability until MacArthur arrived is utter nonsense.
There's an olde Japanese saying, "Beyond the Tone river, nothing but savages," and the wall at the South-Western end of the Odakyu Line (walk out of the station and up the hill in the direction of Kamakura) marks the end of what Edo controlled in pre-Meiji times.
The peoples of Okinawa and Hokkaido (not even counting the Ainu) are as different as Bantu and Nilotics in Africa, and, like the various African groups, no doubt have their various Great Treks behind them.
A shared Japanese language spread somewhat with literacy over the past 500 years or so -- a literacy based upon the invasion of Chinese characters and their subsequent adaptation. The invention of railroads, then radio and television, accelerated it. (Railroads also did wonders for breaking down the, uh, Kentuckification of the local genomes in villages across the land...) If you've ever been to Sendai, though, you'll appreciate that the birth of the Japanese language dates only from the importation of the Boeing 707.
The story of Japan's opening up by Commodore Perry is a cute myth cobbled up for the American tourist trade. The "sakoku," Japan's supposed closing to the outside world, was an administrative measure and existed on paper. The Noto Peninsula on the North Coast of Honshu never stopped trading with Korea and China and the English had substantial commercial ties to Western japan quite apart from the legally sanctioned ones at Dejima or Hiroshima. The fortunes made by the families trading with the outside world down through those centuries are still identifiable today: they largely escaped the MacArthur reforms after WWII, though they've also been exposed to the subsequent inflations with mixed results.
Long story short: anybody who tells you about their racial purity is living in a dream orld, or a nightmare, of their own creation.
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@josephpeeler5434
Re your advertising piece, https://www.rmegold.com/blog/what-money-meant-to-founding-fathe...
That's insane, Joe, if it's not a lie. Let me know, do you prefer to be considered mad, stupid, dishonest, or some graduated combination?
Money meant Mexican or English coins, IOUs at the grocery store, wampum if they did business with the Americans, and lists of debts settled quarterly or annually, often in crops or labor.
To the "Founding Fathers," the leaders of the successful uprising, gold meant gold.
Since you are such a total fucking gullible babe in the woods, Joe, let me point out what that site is really doing: they are selling stuff to suckers. Mainly they are buying gold at the ever-varying market price and selling it to people who will swallow a good line. Everything on that site is half-truths, some nonsense, and sales patter.
If you actually need some gold, maybe for your electronic or model railroad hobby, I would encourage you to talk to your dentist and ask them where they buy theirs. You'll get more gold for less money that way.
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@MyVlogTubes
Hunh? Here in Canada I don't see your "those racists bastards of moslims."
The muslims I meet here tend to be refugees from exactly the sort of authoritarian and mob-violent societies you are objecting to. They make fine Canadians and add to the richness of our culture.
You are right, however, in pointing to the problems of the societies they are fleeing. My own feeling, and it's tentative, is that the racism and particularism that you so correctly object to are surface manifestations, the waves above the deep current, of larger problems.
The larger problem is not the shouting about who wears what kind of hat on Sunday, or Saturday, or... It is massive unemployment of young men. There are well-known false solutions to this, militarism and gangsterism, the latter often disguised (as in the United States) as religious fundamentalism.
I think you should pay more attention to that, and think about solutions to it.
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At 4:31 this story exactly contradicts itself. Just before that they say that "binary" transmits ones and zeroes. Then I guess somebody figgered out that uh-oh, you can't transmit a zero, so they 'fessed up.
"Binary" is just another sort of FM.
"Ones" are slightly faster frequencies than "zeroes." In this convention, anyway.
Then they do it again at 12:15. When things get crowded, they "use digital signals encoded using phase and ampllitude." That's called frequency modulation, FM, and ampllitude modulation, AM. It's not digital.
When they use the phrase "efficient digital signal" at 13:00, they are lying. What they mean is "efficient analog signal." (Do they use PCM, pulse-code modulation, between the diaphragm of the microphone and the encoder of the radio transmitter? They don't say.)
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And remember, kiddies, "each" means one. so each of anything is singular and takes a singular verb. When somebody, e.g. Wendover, says "each are" it means they've lost track of their subject. They don't know what theyre talking about.
Just take it down, rewrite it and re-record it, OK, Wendover? The pictures are fine, and the technical background is roughly correct. It's only every single detail that you've gotten wrong, Wendover.
You've assaulted 87,000 people to date, August '24. Time to stop maybe?
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@Donald Anglin
I just read "The Faith of Donald Trump" last week. It says that Trump has a faint and distant affiliation with Presbyterianism and that American Presbyterianism once, long ago, had an extremely reactionary, indeed medieval, indeed pre-Presbyterianism, aspect to it, of which the author would approve if it actually existed.
It made no plausible connection between the two themes, and indeed the book had a preface by a well-known right-winger expressing amazement that anyone would contemplate writing or publishing such a book. The publisher must have thrown it in for shortage of copy with the full satisfaction, illusory given my existence, that nobody would ever read it.
I point this all out to you to emphasize the inanity of anything Donald Trump might say, least of all to the United Nations on the subject of faith.
. * * *
The Faith of Donald J. Trump: A Spiritual Biography Hardcover – February 13, 2018
by David Brody (Author), Scott Lamb (Author)
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@JohnJaneson
One way you can make huge profits is you produce cars in a low wage country, Call it MiddleCountry. And you sell them, at a profit of course, to yourself in a high wage country. Then you put them on your balance sheet as assets in your companies of this BigUnitedCountry.
Then you call in the auditors you pay, and they advise you, not anybody else, that you're amassing valuable inventory from profitable producing companies you own, so Happy Days.
Bingo: most profitable car company in the world, even if you nave no customers but yourself. Put out enough press releases -- and pay all the stock brokers commissions that get bigger as prices go up, and then what?
Happy, Happy , Happy , Happy Days. That's what.
Couldn't happen? This is the only thing that has happened in the last thirty years.
Put very slightly differently, Do I think Elon Musk is doing with cars exactly what all of the Wall Street of Bernie Madoff's generation did with everything except cars?
Yes.
.
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FYI: Canada's New Democratic Party is formally a Second International Socialist Party, i.e. a social democratic party of the British Labour or Swedish Social Democratic type.
(FWIW, the Internationals are the four or five or six, but who's counting, organizations which in theory represent the unbreakable solidarity of the international working class. They tended to be founded by Karl Marx and would then have to throw him out when he got too weird, at least up to the Third. The Fourth is the Trots, and the Fifth, notionally, is Maoist of about the Gang of Four type, and doesn't seem to exist, except perhaps in Ceylon or someplace strange like that.
The Second is alive and well, its backbone being English Labour and the German and Scandinavian Social Democrats. The First is the Anarchists, and has, I think it was, two members, the English Post Office workers and some other elite bunch of syndicalists.)
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@floatsting20
The Obama Administration was concerned over the fact that Ukraine, a new member of NATO, was governed by a bunch of ought-and-paid-for, utterly corrupt, pro-Russian gangsters.
Vice-President Biden was concerned about the particular crookedness of the top Ukrainian prosecutor, perhaps aware of his misdeed because his son, Biden, a high-powered commercial lawyer, had a major Ukrainian client.
The people of Ukraine rose against their government and threw the bums out in a massive election defeat.
Russia invaded the east of Ukraine, and Obama retaliated with the financial crippling of Russia, which remains in effect.
(The Saudis helped by running the oil tap full blast, butting the price by something like 70%, which devastated the joint. Sadly, it also crippled the good guys in Venezuela, and those troubles are still with us: Trump is lying about Venezuela at every turn.)
That's the essence of it.
If you want to post on public affairs, you should make a habit of reading a varied array of the press. Avoid Fox which is a rancorous sewer of right-wing propaganda. Take everything else with a grain of salt because they are doing their best but they're human.
Google and Bing are your friends: I encourage you to keep reading. As a general proposition America and the Constitution are sound, and people who make a career our of running the country down -- e.g. that "again" as thoug the country were not great -- are just self-serving dummies.
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There are still a tiny number of Trotsky's followers out there. There also exists a tiny cult of residual Leninists who believe the slogan "le pire le mieux." (The worse the better). Their theory is that bad things will make their imaginary "The Revolution" come faster. Think of them as 666ers who have read Das Kapital. In the original German.
The loony right, fertilised with Trump's adequate supply of ordure, magnify these tiny cults, and falsely call them "the Left."
Even Charlie, to his shame, does this, maybe once a month. Remember, he's from Wisconsin, Senator Joe McCarthy's old stamping grounds. Some of us accidentally step on dog turds (or used to: we've beaten dog owners into submission at last, so there's less of it around than there used to be.) in the streets as children.
With Charlie it wasn't dog turds, it was the politics of some of the grown-ups down the street.
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"The more connected we all become, the more difficult it is to spread propaganda and lies." sez Upcycle.
Would that it were so! The central fact of the social media era, however, seems to be exactly the opposite. Western society right now is drowning in bullshit, trolling, and stupidity. Even the honest and decent folks are for the most part flooding the Internet with half-baked, facile, and shallow explanations of things.
Educational video? There is almost none. (Big shout-out to Khan https://www.khanacademy.org/ the major exception. Can we have a Nobel Peace Prize for Salman Khan, puh-leeze?) The first and biggest "educational" effort on the 'Net was MIT's OCW. They point cameras at people talking in classrooms so we can see what classroom education looks like -- a very different thing from participating in online education. We've now seen the backs of a hundred learned heads as they scribble in chalk on blackboards: ah, the electronic age!
Sorry, Upscale Electronics, nice hope, but we're not there yet. All we've accomplished so far is the electronic amplification of the babble of the mob.
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@ThePersianKickboxer
So you may think. They don't even look parallel to each other to me.
Korea, Vietnam and Montenegro have in common their involvement with the disastrous generations-long Stalinist experiment in Russia, but that does not make them the same. Yemen differs. It is a modernization disaster on the edge of a Western, not a Russian, failed expansion.
"Worse" depends on the criterion you choose. Numerically, the one or two million ("but who's counting?") Vietnamese killed by the Americans, French, and their (few) Vietnamese allies looks the worst to me, but your mileage may vary.
The attack by some Serbs on some other Serbs is the only one of the four that looks like an attempted genocide to me, but ethnic differences in Yemen and Korea are certainly important.
I don't know very much about any of them -- but I have visited Korea enough times to know that there is a great deal of papering-over and an equally large amount of plain ignorance among us all about the ethnic differences there. Both northern and southern governments tend to deny that they exist, but that's wishful thinking, to put it charitably.
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Forgiven debt is taxable income. Trump is co-signer on about $1.5 billion, payable in 1998, in debts left from the mess he made and ran away from in Atlantic City. The debt is placed with friendly creditors, probably Russian oligarchs and/or gangsters.
Trump has not yet declared the income represented by these debts not being collected. When he declares it, or when the IRS decides "time's up!" then he will owe tax, at the old, pre-Bush giveaway, pre-Trump giveaway, rates. Plus income. Since 1998.
If it goes to litigation, he could be hit with penalties, too. This is not going to be nice -- particularly for a man whose few actual businesses (as opposed to his successful acting career) has been operated for the past few years by, uh, koff, choke, Eric and Donald Junior, also we may assume, very stable geniuses.
Sad.
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"See. what we do, fellas, is we make an expensive system that doesn't work, and then we crash it into Siberia. That way the Reds will copy it, and they'll have a system that doesn't work, too."
"Hey, Boss, that's great thinking. And if your cunning plot works for this drone we can run it again with the space `shuttle' thingie, right?"
"Guys, that's wonderful. I've got an SST passenger plane we could run for them, too..."
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Eddy,
I'm sure you think that's a sensible post, and it sorta looks that way -- but it isn't.
Toronto currently has about 45,000 "unhoused" people and they are living in about 45,000 government-contolled spaces. They're not out on the street, though, because the various governmental authorities in control of these houses and apartments do not have any coherent set of policies to settle these people "judicially" (or commercially) in the spaces they are in fact occupying.
It's not even that they're not paying: almost all of them are paying, but without settled leases.
Thus is it not enough to do what you ask, supply affordable apartments. There also have to be coherent policies and acceptable legal structures for the long haul. These, at least in Toronto, are very much lacking.
I think it's the same in New York: tens or hundreds of thousands of people have housing but not homes: they are "temporarily" housed -- in some cases for generations in the same place.
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Arif,
You're auditing for a job with the American press, spreading both-handsism everywhere?
Biden is not a clown. He is a serious, perhaps somewhat plodding, working-class politician. He has served long, competently and with decency across the Senate and Administration, and across party lines.
"Clown" describes Trump in some of his moods, it's true, but viper would cover a lot of the others. He is a predatory, immoral, semi-competent, ignorant, and dangerous man, all adjectives chosen carefully.
There is no equivalence between them.
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Such a loud-mouth, assertive, formulaic, fact-free, echoing empty barrel!
Quebec's absurd daily management was set up to put Real Caouette out of business fifty years ago, and it worked. Today's dairy farmers have names like Kraft, Neilsen, and the major co-ops.
Trudeau and Freeland will make a major gesture of giving Donnie Fats a victory at a time and place of their choosing, and they will find some way, probably deep in the tax code, to reward the agribusiness folks who are tapping their feet gently on the sidelines. Donnie will screech that he won a great victory, and life will carry on.
The whole thing is nonsense, the 275% "tariff" is ony symbolic, nobody pays it because of the quotas, the US sells us more dairy than we sell to them, and the totals involved are derisory -- a couple or three MacDonnell-Douglas jets either way.
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Antisemistism is stupid, and so are many antisemites.
(I don't know whether it's still there, but before Wikipedia became very large, and recently pretty competent as well, there used to be a good memo floating around on the then much smaller 'Net, an explanation of the differences between anti-semitism, antisemitism, and anti-Semitism floating around.
Very long story short: "antisemitism," one word, no caps, no hyphen. is best in general usage.
The hyphenated form is people not being sure what to do.
Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, never really existed, but Semitism, with a capital S, was a European, mostly French, antisemitic cult and theory of the 19th century. There may have been, I forget, a deliberately formed group of people working to defeat them. They would have been "Anti-Semites," I suppose.)
Because they are stupid, they think that saying they are anti-Zionist fully expresses their opposition to, and/or hatred of, Jews and all things Jewish.
This is of course nonsense.
Zionism has several meanings at different times and places, and is always a trend within Jewish thought and politics. From the Victorian Age through perhaps 1967 or so, it meant support for the creation of the State of Israel. It was for many years, probably right up to the Holocaust, a minority position of a minority of Jews.
The Orthodox Dogma, back through the centuries, has been that the re-creation of Israel should be in abeyance until the return of the Messiah. This somewhat itchy-scrathy feeling in the back of one's mind, that maybe we shouldn't be doing what we're doing, remains the among many politicians of the Orthodox stream who in fact hold power in that state, the State of Israel which has come into being despite their grandfathers' teaching and political opposition.
Today, in the context of Israeli pollitics, "Zionist" means one of a shifting array of centre-left and liberal democratic politics blocs or schools. To my, older, generation, it means the same thing as Mapai-Mapam used to mean.
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1.) Nice circuit-board, Woz, but who decided on the teak sides for the Apple, the thing we retrospectively call "the Apple I"? For all I know there were dozens of prototype-ish models out there in about 1967. The teak-sided one I saw was on a small Upper East Side network put together by the National Science Foundation, Alvin Toffler and Amitai Etzioni being two of the networkers.*
2.) I really love that bit about redesigning it to have five drilled holes instead of eight. One of the biographies of John D. Rockefeller has him critiquing a guy soldering the tops on oil cans and saving two drops of solder. "But my goodness, I saved millions that way" is roughly what he is supposed to have said.
* Around that time, Etzioni wrote an article in I think Harpers, in which he touched on the subject of memory. He said, "Some things you never forget, like the list of German prepositions which take the (ablative, or nominative or some damn thing), 'aus, auser, bei, mit, nach, zeit, tsu.'." He forgot von.
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@sirkeg1
Simon,
Under Marxist Doctrine, societies move (inevitably, since Marxism is a science, see?) through stages, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism. China, under this schema, has just moved from feudalism to capitalism and they're thinking about how to move to socialism. Communism? That's in the far future. But it's sure. Fer shure.
If they provide you with a program for the show, you might as well read it before screaming that you don't understand what's going on on stage, doncha think?
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It's distasteful, but it is a very genuine trial -- and unusual in that it is one of the few occasions when Trump has been prevented from ducking and weaving, broken-field running, and actually brought into a legitimate legal process.
It may be difficult for you to understand, Chan: Trump has always been, and is, an expert at living unlike the rest of us. He has evaded taxes, cheated on his wives, lied and cheated in every way he ever felt he needed. You, Chan, like the rest of us, have accepted his version of reality.
Now, for once, the old geezer is having to face a bit, at least, just a bit, of the same reality as regular citizens. People like you and me, Chan.
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No, Mr. Trump was never a businessman, Bob, though he played one on TV -- and in his own mind.
As a supposed "real estate developer," he put six of his companies into bankruptcy. This cost people who believed his tall tales and false promises many many millions of dollars. Trump, however, usually managed to escape whole or better.
Eventually the market caught on and his real estate pretences stopped being viable by the end of the last century. Television saved him, and he continued to do exactly the same thing, ow with competent stage directors to take his father's place.
The one accomplishment of his company, the prentiously named boutique "The Trump Organization," was Trump Tower -- carried out by his father, a competent man, and a model for the younger Trump's many dishonesties.
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People forget that there were seven bye-elections during the war, and the results were straightforward: Commonwealth Party 7. National Government, Conservative or Labour depending on the constituency, 0.
Commonwealth was a Communist and Independent-Labour alliance, and the Communists foolishly thought that its steady stream of victories meant that the Revolution was at hand, somehow missing the fact that Independent Labour held them, as they held much else, with a combination of hatred and contempt. (Trotskyism was never as big a deal in Britain as elsewhere, but there is a British brand of Christian Socialism which at least rhetorically sitteth on the left hand of God.)
Independent Labour walked away from Commonwealth by the time of the 1945 election, delivering not just these seven seats but a crucial several percent of the vote everywhere. None of them had any use for Churchill's imperialism, and Tory backbenchers' opposing the Beveridge Report, mandating the National Health Service, was an anchor, sinking, not anchoring, the Tory raft.
Churchill's defeat was sure even before the overseas service vote was counted. The soldiers, of course, did not include a whole lot of Old Etonians...
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Some other errors:
7:45 "The central banking model from the United States and England..." This is disingenuous, a little bit like saying that windmills and bicycles are the same thing because they both have parts that go round and round. Yes, both the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve System can be called central banks -- except that the Bank of England is a bank, and fairly central, while the Federal Reserve is not a bank and is not central.
7:57 "This unites several countries under one economic policy." Nope. 180 degrees incorrect. It supplies several countries with a single currency in very general use in all of them. They keep their own economic policies independent of one another, which results in all sorts of problems which are still being worked out.
8:14. "Since the end of World War Two, the US dollar has been the reserve currency of the world." Not quite. Since 1947 or so the US dollar has been one of the most important reserve currencies of the world. Right up there with gold, and ahead of the pound sterling for most of that period. For most of this period the reserve currency of the world has been Special Drawing Rights, SDR's, on the World Bank, and these are backed by a basket of currencies and other assets, of which the US dollar is just one.
8:23 "This means that all other currencies are backed by the US dollar..." Among other things, and only from day to day. All currencies are backed by the probity of the governments behind them and the productivity of the people in their home countries.
8:43 "A result of this (the Bretton Woods system) was that all currencies were very stable with respect to each other." Wildly wrong. Not even close. Bretton Woods set up the system within which the variations in currencies' relative values would continue to fluctuate.
"Mike Maloney, monetary historian." Nope. Mike Maloney is a metals retailer or an author of the propaganda of metals traders.
Mike Maloney is a good place for me to stop. This is a well-intentioned video, and thankfully free of stupid conspiracism, but it is terribly oversimplified because it assumes "control" and "stability" to be real. They are just words, and don't have a lot of applicability within this topic. "Change," "adjustment," "flow" and similar words are much more needed in this discussion.
Mike Maloney is a perfectly honest propagandist, but he is not a historian, nor is he even a journalist. He is a spinner of stories useful to metals traders.
Long story short: all currencies, from food or candy bars at one end of the spectrum, up through gold and silver and national fiat currencies, right up to the international instruments like the SDR, are different. They all have their own stories. All of them are traded sometimes, and the conditions under which all of them trade change from day to day and place to place. That's why so much of the space in newspapers is given over simply to pages and pages of grey columns of type: prices.
Trying to make them more the same than this is the wrong thing for a video to do. There's lots of room for good videos detailing actual facts rather than attempts at structures and theories. One good story you might enjoy making: the two generation-long war between the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and all the other Federal Reserve banks is a lot of fun.
Why did Harry Truman say "What I need is a one-handed economist?" Wey-yull, there are a lot of economists who say "...and on the other hand..." but I've always suspected it might be connected with the fact that Missouri is the only state that has two Federal Reserve banks in it. I don't know whether this is the cause or an effect of Missouri being the Show-Me State.
-dlj.
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@ericvega5756
Ah, the pure anarchist position. As an old drinking buddy of Karl Hess, back when he lived on his houseboat on the Naval Reservation in post-Goldwater days, I recognize it well.
The problem with that theory is, it leaves us all at the mercy of the big guy with the club. We voted against that, first with Magna Charta, which brought the big guy under the control of a lot of middle guys, and with Common Law, which said even the middle guys have to be subject to law.
In the United States that has gone as far as experimentation with republican democracy, and that is holding up pretty well under attack, still in operation after 231 years, after its false start from 1776 to 1789.
Sorry, Eric, you're about sight hundred years out of fashion for our civilization.
If you want to get up to speed, you can maybe start by confessing what you admit tacitly above, that you lied in conflating socialism with crony capitalism, and that lying is not a good start in contributing to our shared polis.
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At 6:45: Kolmogorov was very much not a 19th-century mathematician. He lived 1903-98 and his career spans, exemplifies, and affected both modern hyper-industrialism and the triumphs and disasters of the Soviet experiment and its failure. One of the key events of the 20th century.
There are many good Kolmogorov stories around, but my favourite is the one, perhaps apocryphal, about steel industries. At one point in the 1940s, when he was working on linear programming, he conjured up a model for a steel industry. Some Russian bureaucrat is supposed to have looked at it admiringly, with an air of Yess, Kamerade, ve vill adopt zis right away, but asked "But what is this vector over here."
"Those, Comrade Director, are the prices," said Kolmogorov.
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Biden is being ver-ree canny: he gets to make half-a-dozen speeches to the whole media audience, time after time saying the same thing, be calm, I'm the boss, everything's going back to normal, be calm. Never boasting once. Just being clearly in charge!
And then, at a time of his own choosing, after everybody has gotten used to the fact that he's won, only then does he come out and make The Big Speech. Acceptance, not proclamation of victory! Damn, but that's smart!
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Normally this would be a managerial and engineering error resulting in a major and expensive tragedy.
Thanks to Donald Trump, however, this is a life-threatening event for Boeing itself.
Trump has conjured into existence an America with no friends or Allies -- though Putin, Kim, Erdogan and such are his personal besties. America has competitors and opposite numbers now.
Result? Everywhere in the world there are no mid-level bureaucrats who will be perfectly happy to take any opportunity to stick it to fat baby Trump. If that means delaying, or side-lining, or even cancelling, anything to do with a large, vulnerable American corporation, so be it.
He's drawn a bulls-eye on Boeing's back, done wonders for Airbus.
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So far, so good, Stephen. Then what?
A reasonably sensible person might complain, in the hope of inspiring somebody else to help solve the problem complained about, and then talk a little trash as a way of inspiring potential helpers. Even a reasonably sensible person might be mistaken about the likelihood of any help being anywhere at hand.
A different sort of person, a persistent whiner, might we say, could complain in the hope of inspiring others to join in the fun. Talking trash might even be fun for a while.
Therer was, after the Civil War, a Populaist Party and a populist movement in the United States, and they inspired enough helpers at least to direct a great deal of income toward Tennessee. A somewhat parallel movement in Europe led to Kristalnacht, and some redirections of income, and then to World War II, and...
Trump? He and his helpers have shown only one consistent policy aim, and it does not resemble either of those populaisms. Trump in power has redirected income very sharply toward the already rich.
I note in passing that the world's richest man is not Trump, but is sometimes these days Elon Musk -- and all the Wikipedia pages around Nikola Tesla have been rewritten in recent years to turn the bloviating, poverty-stricken, con man into a successful inventor.
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When I built the first Western-style coin laundry in Japan, in Kokubunji, a western suburb of Tokyo, in 1972, my good landlord suggested that I should have a chat with the local poli-box, the stand where the most local policeman was stationed, about my idea of leaving the store open 24 hous a day, un-staffed.
I went and said hello to the cop on duty that afternoon, explained what I wanted to do, and asked politely if that would be any problem. "Where is it going to be?" he asked. "Down the street in the Nani-Nani Building," I said. He held up his arm parallel to the ground, and pointed, parallel to the railroad. "Which side of this line?" "To the street side," I said. "No problem," he assured me.
What if it had bee to th north or railroad side of the line, I asked. In that case I would have needed the permission of the local Oyabun, "The Boss," who ran the "entertainment district," i.e. the bars, pacinko parlours, and nightlife to the north of the station.
Just out of curiosity, I went to see the man. He ran a bar on the shoten-gai, the main street north of the station, and was almost alone when I entered. 'Ah, yes, I'd heard about you " he greeted me, and opened a round canned bottle of Scotch, (Is it Grenfiddich?) "A pleasure to see you." We made small talk, and he ended up pointing to a girl by the window. "Why don't you take her with you. She's a virgin."
Over the next twelve years I brushed up against that world only lightly, and for a year or so had one rock-climbing partner who at our age, about 24, had had the first one and a half colours of what was intended, over the years, to be a full-body uniform, tattooed on his back. He was disdaiined by my regular climbing club partners, but was a competent suport on the other end of a rope and a fine drinking buddy. We didn't get much into his business life, though he did take me out for a beer at the one bar which was the sum of his territory. He sketched what he hoped to come to govern over the generation from then on -- the very substantial entertainment district north of Nakano Station on the Chuo Line. If that has come about in the fifty years since, he is today retired a very wealthy man.
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Speed, mass, and length: how nice to have a bit of creative thought, for once, about what the most important "dimensions" are. Or might be.
I'm just so fed up with being told they are up-and-down (that's one, not two, of them) front-and-back, and sideways. And then I turn at 45 degrees and nobody rushes out to tell me that my sideways, front and back, two dimensions, not three, have gone all awhack!
What a relaxing change.
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Research tip: anybody who wants to understand "Trump the businessman," Google up "Trump, Plaza Hotel." Then follow up any thread you choose.
Spoiler alert: he loses the yacht, the wife, the children, his father's fortune -- and the Plaza hotel. It's a truly amazing performance, but half an hour of following up your choice of leads will expose you to all aspects of Trump's, uh, character, um, ability, and ta-da! business acumen.
There's coda to all this. Trump still owes $1.9 billion from his mess-up in Atlantic City. The debts are buried in friendly companies, and nobody is collecting. The problem is, forgiven debts are taxable income. He owes income tax on that $1.9 billion. Plus penalties. Plus twenty years' interest. He's broke.
If Trump had stayed quiet, friendly to everybody, and making a good living laundering money through his gold-plated real estate sites, he might have gotten away with it. He donates to every politician. If he'd lost the election the Democrats would still have been grateful to him for exposing the Bush and Cheney lies about Iraq. Republicans are easier to buy than, well, than Kelly Anne Conway.
Now he's made enemies out of everybody. Britain and Canada, who usually carry water for the US anywhere. China, which was our friend and was as unhappy with North Korea as anybody. Mexico, who simply return his hatred and contempt. This is the old Donald Trump whose only friends are the lawyers he hasn't stiffed yet. Once out of office, he's going to spend the rest of his life in courtrooms. On his good days.
But enjoy! Get an understanding of the man. Michael Moore's judgement is certainly sound. And you can make up your own mind, finding the details through Google. The Plaza Hotel, one of his early and expensive shows of delusion, is a fun place to start.
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Anonymous Troll @Bluesjet1234 ,
Neither one of them is organized. Both of them are slogans and both of them have roots in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and before.
"Black lives matter" is a simple slogan meaning "a black life is as important as a white life; you don't have the right to just forget some poor guy killed at random by the police because he's black," get it?
AntiFa was a small group of lefties at Berkeley and was probably organized enough to have coffee together once a week -- all six of them. They only went national when the Republicans i the Senate gave up on being Republicans and became straight no-balls Trumpoids. At that point, a lot of young people said "This is Fascism and I'm against it." Still no organization, just a lot of people sharing a slogan.
There is an underground press, and some of them talk to one another, a lot of them hate each other. "too pornographic," "too much sports news," all that kind of crap.
The only organization is the Internet, and the most organized thing on the Internet is "a rouble a post" trolls and their script-kiddie followers in the West, a sad bunch of little losers.
They aren't thugs, and they aren't organized.
The biggest damage is that done to the RNC by their moronic PR people who -- back when they had money -- flooded TV with fake ads showing Philippine students and Ukrainian cops, five years and five thousand miles away from each other, but all noisy. They end up with mud on their faces broke and tarred with a lot of dirty tricks, all of which they put up with, few of which they actually commissioned, and every ounce of every one dishonorable and un-American.
There is a tiny number of drunks, of Trotskyites and Black Flag anarchists, and a few old H. Rap Brown (look it up) disorganized Blacks. That's the only thing out there that corresponds to your fantasies,
Suck on it, nameless Bluesjet: you're a sucker for Hannity, Trump, and a bunch of lunatics and clowns.
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@manuelkim7064
"Making an analogy between Modern China and Meiji and Imperialist Japan is also cuckoo territory." Now there's a sweep!!! 🙂
By "modern China" do you have in mind 1644 to 2024? Or 1949 to Deng in '89? Or what period do you have in mind with that rather large term "modern China"?
I don't want to hurt your feelings, but I am forced to say that your sentence, "Making an analogy between Modern China and Meiji and Imperialist Japan is also cuckoo territory." is sorta self-referential. That's the cuckoo territory, don't you think, now that you've had a chance to think about it?
There is one of your points, too, that I think you'll have to agree is very precisely, clinically, incorrect I'm not talking broad nonsense like whose stuff is cuckoo. I mean a specific wrong word on your part: You say " but overall she presents a very US-centric view of the world." You blew it at the word "*overall*."
Go back and listen to her again. You'll find that she uses the word "we" from time to time, and when she does she is expressing an opinion about Americans' interests, Americans' actions, and so forth.
But "Overall"? I think there is only one thing that characterises what she says overall . Overall she believes that it is vital to see the world from both maritime and continental points of view. Overall she things the maritime view is more important, more productive, more historically interesting,..
She presents a "very US-centric" view very very rarely. And she identifies those points with precision and honesty. That's when she uses the word "we," and when she uses the word "we," that's what she's doing. It's only a small part of what she is saying here. Go back and check. Then get back to us, OK, Manuel?
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Dwarkesh, If you have a moment, could you go back and look at yourself at 4:38 making a boyish funny, "Putin, right?"
No, she knocks you down: Kim.
Play the video a couple or five times, just fifteen seconds forward. It's smart kid Dwarkesh meets a grown-up, something that has obviously not happened to young Dwarkesh very often in his life so far, yet.
Study that fifteen seconds, Dwarkesh. There's a bit of important content there: the very different mental states and problems of Kim and Putin are data important to the wider world.
But for you, the important thing to be gained is that you just met a grown up. And she taught you something.
Or at least she gave you the opportunity to learn something. About somebody more important to you than Kim or Putin. About Dwarkesh Patel.
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"Loo-ten-nant_ governor" -- on The Manchester Guardian? Say wot?
But if you were a real journalist you would research Oz's claim that Fetterman "would add another trillion, etc. etc."
That Democrats cause deficits is an endlessly repeated claim and it's roughly 179 degrees wrong: it will take you a bit of research, but you will find that over the past 70 years it has been Republicans who built up the debt, half through greed, half through plain stoo-pid carelessness, and it has been the Democrats, time after time after time, who have cut deficits and in some cases even run surpluses cutting the debt.
Counter-intuitive, perhaps. Counter-mythological, but true. The Republicans' deficit and budget claims are lies, lies believed only because they are so relentlessly repeated.
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@brianmatzen9617
Brian,
Do you have a source for that?
Not to disagree, but on its face, it doesn't seem awfully likely.
Americans, largely European immigrants to America, won vast numbers of the Laskers and Nobels in the generation after WWII, but is that still happening? I don't know, but it doesn't seem that way.
In entertainment, again, most movies are produced in India and China surely? "Broadway" is the equivalent of "Covent Garden," both code words for huge industries.
Art? Are you sure you're not just impressing yourself with the huge amounts of money that were spent on it in America -- in the past?
In all three, why do you think that? 90? Even if you said 50% you'd need to come up with some sources. 90% looks, um, odd perhaps.
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@lkyuvsad
As the great Jane Jacobs used to point out, a unified currency is not necessarily a Good Thing.
In an economy as large as that of the United States, enforcing the use of a single currency has huge overheads.
The unproductive states, coincidentally mostly the "red" or Republican ones, are denied the possibility of catching up through currency adjustment. The result is that they are permanent beggars, getting by on the charity of the functioning states -- and consequently resentful and hence retaliatory against them.
The sour anger of the Republican Party is rooted in exactly this psychology. It is the whimpering revenge of losers angry at the more effective people, economies, and institutions who are keeping them alive.
If they had their own currencies, the losers could devalue, compete, and then work their way back to equality, rather than depending upon charity.
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Every video we see of Putin has him seated at ridiculous distances from his "co-workers." We see him across a ballroom, at the end of a bowling-alley length table, on one side of a half-empty hundred-foot diameter round table. His interlocutors -- audience, press reporters, underlings, whoever -- in every case is isolated from Putin but cheek and jowl with each other.
I'm sure Putin tells himself that this is all anti-Covid precaution -- perhaps with a soupcon of alpha-dog signaling build into the expense of the whole ridiculous get-up.
In fact, if he's vaccinated, he has nothing to fear from any normal working group of healthy, prudent, people. His only "signal," to the world quite instantly, to his fellow apparatchiks as the weeks go by, is that he's a scared little man.
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The plane thing: I once flew alone on an Air California, I think it was, 727 from Oakland to San Francisco.
It was the last plane of the night out of LAX, flying nearly full, and listed on the board as headed for San Francisco -- but it went to Oakland and then everybody but me got off.
The stewardi approached me with puzzlement. Why wasn't i getting off? Why aren't we going to San Francisco? I asked, and everybody buzzed around in confusion.
So after a while they delivered me, a complement of one, to south San Francisco. I never figgered it out -- but if they'd been thinking they could probably have saved themselves a few hundred bucks, unless the plane was needed in San Francisoc next morning, by putting me in a limousine home.
And yeah, the cat's existential crsis is a hoot. Corporate pet for Air Calfornia maybe?
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"That world," the liberal international order, "has gone away," sez Sean McFate.Don't think so. There's resistance to its evolution. That resistance is currently loud, ignorant, and ugly, with Trump, Orban, al-Assad, Erdogan its prominent symbols.
The fact remains, behind all the noise, the liberal order is what feeds us all. Trade, united global tertiary education, open media, science -- all under criticism from the faux "conservatives," the yowlers, but all functioning powerfully and well.
That world isn't going away. The people who wish it would go away are old white geezers dying off fast. There are 7% fewer of them every year. The sky is not falling, Chicken Little, Turkey Lurkey.
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I did a bunch of that stuff at Rand, out on the coast, back in the day.
The bad news is, even at Rand, where they are fairly bright lads, about a third of their "top-level" "experts," people carrying real authority and power, are just too stupid to function. they get inconceivably dumb implications out of the games. Human stupidity achieves real sophistication and subtlety sometimes.
More importantly, I think, Darwin has burdened us with a lot of loud or assertive fools, and with matching weaknesses before them.
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That's a gimme: No, Donald. They think you're a dumb SOB.
They're the last 1.3 billion catching up with what the rest of us already knew..
And, uh, one small thing: that outsourcing is profitable as all hell, otherwise nobody would be dong it. Nobody, not even "the United States" which isn't involved in the transaction, loses on the deal. For the nation as a whole, outsourcing frees up "human resourcs," that's people, who could do necessary -- and long overdue -- maintenance and infrastructure construction work.
Duh, Donnie. Duh.
Pity Daddy bought you that million-dollar degree at Penn, Donnie. The other kids did their homework and learned about trade, business, and economics.
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That horrible median score on the Putnam? No big deal. The median number of errors found in a Microsoft operating system by its pre-release reviewers is zero.
The top few reviewers, however, tend to turn in numbers like 160, 90, 68, 55,... lots of twos, lots of ones, and then about 200,000 people who just wandered in clueless. They're zeroes -- and that's the number of improvements they come up with, too.
Hmmm. How about a video on Zipf's Law, power distributions, and maybe a few of the other fun ones. All the economists out there deserve to find out more about heteroscedasticity, for instance, doncha think?
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@justme7413
You don't name any poll that backs you up, anonymous shitposter.
.
Here;s what Forbes says in reply to "Harris Trump polls today" (which will obviously continue to change bit by bit every day:
"Harris and Trump are tied at 42% among registered voters in a six-way matchup with third-party candidates, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (6%) on the ballot, according to the Times/Siena survey.
Democrats are far more enthusiastic about Harris than they were Biden, the Times/Siena survey found, with nearly 80% of voters who lean Democrat saying they would like Harris to be the nominee, compared to 48% of Democrats who said the same about Biden three weeks ago.
Two polls taken since Biden dropped out show Harris leading: Morning Consult’s weekly presidential race poll, conducted July 22-24 among 11,297 registered voters, shows her with 46% support, compared to Trump’s 45%, while she is up 44% to 42% over Trump in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted Monday and Tuesday. "
Long short: Trump is toast -- which is no surprise since he has never won a popular election, and was only named President by the "Electoral" "College," a deliberately anti-democratic device of the slavery negotiating Founding (and all-male) Fathers.
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@kohlcooke8789
Biden isn't trying to beat "angry Bernie fans." Most Bernie fans are liberals or Social Democrats, which means they are pretty close to Biden and will support him.
There are a few hundred thousand Red Diaper babies out there, children of Communists. Some of these people, perhaps ten or twenty thousand in the entire country are not particularly "political" in any civic or contributory sense. They are emotional outsiders, often rightwing extremists.
Of the political ones, and now we're down to probably one-digit thousands, many believe in the olde tyme Leninist doctrine of "le pire le mieux," the worse is better -- making things bad will bring their revolution faster.
These are your Trump-before-Biden Bernie Bros. They are loud but they are few.
You have to keep your eye on the facts. Fact One is that Hillary beat Trump by three million votes. Trump is a glitch in the Constitution, a side-effect of the nasty compromises of 1785~87 when the current Constitution was being written after the failure of the 1776 Articles.
Trump is tall, energetic, televisual, confident, and assertive. He's attractive and convincing if you're not paying attention. A lot of people have been sucked in by him, and importantly a lot of special interests, greedheads, reactionaries and the few fascists out there have found him useful.
On the other hand he is ignorant, of mediocre intelligence and essentially negative learning, and harmful -- harmful essentially to the interests of the barstool philosopher class who have followed him.
If people pay attention and act with good sense, 2020 will be a wipeout of Goldwater-scale proportions. The GOP could be wrecked for a generation, leaving only pieces to be reconstructed in some different way.
America no doubt has a place for principled conservatives, an edge party of the Never Trumpers.
The Democratic Party of President Obama and the Cllintons stands for capitalism armed to the teeth. There is no viable administrative position to the right of that. that is the centre right, not the center left.
America needs a center-left, Social Democratic Party.
A reconstruction of the parties has to occupy most of the next few years -- up through the two elections after the 2030 census and redistricting.
For the moment the only challenge is getting a return to reasonably normal politics. That is what Biden represents, and the majority of Americans know it.
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Run when chaste? Rather redundundant, doncha think, Chris? Obviously those who don't run don't stay chaste very long.
Priests should also be allowed to wear black suits -- and should be encouraged not to take them off at the wrong times.
But Young Socialist "Alliance," Roger? There's no such group, though at the time I used to think that the Young People's Socialist League (which later changed its name to Students for a Democratic Society, and later still The Weathermen) chose that name because YPSL was from Ypsilanti. (Honest. It largely was!) But no, Roger Stone, young socialists don't do "alliance." Their specialty rather tends to be fractionation, division, and infighting -- when they can't achieve total chaos, that is.
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Not Q
"Among the ‘Jewish groups’ Trump cites, one with neo-Nazi ties, Roll Call
“President Donald Trump pushed for Congressional leaders to unseat Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., from the House Foreign Affairs Committee this week by citing a letter signed by organizations he described as “Jewish groups” calling for her removal. But the coalition behind the letter — described by conservative media to be ‘leading Jewish organizations’ — includes groups that maintain no relationship to the American Jewish community and peddle anti-Muslim conspiracy theories….Muslim and Jewish groups alike have questioned whether the push is motivated solely by rooting out anti-Semitism, or scaremongering against one of the first Muslim congresswomen ever elected. ‘There’s no doubt that, rather than seriously confronting the issue of anti-Semitism, President Trump and his allies want to weaponize the debate to advance their own agendas — agendas rife with xenophobia and Islamophobia,’ said Logan Bayroff, director of communications for J Street, a Jewish group that endorses a two-state solution.”"
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@aintnoslice3422
NoSlice,
I share your sentiment, but your history is plenty flaky.
That huge increase in the debt under Obama was Bushlet's doing, so I'd have thought that alone would put CheneyBush ahead of Reagan on your list of evils. Count them for first-worst, Cheney, and half marks for an assist to Bushlet, is how I would score it. (If anybody wants to object that Cheney wasn't elected president, the answer is obvious: Neither was Shrub. Cheney at least carried out the work of the office, dishonestly though he did it.)
Your claim "that virtually every current problem with America can be traced back to Reagan" is just plain nuts. In fact that whole long paragaph is crazy. You're right about the wrongs. You're just plain silly in lumping them togeteher into the immediate past. Cripplling corruption? Hell, every President from Andrew Johnson to Wilson beats Reagan at that.
Enough: this is trivia, and not worth arguing about. Your heart is in the right place. Now if you can get your historical fact base to catch up with it, you're going to be a solid piece of work. Go back and hit the books. Start with the Lafollettes and Eugene Debs, and work your way up to the present with Beard and the histories of the new Deal, and you're going to be in fine shape.
In solidarity,
-dlj.
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Canada had a very delicate time winkling US bases out of the country, back in the 1950's. Today there are none, but there are 156 active duty American armed forces personnel in the country. Some are liaison "officers," some NORAD staff. The number of Canadians on active service in the US is probably slightly larger, but I can't find it, dammit! Some would be involved with NORAD, some through NATO.
Canadian Forces planning for repulsion of any American invasion was curtailed in 1937. It is not at all clear whether it was Canadians who burned down the White House in 1812; arguably it was "the British," and Canada did not become an independent country until 1867. (The spate of recent news articles saying 1937 are simply wrong: some idjit is confused about a few updates old olde tyme regulations.)
Some American mob invaded from Buffalo during the War of 1812, but they were rounded up at Fort York, in Western Toronto and probably just shipped back to the US.
Benedict Arnold threatened to invade Canada in 1776, three years before his name became synonymous with treason; his force petered out somewhere in the middle of upstate New York.
Donald Trump is an idiot, and the US has made an international fool of itself letting him into their politics; he makes Americans poorer and America weaker every time he opens his mouth, hell, gets out of bed. Everything he has ever said about Canada is just stoo-pid, to use the technical term.
In any discussion of Canadian statehood, remember that Canada is ten Provinces and three Territories. Thus you'd be looking at 20, or perhaps 26, Canadian Senators. That would be the end of Republican power in the Senate for a generation or two.
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@leilaw8331
Leila,
I'm going to use your comment as an opportunity to reply to Lewis Howes.
First, though, your rather ugly attack on Christian: You're quite wrong to attack her for an ingratitude that is purely of your imagining. (Personal insults are almost always just the venting of the insult-thrower's own internal bitterness.) She doesn't owe Lewis any thanks: he's getting paid by YouTube. And her complaint is accurate.
You have two things faintly correct: Lewis Howes is a brilliant organizer of interviews, and he is trying, but I am afraid failing, to make his interviews interesting with his interjections.
Lewis,
I am in awe of your good taste in people to interview, and this one, Dr. Huberman, is your taste at its best. And, as I said to poor Leila, above, you are right to try to pace and modulate the interviewees' replies.
Your problems, though, are several. The biggest one in this interview -- as several, nay, many, people have pointed out in this comments section -- is that you sometimes don't have a clue what you're doing. You obviously are not listening to Huberman or don't understand what he's saying. Time after time here, your interjections are just painfully, well, there's no other word for it, stupid.
That's your big one in this particular case. A smaller, but very irritating, one is your addiction to the "Let me just summarize what you just said/If I understand you correctly..." trope. 1.) This is annoying as all get out if you use it more than twice in a two-hour video. 2.) You make a complete fool of yourself if your summary is wrong. Your guest won't tell you. They'll flatter you, or at least avoid hurting you, by talking around your error and pretending that you got it right -- but we, your audience don't have to be so forgiving.
On the basis of your taste in choosing topics plus your managerial ability in putting together competent production values -- "a good show" -- you have tremendous potential, and I wish you well.
Your errors -- sometimes gleefully noted by the quite accurate complaints here -- are a threat to your YouTube career.
Here's a suggestion. This will take work. Make a transcript of everything Huberman says in this video. Then watch a couple of his other excellent videos on the 'Net. Maybe talk them over with a couple of friends who are interested in his topics. This will take you days, I know. Stick with it. It's a necessary investment.
Then, make transcripts of your own interjections here, one each on a separate piece of paper apiece, and go back through the written texts, his and yours, and identify your errors. If you've done it right, you will cringe time after time after time. Your mistakes here really are horror stories. But you will learn from it.
Good luck! You have huge potential.
-dlj.
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It doesn't have to be global. It is going to be tough on the United States - at least until J.D. Vance decides that this is his 25th Amendment moment. Trump is obviously disabled, and I think that the drubbing the GOP are going to take in the midterms may clarify some Republican minds on this matter.
For the American crack-up that Trump is working on to be kept local, the rest of us are going to have to be responsible and thoughtful.
For starters, we don't need to retaliate. Trump is obviously the idiot running around saying "Do this, do that and I'm going to keep hitting myself on the head with this hammer to show what an interesting character I am." Hitting ourselves on the head with our hammers is not a sensible reply to this fule.
Trump's coming outrages are going to cause all sorts of market irrationalities. Chiefly, there is going to be a huge hit to the standard of living of the Average American -- but also there's going to be a supply in aluminum and steel across the rest of the world.
(The world steel surplus is almost permanent, because every Big Operator of every line of thought, has a little bit of Stalin in him. Thank goodness for Deng Xiao Peng for looking after things for the past forty years, at the expense of the Chinese consumer. The next forty years are going to present the same problem again. Marshall Plan 2.0 for Latin America might hold that back for a while...)
What must we all do?
1.) Relax. Just doing nothing will be better than doing all the stoopid retaliatory things that make some politicians so goddam happy.
2.) Ameliorate the aluminum and steel surpluses. We can all start on that Marshall Plan 2.0 ourselves. This will be a good time to invest in a lot of those Chinese-style sky highways and bridges to the heavens, all across the Andes, and maybe the Atlas range as well. It could be a wonderful time for French and German tourism down through Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.
3.) Elect another decent Pope. I.e. one who will remind everybody that Mohammad was just another regular guy like Jesus, a hard working dreamer who wanted to be a good Jew. This will do wonders for the labour shortages of Britain, Germany -- and Russia, if they decide to "join the party," in Sarah .C Paine's good phrase.
4.) Wish America well. They'll do the right thing eventually.
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What these dummies are missing is that sure, SALT hits the blue states -- but it hits a particular kind of family in the blue states: the very well-off but not hyper-wealthy.
Super-millionaires all have their pass-through gimmicks, so they're home free and laughing. Working and middle-class people in the blue states get their pittance in the first year or so, but they're also smart enough to figure out that a.) the increase in non-Obamacare insurance will eat those tiny gains away, and b.) they're getting phased out after the 2018 elections, which they're supposed to be stupid enough to vote Republican in.
Who's left? Who is famously getting blue-state-screwed? The country club Republican class, that's who.
These smart-asses haven't hit the Democrats. They've nailed not the red-hat-yahoos but the genuine Republican base, doctors, lawyers, small millionaire business owners.
Trump's destruction of the GOP marches on, hand in hand with his war on America.
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Brazil's corn production is half of China's, a third of the US's. (Around 3:05.)
That's not really "right behind." It's "in third place, at half of China's."
Just for laughs, Brazil's corn production was created by Henry Kissinger in 1972 when he tried to push Mitsubishi Shoji around. MItsubishi had no choice in the short run -- and every choice, including specifically Brazil, in the long.
Kissinger is a loud-mouth about his short-term wins, strangely quiet about his frequent long-term disasters. E.g. Both the US and Vietnam lost more people killed under Kissingers, and Nixon's, totally lunatic, fake peace negotiations than they had lost in the previous generations of deliberate, careful, killing under Eisenhower, Kennedy, and then Johnson who got the undeserved blame.
Kissinger got an utterly undeserved Nobel Peace Prize; in a just world he would have been sent to The Hague in handcuffs.
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Luke, Well said -- on an important point.
When a huge "market cap," the arithmetically calculated stock-market valuation, of a company evaporates, no, that isn't a measure of how much money people have lost. It's a measure of how much of some index people will now have to re-evaluate.
If there are a thousand shares of a company with a stock price of $100 out there, the market cap at that moment is $100,000. If the price changes to $101 or $99, the market cap is now $101,000 or $99,000. Nobody has gained or lost any money, yet.
If one person buys a share at the new price of $101, there are 999 shares out there whose ^price* has gone up a dollar -- but nobody has gained a dollar unless they can find smebody to buy from them at the new price.
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"It's not the vaccines that people don't trust"
Quite right. The vaccines in general, often compulsory, use have been tested like crazy and are one of the main reasons we have average life expectancies above the traditional 28~32.
Our problem is that we have a lot of stupid people, usually Trump voters, spreading misinformation, fear, and doubt.
These people are a major reason why the United States, once the richest and healthiest country in the world, is now the fourth richest and dropping and has the average life expectancy of a developing country in Africa or Latin America.
America is unique in the advanced industrial countries in having states with declining life expectancies. The immediate cause of this is mostly opioid addictions and covid-19. The inability of America to handle these threats, however, is probably the massive ignorance spread by religious nit-wits, right-wing politicians, and marketing profiteers. Every society in the world faces these problems. The United States is unusual in the degree of pure fumblebummery it brings to bear on them.
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"We need religiosity," he says. That's flat-out weird. Religiosity is one of the things all sane people, and particularly the soundly religious, should strive to avoid, imho.
I think we may be stuck having to take some things on faith. I think we may try to create a foundational "faith" as best we can. But religiosity?
The problem is that there are two very different definitions of the word, universes apart, and amusingly found in the different universes of Oxford and Cambridge.
The Cambridge definition runs, "the quality of being very or too religious, or reminding you of religious behaviour, often in a way that is annoying:
From his mother he inherited a fervent religiosity.
She has a distaste for overt religiosity in public life."
Oxford, however, gives the to my mind somewhat Victorian, at best Edwardian, definition, "Public and private religious practices, beliefs, and experiences all constitute components of religiosity. Scholars commonly use three central components to measure religiosity: institutional religious engagement, non-organizational religious activities, and expressive or subjective religiosity. Scholars use church attendance and participation in congregational activities to measure organizational religious engagement."
Montefiore was a Harrow boy, so far so good, but Cambridge educated. Perhaps the musty carrels have tilted him Oxford's way.
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Trump goes to war -- against Boeing, against FORD and GM, against everybody who uses steel.
Worse, with his withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership he goes to war against the industries in which America is strongest, Silicon Valley, Big Pharma, Hollywood, the whole information- and research-based 30 or 40 percent of the economy. All of these sectors, companies, investors and workers depend upon patents, copyrights, and the rule of law and respect for negotiation.
TPP protected these, and with a strong -pro-US bias. Trump is undermining them all.
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@davidobriend8560
You're not counting votes out there, David.
Trump has been very quiet about Ukraine, and until he decides which way to jump, his people -- 15%, not 37%, of Republicans -- are genuinely split on Ukraine.
No more than half of them , say 7% of all Republicans, are committed Putinite slime of the Bannon type.
These are noisy, but their numbers are declining, and they will vanish back to their variety of Birchite holes by six months after Trump's defeat or jailing, whichever comes first.
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The Sassanids had smoke signals and heliographs two thousand years earlier than Jacquard's looms.
Signals. Information.
How far back do the North American Amerinds' smoke signals go?
. ###
And incidentally, "algebra" didn't come from "jabr, meaning bonesetting. It comes from aljabr -- meaning algebra, the mathematics of solving equations.
That, in turn, is related to jabr, bonesetting or assembly of parts, but the idea of a European building from a savage, ancient, Arabic notion is just false. We got the whole thing, both the word and the idea, from Arabs and Indians.
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There is an error in this video at 2:35, where it shows me on Fifth Avenue, outside my office in the Fred French Building on Earth Day.
They have the date and place correct, but that isn't me. Sheesh! And I wasn't carrying a broom, nor were any of my witches, who as it happens were not there. I had sent them off to bewitch people elsewhere, while I was, as the movie correctly reports, demonstrating.
I dunno. 20% correct?
I am, however, clearly visible cheering in the audience just down the street, later. I'm the guy in the middle, waving to the camera.
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This is a wee bit worse than it looks: the raw Dow-Jones is expressed in US dollars, but the real world operates in a basket of currencies. Out there in the world values of stuff in America are counted in "DX," that is in trade-weighted dollars, a mixture of Euros, Japanese Yen, Pounds "sterling" although they're as paper as any other currency, Canadian dollars.
Long story short: the DX was at 102 when Trump was sworn in, and it's around 89 right now. That means a DX-DJ, a trade-weighted Dow Jones, has gone sideways since Trump moved into the White House. It lost about a quarter of a point yesterday.
Add that to the 2.9% drop in the Dow, and you get a slip of 3.2%.
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@XenoTravis
You're right that the US is not the most dishonest. Nor the most bigoted, nor the worst of anything else. The power of American media, however, make America most widely visible.
In war, though, America probably is the most dangerous. Iraq looks to us like your usual sort of government lies, Dick Cheney laying down examples for the younger Donald Trump to think of as normal. For hundreds of thousands of Iraqi families, however, those lies resulted in dead relatives, most young children.
Vietnam, the insane assertiveness of the sexually insecure JFK, is similarly a matter of between one and two million unnecessary killings.
The simple power of American technology makes politicians' lies and insecurities into mass death.
With great power comes greater responsibility -- and the Kennedys, Cheneys, and Trumps have not learned this.
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North Korean denuclearization is a big problem here, but the real problem is this "Korean Peninsula" thingie.
When I lived in Japan I had an acquaintance who commanded a Spruance class destroyer home-based to Yokosuka, just south of Tokyo. He once said "Look, I'm just a 35-year-old kid driving a boat for the Navy -- but I've got more shit here than everything dropped in WWII."
Denuclearization of "the Korean Peninsula," what Dear Leader Trump has signed off on, implies Li'l Kim's inspection and verification of every American shipyard, airbase, and other installation -- all those artillery pads with the 100-ton TNT equivalent tank-busters -- in South Korea.
I sorta doubt that Donnie Fats has talked that one through with Secretary of Defence Mattis, nor with National Security Advisor Bolton. Nor, of course, with Kim. Yet.
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The Trump problem, and implicitly the problem of the amoral and immoral spinelessness of the mass of Republican office-holders, is only half of the problem here.
There is also the very large problem that both the major parties are out of touch with the realities of governing. Meanwhile, the minors -- the Greens, regionals like the Michigan Conservatives, the legal fiction of a third party used to such great effect by Nadir and Perot -- represent a variety of off-stage problems.
The elephant in the room is that the Obama-Clinton Democratic Party stands for capitalism armed to the teeth. There is no viable politics to the right of that.
McConnell, who brings personal wickednesses to his objective Trumpistry, and McCarthy, a pitiful little jackal, represent irresponsible force, a little power. They have no politics beyond the occasional favor they might do for a past friend or a future source of cash.
There is, therefore, no legitimate reason for the continued existence of the GOP.
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No-Rules Racing: The QEW, the Queen Elizabeth Way, named after the Queen Mum, the late ER-II' s mother, runs East from the Rainbow Bridge across the Niagara Gorge..
There are probably more Rolls-Royces per unit length along it than anywhere else in the world. Somewhat over 700 or more than five per each of its 137.8 kilometres.
Driving home from Ridley to Upper Canada, Saint Catherines to Toronto, in Richard Kee's Rolls, I saw the OPP pull up behind me at a wee bit over a hundred -- that's mph, since we still used miles in my lawless youth.
I stepped on the gas, the car leapt to about 130, and the cops waved me a cheerful bye-bye.
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Dennis Chu
Utterly.
In part it's a matter of his not understanding what America is all about. "His eyes glaze over when you get to the Fourth Amendment," one of his failed briefers famously said. He doesn't know anything about the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, or even the most elementary facts about hos laws are made and administered.
Fundamentally, however, it's a matter of his rather peculiar personality.
He weak, unusually self-centered, needy, uninterested in fact but highly skilled at acting, at hunting for people's weak spots, and at the sales skills of flattery and selective presentation of opinions.
You'll notice that being thoughtful, knowledgeable, intelligent, or patriotic don't appear on this list.
He's a sporadically successful, frequently failed, con-man.
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Uncomfortable moment: when you try to tile all of infinite space by making a spiral of little squares each of which contains a Hilbert Curve, haven't you just fallen into the problem that the snake curve had, back earlier in the video? Haven't you made a jumping, discontinuous, mess out of all those pleasantly well-proven-out little Hilbert-curves squares?
It would be nice if somebody could post a reassuring No, 't'ain't so. Alternately, is there a better way of tiling-out the plane with a Hilbert Curve of little Hilbert-curve-squares instead of that dumb* spiral?
I think the answer is yes to the first, it's a mess, but then yes to the second (whew!), it can be made to work, but I'm not sure.
_____________________________________
* For once "dumb" as stupid is the same thing as dumb having lost the power of sound.
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@ernpible9590 Yeah, this YouTube comment software really sucks. I'm particularly annoyed by the way it sometimes seems to indent replied so they appear directly after the comment you're addressing and at other time just drops you to the bottom of the thread (and at other times to the bottom of the visible thread, i.e. the middle of the whole mess.) The whole thing is totally amateur hour, which is particularly sucky given the colossal amount of money involved in their business.
On my father's, and many pharmacists', snark at doctors, above, note that there are very many excellent MDs, and the vast majority of them do more good than harm. Only a bare majority of American doctors, however, believe in the science-based medicine originated by Koch in Germany in the 19th Century, very many of them believe in magical, personalist hooey (which has just the faintest basis in psychological fact), and a small but not inconsiderable minority of them are dangerous psychopaths made all the more dangerous by the structure of their "profession." This has been your run-on sentence of the day.
The nut lady who is the subject of this video is probably one of the more harmless of the fringe of clowns, fascists, egomaniacs, greedheads, fools, lunatics and incompetents who travel under the flag "medical doctor."
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@ernpible9590
What country are you in?
I'm in Canada, but lived in the States, served on Congressional staff, got important legislation passed, and have had serious overseas assignments on behalf of the US in Japan, France and the UK. Ex-wife and two children are American, and all are seriously connected, so...
My business background is mainly Japan and the US: 400 coin laundries in Japan, dryers manufactured for me in Texas.
I hope that Venora Dorowolski is reading my notes above, and I owe her a note: she is serious people, slightly incorrect in some of her points, but right about most of the big ones. Importantly on this topic (and in this flaky, low-life ridden medium), she is sane and intelligent.
You seem to be handling a couple of people making apparently honest queries, above. Good work.
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Neither the Republican Chairfool, nor the news guy, seems to understand that in American law "treason" has a very specific meaning, stated in the Consitution, roughly, from memory, "giving aid or comfort to an enemy."
From context, i.e. the Constitution, this plainly means an enemy of the United States of America.
This is obviously not relevant to the internal politics of the Colorado Republican Party.
C'mon, guys, funtion much?
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This is the sound, younger, Leonard Susskind, before he settled down for long evenings of "Werner Erhardt" bullshit in San Francisco and decided that all the problems of physics could be solved if you just replace any inconvenient zeroes with little itsy-bitsies you call strings.
Why do you call them strings? Why not lumps? Or nice straight rods maybe?
Your problem with lumps or rods is that people might start asking questions. How big? How do you know? Where did you see them? Do they go bump in the night? All of a sudden you'd be subject to the conventions of empirical science.
Strings don't have these problems because we've been studying them for thousands of years, so we know all about them. They're harmonic, and they just behave mathematically. At first people thought they could get away with them all being sinusoidal, and that's still the starting point for every creative meander. Still, there's nots of new mathematicses in the past four hundred years, so there are other things to try out, too. All you have to do is "Just do the math, fellas," and that's what every soi disant physicist has been doing ever since.
The volume of maths produced in this effort is impressive -- if you're impressed by page counts. The amount of physical reality, though, seems, uh, is "invisible" the word I'm looking for?
But yeah, Leonard Susskind on Einstein up to 1905 is reasonably OK.
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@kapilsharmaWorld_uncensored
Horsefeathers.
The Big Four, formerly the Big Seven, soon to become Ernst, Ernst, Enst, Enst, Ernst and Ernst, are as bad or worse.
There has been one steady advance among chartered accountancy partnerships since 1900 -- the steady advance in the depth and breadth with which they and their associations have insisted to governments and the public that they have no responsibility to anybody but the managements, not even the companies, just the hired adminstrators, who hire them.
Your chance of finding an honest accountantcy with a feeling of responsibility to the public among the majors is exactly zero -- as they proudly proclaim.
In a small local, it is possible, if you investigate, you might find something different, but this is not a norm of the industry.
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Grant,
Damn but your expressive little blue Pi's are intelligently done!
I think maybe you should be in the running for a Pulitzer in cartooning for them!
I also think your Einstein quote, to the effect that the cultic "math and reality are identical" is ver-ree apropos. When I first read Eugene Wigner's paper, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences, I thought it must be a bad translation from the Hungarian.
It turns out he was serious. Ugh! There are a whole slew of things wrong with it, among other things that for every mathematical construct suggesting a reality there a bunch of other ones with different implications. I think the Big One, though, is that most of the mathematics Wigner celebrates takes the form of differential equations, and these are hypotheses, not conclusions. Even their solutions are mere suggestions, not statements about reality.
The Wiki entry on Wigner's paper does him a great favour, suggesting a tentativeness that I don't see in the original; to my mind, the paper is emphatically wrong, and your Einstein quote gets it right.
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Vitor,
Your "Finish" is just a stupid mistake, and you should fix it. You've had four months to do it in. Why on Earth haven't you?
"Adopt" seems a bit odd to me; how about "adapt to"?
"Mould" is optional, I guess.
Net net, I think you're about a B+ in script-writing. If they ever start a category in Portenteousness, you'll take home an Oscar. Most Finns are born indoors in warm places, and have been for centuries.
The Finnish fighters were clearly superior to the Russians in pretty much every department. Rural people everywhere are competent with long guns, and layabout slobs aren't, so a lot of the poor stupid Russians were just being handed a ticket to their deaths. One Big Thing was that the Finns had the home field advantage, where "home field" meant a great deal more than just the crowd and the cheerleaders. They knew the weather, the terrain, and how to build a camp fire...
That they were fighting for their lives and their families' would seem to me to have been the major "non-material" factor. If they'd been fighting in July, you would be be be nattering on about how the Finns had a better attitude toward mosquitoes. wouldn't you?
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@cliffsdepot
Your long list of counties, Cliff, does not make it any more likely that you actually watched the video. The whole point of the thing, which you miss, is that the Korean Communists, later confined to the north, took the initiative in getting China and Russia involved, for mixed and different motives.
Stalin's doctrine, and very competent writing, on nationalities was a major intellectual contribution to modern i.e. post US Civil War, Marxism, and it, quite as much as his bureaucratic competence, established him as a Communist leader.
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Laura,
That's not true. There's no doubt that he's a dummy, a lazy time-server, and that he perjured himself at his Senate Confirmation hearings.
It is wrong, however, to say that he has been ineffective. The Federalist Society has a lot of members who are dolts, thugs, and clowns, with a light sprinkling of fascists. It also has a few -- a large minority -- who are principled conservatives, and a few more who are just-for-fun fans of the original Jennings Randolph.
Many of these latter two groups are highly intelligent -- and a numbskull like Thomas still has to have clerks. For a bright young conservative of the Bill Buckley variety, a spell of writing judgements for Justice Thomas can be fun, challenging, a chance to put right-wing dogma into circulation at the least and on the books at best. It's also good on the resume if you're headed for big corporate law.
I used to read Supreme Court judgements, sometimes for work, scurrying over to the Supreme Court to pick them up off that little table where they release them (on I forget which day of the week it was: it's 48 years now) and sometimes just out of interest. I've read them desultorily over the past few years. All of Clarence Thomas's office's output is really first-class work.
I don't think he did it, and I don't think his dog did it unless dogs regurgitate homework they've eaten. Because of his ideological position he has attracted some good minds. His clerks have included some really fine and competent people.
Don't take your enemy for granted, Laura.
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@circleh5173
The country was in good shape in 2016 -- which is why Hillary won the electoral vote by three million. Trump, like Bush before him, is an appointed, minority, loser President.
If Trump had acted responsibly on Covid, 2750 Americans might have died, not 200,000. All he had to do, at the time of the Woodward interview when he knew how dangerous it was, was copy South Korea. The Koreans had 300 dead in a population of 40 million. Prorated to the US, that's 2,750.
There will be a second wave, possibly worse, and Korea is in danger of complacency. The US, by contrast, is in danger of Trump.
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"just"?
"opportunist"?
Nida,
Those are truly insane words to use, far outside the limits of decent daily discourse.
That you use them casually and carelessly is a sign that the Republicans have corrupted the daily politics of the Republic to a truly obscene degree.
Trump's "insult" of prisoner-of-war McCain was a gratuitous piece of filth which, alone, should have seen Trump simply thrown out of the debates. On the spot. On TV. Right there. That he went on to win the Republican candidacy was a sign that his personal filth, of mind and spirit, had rotted through the whole party.
To call McCain a RINO in contrast to Trump is by contrast just a bit of innocent nuttiness. A crazy little throw-away. McCain was of course a foundational and generational Republican. Trump far from being Republican "in name only" was and it a flamboyantly fake Republican, a traitor to, a strutting, puffing, yowling attack on, everything historically ad normally Republican.
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@donaldmiller8629
Donald,
You''re distorting history, starting with a wee bit of truth and then stopping with that little bit.
The KKK supported the Dixiecrat or Southern Democratic parties from its founding after the Civil War through the beginning of the New Deal. FDR was its enemy, and it withered slowly from the 1930s onward. It has been weak, but supported the Republican Party, in the South through Nixon's Southern Strategy, and in the North, in Indiana and other states where it had a robust existence.
As you said, "You may want to be careful about encouraging people to read their history. Especially from about 1855 onward." And particularly from 1962 onward.
Best wishes. Wash yer hands, eat your green veggies, and good luck. Especially with your history.
Here are some starting points for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/07/26/what-we-get-wrong-about-southern-strategy/
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater
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The number of women in the warehouse parts of this film remind me of the Japanese situation. From 1972 to 1984 I built 400 of the first coin laundries in Japan -- before me, no coin laundries, because everybody just knew that Japanese women loved to do laundry... by hand... in cold water.
Fer shure.
This led me to meet all sorts and varieties of people. Two of the stores I built were for investors in the Shitamachi, the lower town so lethally firebombed on the infamous March 9-10 of 1945, a raid which killed more people than either of the atomic bombs. It led to His Majesty the Emperor visiting on foot, the Palace being only a couple of kilometres away, and expressing his sorrow, if not quite apology, to the survivors.
The Shitamachi is contiguous to the capital's geisha districts, and includes entertainment zones which might be said to be in the geisha without the pretensions business. One of my customers told me with pride that during the war her girls had worked overtime -- assembling electronic assemblies during the day, quite apart from their work of the evening. I assumed at the time that this meant radio parts, and on the basis of this video still think it was limited to that.
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At around 5:10, note that the United States, unlike Canada, is largely made up of former Spanish colonies. Forida was one of the original 13, and the "Louisiana" Purchase, of everything drained by the Mississippi, was largely settled by Spanish settlers and Mexican natives.
Louisiana certainly aquired a French-speaking population, the expellees from Canada, but it was originally Spanish land. The actuall "French" participant in the American Union was Missouri, which was officially bilingual until 1957. But no, French and English are not the reason Missouri has two Federal Reserve banks. I dunno, can we suppose it's somehow the result of a bank auditor saying "Show me"?
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Michael is slowly coming to admit something that isn't in the book, that Sammy knew he was in trouble a year earlier and had been worrrying about it constantly ("10%," he claims!) for the entire year.
I first read the book when it came out, and it seemed to me then that it's "meaning" was "Oh, shit, i didn't know that was going to happen." (when Michael was caught off guard by the collapse) "What the hell can I pull out of the wreckage?" The "You make up your own mind, reader" thingie is somewhat present in the book, and was what he, Lewis, went with most energetically in the first few weeks of book tour.
Now, a few weeks later, Sam looks old and tired and tawdry despite the fact that the prices of the coins are holding up for the moment. "CZ" is out, and my guess is that he'll count that a blessing in years to come -- if, of course, he's not in jail in years to come for years to come...
This video is a month old. It's going to be fun to see Michael's take on it all in January...which is when I plan to read the book again.
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@tpower1912
You're not totally out of contact with reality. There were mega-fauna in the north until very recently, so don't exaggerate the consideration you give to the few left in Africa.
On the evolutionary value of intellectual thought, you are assuming ver-ree fast evolution among different human families and, I think, attaching too much importance to it as a factor in continued breeding ability, Darwinian "fitness."
We have only been Our Of Africa for about 100,000 years now. Skin and hair colour can certainly change in that time, and lactose tolerance seems to have evolved, in the few places where it has, in only about 40,000 years flat. Frontal cortex size has reduced greatly since the mid-stone age, which is barely longer. Intelect on the other hand? I don't see much difference between the walls of the cave of Lascaux and the MOMA, the jewellery of Northern France 60,000 (sixty!) years ago and the stuff at art fairs today, nor between the fighting arts of bands of apes and the work of Herman Kahn.
Your general rule for looking at African cultural and intellectual achievements today, it seems to me, is that we don't know very much about it. The astonishing overlap between ability in abstract mathematics and that in music has been noted but not explored. We do, however, have some blunt findings: most of the race's genetic diversity is still in Africa: most of us around the planet are descended from a very few. The tallest and the shortest are in Africa. So are the fastest. It's safe to say that the stupidest are at the lower bound, probably in the hills of Alabama, because the lowest IQ below which anyone can survive is roughly the same everywhere -- but lower where there is social Security.
To the extent that general intelligence is physiological, which is somewhat, I'd think you'd go looking at the highest where the extremes are all found.
Cheers,
-dlj.
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Biden is being ver-ree canny: he gets to make half-a-dozen speeches to the whole media audience, time after time saying the same thing, be calm, I'm the boss, everything's going back to normal, be calm.
Never boasting once of winning. Just being quietly but clearly in charge!
And then, at a time of his own choosing, after everybody has gotten used to the fact that he's won, only then will he come out and make The Big Speech.
Acceptance, not proclamation of victory! Damn, but that's smart!
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The US military is probably a great deal larger than it needs to be, and the Department of "Education" is simply a funnel for grants to the states which could be folded down into about six people, two telephones and a computer terminal inside HUD. (I wrote the first round of the legislation which brought it into existence, and I did a very bad job of it: I underestimated the wickedness of the AERA, the American Educational Research Association, which kidnapped it. The original intention, when it was the much smaller National Institute of Education, was the carry out research on education; the role of the AERA is to suppress it.)
In general, however, the US government if far, far better staffed -- leaner, and both more efficient and more honest -- than any large private organization anywhere doing anything.
The post office, though, should probably be abolished, replaced by six or eight people in Treasury and the military to be responsible for anything either top secret or radioactive.
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Reminder, Adam,
Biden was put into the Senate young, back in the days of machine politics, by a bunch of the top bosses iin the state machine. As so often used to happen in Chicago and Truman's Missouri, the bosses looked around for the brightest and the best to nominate (in part because getting a bright youngster into a non-machine job gets one possible pest out of the way).
So they nominated Biden when he was underage: he had to wait for his 35th birthday. And people who knew him in the White House, Obama and the Federal Democratic machine agreed: He's really, really ordiary looking -- but underneath, he's a very bright lad. Just incidentally, he's good at working across the aisle: The goverment has kept functioning, through Republican manjorities in both houses, because Joe can make deal while Trump can only make noise.
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Sharon,
You're right, and you're right in big important ways.
Still, China is up against one great big problem: "Marxism," so called, has reached the end of the road. To my eye, they are in the same political rut as Spain was when General Franco descended into his dotage.
Fascism is one of those things that works real well until it doesn't. And if the succession of The Gang of Five, and Mao again, and the succession of apparatchiks following the Deng "line," and now Uncle Pooh Bear isn't fascism at its best, what would anybody else like to call it?
European Fascism is 13th~14th Century Corporate State theory as beaten into modern shape by Mussolini, and copied successfully -- for a while -- throughout the Latin world, less successfully in the Latinate parts of Africa.
It had just one, <koff> <hakk> leetle <harruggh> failure: Hitler, <spitt!>
Also brought up in Roman Catholic Bavaria. Enlightened by the writings of Il Duce.
He managed to blow it. I dunno, German thoroughness getting to the end of the diving board faster, maybe?
The Asian fascisms have their differences and their similarities. Their civilizations are all as old as the Pyramids, and Asia had communicating, mingling, and informing governmental centres long in storied, traditional polities while Romulus and Remus were still out in the fields trying to figger out the North Star and wolf cubs are cute if Daddy wolf is far enough away.
The Pre-Socratics of Greece were students of every culture east of them -- and none to their west.
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@colinmacdonald1869
An odd myth from my childhood, from one of my schoolteachers: it was said that Newton, Maxwell, Faraday, the poet-historian Macauley, and the novelist Trevelyan all lived close to each other, though in Newton's case a couple of centuries apart, on London's Macauley Road, near my house.
Thomas Babbington Macauley's house, on the corner, is pretty plausible and has a plaque for say-so. The Newton attribution is all tied up in the mystery of a fancy, perhaps fanciful, house said to be owned by the Royal Society half-way down the street. The rest are all just maybe-maybenots
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Poor Tv,
1933 is the wrong year for you to be identifying the clear visible model of Fascism. (Your lower-case "fascism" is just undergraduates on their second beer -- but that makes it, too, impossible to identify with Hitler's swearing in, 92 years ago next fortnight.)
Governnance symbolised by the fasces was Roman, or Etruscan if you like, around 630~625 B.C.E. It turns up again from time to time, wherever people tried to claim Rome as their inspiration, down through the centuries.
Corporate statism is to my mind is more representative of German governance under Hitler's heavy handed international, naturally called "National," free enterprise, amusingly parading itself as "Socialism." As a political theory, this grew up in the shadow of a Roman Catholic Church intellectually threatened by the superior minds of Moslem North Africa and their magnificent universities. It "flowered," if that's the word, in the 13th or 14th centuries of our era.
It was a shallow pastiche of odds and ends, (corporate statism, not Moslem thought, its enemy), occasionally taking a break from burning a heretic or ten in an auto-da-fé to go back to its Podunk Chamber of Commerce as Usual sort of analysis. It was foundational material both for the Nazis and for Mussolini, whom Hitler seems to have looked up to, correctly imho, as his mental superior.
'Course a competition between Mussolini and the Bavarian Beer Hall Bunch for the Wharton/Kennedy-School Prize in Theory of Industrial Societies' Governance is a hard, tight race. Thundering neck and neck down the stretch, Shoppers' Week versus Hollywood Secrets . But with guns and farm policy, not fur coats nor suites in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. The medievals could build Notre Dame. The Axis gang of half wits sure did crush the vegetable stands of London's East End.
So, to answer you sightly strange jape, No, nothing around here is your "the definition of fascism."
For your "the term is meaningless," do you think "PoorTVliet" might win the door prize?
Seriously, child, What are you trying to say??
And how do you think you're helping your country or yourself, blubbering away like that?
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Once you've figgered out the percentages, 91.7, 94.2 and 92,6, the question arises, is 1.6%, the difference between the two big ones, even a difference? My rule, purely emotional I believe, is yes since 48 and 186 are "big numbers," a big number being completely arbitrarily defined as anything over about 17 and "about" being an undefined element, like a point or a line. FWIW, the long run feels like a time period where you can feel the difference between 1% and 3% compounded annually, so maybe five years.
Alternatives welcome. Anybody got any real science on these? How can 17 be big while a mere five is long? I dunno.
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@Killua2001
That's true enough -- although it was obvious to me as a child that Africa and South America had once been connected, and my father agreed that this was his impression, too. (At one point in the 1980s a bunch of people decided I ought to go to work with J. Tuzo Wilson, and it all got as far as an interview with him. I don't know what he thought of me, but I backed away like crazy: I admire the man's work, but. But.)
The inverse square law and the fact that earthquakes are pretty continual while all the planets lining up happens very rarely if at all have both been known since the year Dot. I.e. the New Scientist guy was a fool and his editors were asleep at the switch.
But a query: what makes you think our understanding of science has "shifted dramatically" at any time in the last fifty years? Hell, since Bacon? Well, Bacon modulo Popper... No, I don't think mumbling about paradigms shifting is dramatic; it's just an example of the power of a clever buzzword.
The biological sciences have made great advances, but in a pretty straightforward way according to the DNA/molecular and the games-theoretical/information-theory programs that have been pretty clear since maybe 1930~50, don't you think?
IMHO physics has been in a black hole for about the past ten years with what seems to me like an extremely stupid walkabout into string theory. ("We've got all these infinities, so let's get rid of all the zeroes by calling them little-itsy-bitsies. An' hey, we've been studying harps and sine waves for three thousand years, so let's call them strings. Problem solved. Let's move all those grant applications out...")
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