“In interviews published posthumously, MacArthur said he had a plan that would have won the war in 10 days: ‘I would have dropped 30 or so atomic bombs . . . strung across the neck of Manchuria.’
Then he would have introduced half a million Chinese Nationalist troops at the Yalu and then “spread behind us — from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea — a belt of radioactive cobalt . . . it has an active life of between 60 and 120 years.
For at least 60 years there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the North.” He was certain that the Russians would have done nothing about this extreme strategy:
MacArthur knew his push deep into North Korea might trigger a counter-offensive from China and he had a plan to prevent a possibility that soon became a nightmare reality.
Brazil, Russia, India, China. The so-called BRICs.
“Over 50 percent of them(Americans), according to a Gallup poll conducted this year, said they think that China is already the world’s “leading” economy, even though the U.S. economy is still more than twice as large…
The notion of wide-ranging convergence between the developing and the developed worlds is a myth…
Of the roughly 180 countries in the world tracked by the International Monetary Fund, only 35 are developed. The markets of the rest are emerging – and most of them have been emerging for many decades and will continue to do so for many more…
There were a few pockets of countries that did catch up with the West, but they were limited to oil states in the Gulf, the nations of southern Europe after World War II, and the economic “tigers” of East Asia…
It was only after 2000 that the emerging markets as a whole started to catch up; nevertheless as of 2011, the difference in per capita incomes between the rich and developing nations was back to where it was in the 1950s…
Other than being the largest economies in their respective regions, the big four emerging markets never had much in common. They generate growth in different and often competing ways - Brazil and Russia for example are major energy producers that benefit from high energy prices , whereas India, as a major energy consumer, suffers from them. Except in highly unusual circumstances…they are unlikely to grow in unison…
Russia’s economy and stock market have been…dominated by an oil-rich class of billionaires whose assets equal 20 percent of GDP, by far the largest share held by the super-rich in any major economy…
…looks back to say the seventeenth century, when China and India accounted for perhaps half of global GDP…
China’s population is simply too big and aging too quickly for its economy to continue growing as rapidly as it has. With over 50 percent of its people now living in cities, China is nearing what economists call “‘the Lewis turning point’” the point at which a country’s surplus labor from rural areas has been largely exhausted…
One casualty will be the notion that China’s success demonstrates the superiority of authoritarian, state-run capitalism…
Although the world can expect more breakout nations to emerge from the bottom income tier, at the top and the middle, the new global economic order will probably look more like the old one than most observers predict. The rest may continue to rise ,but they will rise more slowly and unevenly than many experts are anticipating. And precious few will ever reach the income levels of the developed world.”
“Possessing no super-powers and using no weapons (save for what he carries in his ‘utility belt’), he instead relies on his cunning, vast fortune, and, above all, his skills in hand-to-hand combat to defeat his opponents. It has long been known Batman is one of the – if not the – most skilled unarmed combatants in the world, but just how good of fighter is the Dark Knight, and in what disciplines?”
Usual claim to fame: Kidnapping political opponent and future South Korean president Kim Dae Jung from Japan in broad daylight and taking him out for a ride on a boat.
Kim Dae Jung came within minutes of “sleeping with the fishes” and certainly would have if not for immediate US diplomatic pressure.
The Dictator Park was known for allowing torture, the creative use of electric shock was a specialty during his rule.
Above all he turned South Korea into corporate oligarchy mainly concerned with the needs of a few ‘chaebol’ mega-companies. Funny how they never seem to mention that both North and South Korea were dictatorships for decades.
Not Pure Evil?: Park despite his abuses is commonly credited with getting things done and putting the infrastructure in place that has allowed South Korea to become the economic superpower it is today.
Bonus: His daughter is now the president of South Korea.
Usual claim to fame: Made thousands of political opponents “disappear.”
Not Pure Evil?: Pinochet turned around Chile’s economy overnight using his dictatorial power to simply get things done. Ever since, Chile has consistently been the most prosperous and stable country in South America.
Bonus: His look has had enduring influence.
Capcom vs. Reality
Also, the only of these 3 dictators to die from old age…in his 90s.
Usual claim to fame: Rose to power as a US puppet who was installed to collect debts the Dominican Republic had defaulted on. Soon he owned most of the country’s economy and was more than willing make opponents “disappear.”
Not Pure Evil?: Like the other two dictators Trujillo is credited with strengthening the economy and infrastructure of the Dominican Republic despite making the country into an oligarchic nepotocracy.
Perhaps more remarkable is Trujillo’s establishment of a system of national parks, regulation of logging and slash and burn farming.
Somehow people end up paying more attention to these kinds of regulations when there’s a ruthless dictator enforcing them…
The results of Trujillo’s policies speak for themselves.
Here’s a picture of the border of Haiti and the Dominican republic.
Bonus: How many dictators could be marketed to the green and “fair trade” crowd? Couldn’t you envision him with that trademark smug smirk on the front of a bag of organic coffee?
Back in the 1850s, a Tennessean named William Walker and his band of mercs launched an offensive on Baja California and successfully captured the Baja del Sur capital City, La Paz.
He proceeded to declare a Republic of the Sonora complete with territorial boundaries and its own flag.
More amazing still, he and his men managed to get out of there alive again after the Mexican government started sending armies into the region.
Walker was a real filibuster. Not one of our modern gerontocrats deadlocking sessions of congress. No he was a filibuster in the original sense of the word. A freebooter trying to conquer a sovereign state without permission from any state.
The age of manifest destiny in America fostered an entire generation of filibuster mercs who tried to take over countries and found their own colonies.
For Walker, his personal war with Mexico was just the beginning of his career.
Next, he showed up in Nicaragua with a private army of 60 men and tried to take over the country. He actually succeeded and declared the foundation of (another) new country complete with (another) new flag.
As if taking on one country wasn’t enough, Walker soon found himself at war with Costa Rica as well.
He held on for awhile despite the odds and still managed to escape with the help of the US Navy.
Still not discouraged, Walker next tried to invade Honduras but this time he was caught by the British Navy, who had no intentions of allowing an American to mess around in a zone of influence so close to where they were already planning a canal.
The British simply turned Walker over to the Hondurans, who lost little time in putting him in front of a firing squad.
Walker had no military experience and little grasp of strategy, achieving many of his impressive victories with superior firepower. Both in Mexico and Nicaragua his campaigns were ended by disastrous incidents that led to his forces being cut off from their supply lines.
An impulsive fool, he actually seized steamships from Vanderbilt, the Robber Baron sponsor who was supplying him with food, arms, and transport.
Vanderbilt retaliated by giving gold and guns to Walker’s enemies instead to get revenge and to recover his steamships.
Predictably, Walker found himself suddenly stranded in a foreign country and would have gotten himself and his men killed then if the US Navy hadn’t picked them up.
Walker got his way as a crazily charismatic dreamer in spite of his ineptitude. Newspaper articles about his crazy exploits always got him new followers no matter how badly he screwed up…until his luck finally ran out.
William Walker, a 5″2 120 pound dynamo of reckless ambition that got himself and lots of his followers killed while trying to found a private Latin American empire.
No amount of attempts at squashing them all, poisoning them, diseasing ever works.
But there’s a simple strategy that’s obvious if we think about it.
The Earth can support only a finite amount of biomass.
Every gram of that total filled by people, crops, and livestock reduces the amount left over for everything else.
So in theory, if you just kept making more people and domesticated organisms, there would eventually be nothing left over to support pests…Or anything else for that matter.
It’s over 100 degrees and there’s no climate control.
What do you crave more?
A big greasy burger with salty fries?
or
Lots of fruit and salad?
In the past people ate with the seasons and not just because lots of foods weren’t available all year round but because you feel like eating different things depending on the weather.
Our bodies pick up on seasonal signals. Appetite and food preference change accordingly.
But what if you’re stuck in an office all day long?
The air is always crisp and chill. You live your life in a perpetual autumn. Winter is coming. The harvest is finished.
Autumn is the time of year for bacon, ham, apples, turkey, gravy…
So that bacon cheeseburger is what’s for lunch…every day.
I came to this realization when I performed an experiment on myself.
In the summer of 2010, I was living in Las Vegas, Nevada.
I turned off the AC for a couple of weeks just to see what it was like.
As my body tried to cope with the 110-112 degree heat, my appetite plummeted.
All I ever wanted to eat was watermelons and cucumbers.
I’d go through multiple lemons a day drinking tons of lemon water.
I relied heavily on the quinine content in tonic water to make me feel just a bit cooler and would go to sleep wrapped in wet towels.
The human body disperses heat better when it is leaner, so my body was doing its job, desperately trying to shed extra mass as quickly as possible.
By the end of my experiment, the 90 degree lows at night felt very cool and comfortable. Air conditioned buildings felt icy inside. My body was adjusting.
My trial run finished, I realized that in the past, people must have gained weight in the autumn and then lost it all again in the summer. It all balanced out.
But perhaps those ancient instincts malfunction when we live all year round at a constant ideal temperature and thus become a contributing factor behind the trend of obesity.
On the weekends, I was an explorer in a strange country.
One of the things that intrigued me most was the Asian system of traditional medicine.
I wasn’t interested in curing an illness, though.
I was interested in supplements that make a fit person even stronger.
I don’t trust big pharma, so as I browsed Seoul’s medicinal markets my goal was to go back to the source.
I saw things such as dried seahorses and live hornet’s nests being sold as medicines.
I tried out lots of things myself including roasted centipede, gastrodia(a plant that produces no chlorophyll and generates its food through symbiosis with fungal colonies), and mugwort a relative of nightshade that induces crazy, lucid dreams.
My favorite though, was the most famous of them all:
Korean ginseng.
It contains phyto-androgens unique to ginseng plants known as ginsenosides, organic compounds that boost testosterone and strengthen the immune system. Ginseng is one of just a few herbs that’s known for benefiting pretty much the entire body, an adaptogen.
Better, it’s been used for thousands of years and in all that time, it’s never been associated with any of the devastating side effects that are commonplace with pharmaceuticals.
In Korea I was able to buy up entire 6 year old ginseng roots and consume them straight.
I loved the fiery rush and the extra resilience I’d get from consuming ginseng regularly and it became a part of my lifestyle.
When I got back to the states, I found the actual roots were almost impossible to find. Ginseng was only available as overpriced pills and weak extracts that were often made with junk grade young roots or cut with cheap imposters such as eleuthero root.
With little other choice I tried different brands of pills and was disappointed. They couldn’t compare to the real thing.
I told Eric, one of my esteemed co-writers on this site about my encounters with ginseng and it immediately caught his interest.
He tried it out for himself and heartily agreed with my assessment of the root’s potential.
He then proposed finding a direct Asian source of the highest quality roots and then selling them direct.
Why not?
After all, we knew we’d have a product immensely superior to a market saturated with inferior gel caps that we could sell for much less.
By the Middle of WWII most the world was starting to look less politically diverse than the Risk gameboard.
The world was centralizing rapidly as a few winner states with the most resources, biggest guns, best scientists, and most ardent nationalism were curb stomping the remaining minor players out of existence.
At the conclusion of WWII an all powerful US found itself at the top of the world followed by a gigantic Soviet Union in a distant 2nd place.
Eventually even the Soviet Union disappeared and for a decade or so, one clearly dominant state remained seemingly unopposed…for the first time ever.
A historian named Francis Fukuyama hailed the collapse of the USSR as the “end of history.”
He was right to recognize a critically important milestone, but it did not mean what he thought it meant.
History as it had been known had ended in 1945.
Before the industrial revolution and modern science, warring states felt sufficiently secure that their root stock civilian population and critical infrastructure was too numerous and too widely spread to be easily destroyed all at once.
The stakes were not quite as high for rulers, so wars were frequently deemed a worthwhile risk.
From the mid-19th century onwards, methods of destruction became so effective as to make mass wars on open battlefields impracticable, excessively costly, and excessively risky for States and Societies themselves.
The invention of an ultimate weapon was just the decisive and logical culmination of the trend.
The atomic bomb changed everything.
Before there was a doomsday weapon, every man was very likely sometime in his life to be needed as a soldier.
Societies that wanted to survive had to make sure their men could hope for sufficient wealth and a woman who would bear his kids.
Thus he was given the necessary status and esteem by society to accomplish these goals.
Before there was a doomsday weapon, societies could ill afford internal dissent. It was a paradise on earth for the robber parasites of each respective society.
For thousands of years, even if you hated the duke who sent armed men to collect the rent, life and society itself could be wiped out by a conquering army. If your family was to have any chance of survival…long live the King.
The collective standard of life, like wages, could be forced downward according to a collective iron law to the lowest people could be persuaded to accept. The alternative was annihilation at the hands of invaders living in as desperate a poverty as themselves.
No beast on the Savanna ever has a chance to optimize its lifestyle or treat itself for worms because it must constantly be watching out for predators instead…
To survive, the state, society had to function in certain ways so implicit and obvious, that one might as well be defining the nature of the atom. Both the peasant and the King were crammed together in a society’s nucleus. However strong the forces of self-interest pushing them apart, even stronger external forces held them together as allies in the struggle for scarce resources and the mere privilege of existence.
As the nucleus of the atom has been split, much the same has happened to societies.
Doomsday weapons did much to alleviate the ever present external threat that held it all together.
Ever since, people have been discovering that without the fear of immediate extinction, their best interests lie beyond any arbitrary State. Like is free to ally with like. Every breed knows its own.
First, the Kings themselves with their superior access to information freely multiplied their wealth by unchaining themselves from any particular population of subjects.
The previous order had already been good to them but competition had been fierce. Now they could cooperate better with one another while the masses of the world were still ostensibly locked in the ancient competition.
With the expiration of the USSR the last excuse for a world defined by competition between states had vanished.
For a decade or so, things seemed to coast along smoothly as a recognizable traditional system, but the centralized society had been steadily unraveling for decades, a trend that was suddenly and exponentially accelerated by the eruption of personal computing, the internet, and wireless communications.
There is no going back now because all the pieces that composed the old social nuclei have recombined in countless new associations. Associations more strongly governed by innate attraction than mere fear and reaction to immediate danger.
Francis Fukuyama: The man who proclaimed the end of history.
Ever since gunpowder, most inventions have served to centralize more power in the hands of the state.
This trend culminated in the 20th century with technologies such as mass media, mass surveillance, airplanes, and tanks.
Now, with social media, smartphones, and the internet, power is moving back into the hands of ordinary people.
The printing press ushered in political strife across Europe as people suddenly had better access to information.
The same is now happening with new technologies and we see decades long, stable regimes suddenly toppling as the availability of information reaches a tipping point.
Monolithic governments full of bureaucrats are continuing to decrease in effectiveness and importance. These large bodies are now too slow and unwieldly to keep up with commercial enterprises or even the ordinary man on the street.
Events now breeze past these governments before they can even begin to react. The governments haven’t changed…since ancient China bureaucracies have been all about trading speed and flexibility for dependability and security. The world has changed and old school government ministries can no longer keep up.
Culture at large is moving away from the control of a few sources towards a great age of fracture.
Though the traditional culture has died out, new, vital cultures are coming into existence and they will make populations ever more difficult to control from a centralized source.
“Microsoft’s implementation – “stack ranking”, a bell curve that pits employees and groups against one another like rats in a cage – plunged the company into internecine fights, horse trading, and backstabbing.
…every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor…For that reason, executives said, a lot of Microsoft superstars did everything they could to avoid working alongside other top-notch developers, out of fear that they would be hurt in the rankings.
Employees quickly realised that it was more important to focus on organisation politics than actual performance:…”
One of the commenters on this article, a ‘mikesmith’ gives some real food for thought by challenging current conventional wisdom about the ascendancy of STEM.
“I was particularly struck by the very last line, quoting Jobs: ‘Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its DNA.’ That is so insightful and so true, and says so much about why Apple is now the world’s biggest company. And it’s now fundamentally an arts company, nont a tech company. Sure it has to have great technology. But the purpose of the technology is to sell the arts products. It’s the products created by musicians, writers, filmmakers and others sold on iTunes that is financing Apple’s growth.
And it’s not just true about companies but about countries as well. Those that prosper in coming years will be those that promote the arts, the humanities, the liberal arts. Education in those areas should be a country’s number one priority, and those countries that do that will be the leaders and will have the most prosperous economies. People who study business and technology simply aren’t capable of coming up with the creative ideas. They are good at bean-counting, or finding ways of making the creative peoples’ ideas work better, but they shouldn’t be in charge and they certainly shouldn’t be receiving the bulk of the investment. It’s the artists and the creatives who matter, who now generate the ideas and the profits. Consider how much economic activity just two artists, Tolkien and Rowling, have generated in the past decade. Huge streams of billions, stemming from the work of just two artists! And they will continue for decades.
I’ve read numerous articles in this paper and others recently that young people are studying business and the sciences more than the arts and the humanities. That is just disastrous, both for the individuals and for their countries. And I feel so sorry for those young people who have been brainwashed into thinking that that’s the way to go. There’s no future for them. They should consider well Jobs’ insight, it’s quite brilliant.”
I called this election a few weeks ago after Romney’s disastrous “binders of women” comment and his unconvincing performance talking to female voters.
Already, the viability of Romney’s campaign had been dubious.
He was solidly backed by white males but all the rest of the electorate was arrayed against him.
His only chance of success was challenging Obama’s dominance of the female vote.
Romney’s dominant demeanor, height, chiseled movie star looks, dignified salt and pepper hair gave him considerable appeal to women, but his presence and personality couldn’t prevent women from voting for an incumbent who seemed more likely to assure them access to power and material resources.
But who won or who lost is not what’s most important.
Nation states are fast losing legitimacy in an age of mass communications. Presidents, prime ministers, and premieres no longer run the world like they did at the end of WWII. At best, we can expect the leader of a nation to execute a bold holding action, preventing the state from disintegrating any further.
The two big lessons of this election lie not in the candidates or parties but in the demographics of the vote itself.
This election is a landmark event because it has starkly revealed emerging divides in American society and set the tone for a new era of identity politics.
In this 2012 election,
1) Men were pitted against women in direct combat, both groups voting as blocks.
Whites were pitted against ethnic minorities, both voting against each other in blocks.
Whites no longer dominate politics by default.
White men find themselves outnumbered by a coalition of women and minorities in a struggle for control of the state.
On paper, the economy is stagnant, but in reality, society’s wealth continues to become increasingly hoarded by a noble caste.
The traditional job, society’s favorite means of distributing wealth to most people, has become unstable and sporadic at best. As an institution it is becoming obsolete.
It’s easy to have a plural, inclusive secular society when there’s plenty of wealth to go around.
But if wealth is scarce and growing scarcer, people predictably splinter into factions, each looking for a bigger slice of a meager pie.
With the 2012 election, we see the effects of years of scarcity manifesting in politics.
As more people become desperate, we will see more factional voting blocks locked in bitter competition for power and resources. We might expect the rise of modern day political machines dedicated not to the promotion of policy preferences or idealism, but to “identities” we were born with.
2) A major tipping point: Americans of the Boomer generations and older are no longer able to carry elections on their own.
Politics as we’ve known them for the last few decades have just ended. Because of their massive numbers and high rates of civic participation, the older generations have stubbornly held on to a dominant role, but their ability to shape the nation’s destiny is inevitably waning.
In these times of economic depression and social turmoil, it is the wealthy, powerful, skilled boomers who are still holding this society together.
As they increasingly retire from their jobs, succumb to illness and old age, and decline in political influence, the old order will begin to pass along with them.
Eric and I conjecture that there will be a critical tipping point by 2015 or 2016 as volume of retired/sick/dying baby boomers reaches critical mass and the 1990s and 1980s begin to seem as quaint and culturally dated as the roaring 20s or the prosperous 1950s.
For until societies worldwide drastically rethink the nature of wealth and economies in an age of massively automated manufacturing and advanced computers, countless millions will live in squalor in the midst of plenty. Formerly normal households shown in Hollywood movies will come to seem like something out of a dream.
A peaceful and open society will come to sound like something out of an impossibly naive fairytale as we begin to experience earthquakes along widening social fault lines.
“As population density and travel increased, fermented beverages such as beer became a way to transport a nutritional food stuff as well as a source of safe liquid refreshment. There was an old adage “…the water can kill you but the beer won’t.” People in the West did not realize that boiling water could purify it…
But what about people in Asia?…all drinking water be boiled as a hygienic precaution. One summer day while visiting a distant region of his realm, he and the court stopped to rest. In accordance with his ruling, the servants began to boil water for the court to drink. Dried leaves from the near by bush fell into the boiling water, and a brown liquid resulted…
Thus, two vastly different cultures separated by thousands of miles developed distinctly different ways to deal with polluted water for consumption…
It has been found that approximately half of the Pacific Rim Asian population (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans) possess an atypical alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) known as ADH2*2 that leads to unusually rapid conversion of ethanol to acetaldehyde … After consuming one or two alcoholic beverages, they may experience symptoms which include dizziness, nausea, headaches, an increased pulse, occasional extreme drowsiness, and occasional skin swelling and itchiness. These unpleasant side effects often prevent further drinking that would lead to further intoxication…
Could it be that a culture rich in an alcohol tradition evolved in the West to deal with the problem of poor potable water quality; while in the East, to deal with the same problem, a culture evolved centered around tea because of the presence of a mutation in a gene?”
Or more likely and way too non-PC for the New York Times, Europeans started out like Asians and evolved a higher tolerance to alcohol. Those who could tolerate alcohol better avoided intestinal parasites and had the vitality to sire more children.
According to the PC narrative of course, human evolution came to a halt a few tens of thousands of years when “modern humans” emerged completely formed and have stayed static ever since.
Also, some have supposed that the burst of productivity that came with the industrial revolution was in part a result of Westerners trading alcohol for tea as the drink of choice.
“New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures — from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete. Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs.
We like to believe that the appropriate response is to train humans for higher level work. Instead of collecting tolls, the trained worker will fix and program toll-collecting robots. But it never really works out that way, since not as many people are needed to make the robots as the robots replace.
And so the president goes on television telling us that the big issue of our time is jobs, jobs, jobs — as if the reason to build high-speed rails and fix bridges is to put people back to work. But it seems to me there’s something backwards in that logic. I find myself wondering if we may be accepting a premise that deserves to be questioned.” LINK
Even if it’s an opinion piece, a lone voice in the wilderness, I’m very surprised to see this kind of sentiment in an MSM publication like CNN.
The original Luddites were quick to grasp the long term implications of the industrial revolution as they saw their living vanish overnight.
The ‘job’ as generations from the 19th century onward have known it has gradually been decreasing in importance and reliability.
We’ve tried reducing to 40 hour work weeks, we use schools to keep young people off the job market for years.
We’ve adopted a truly Keynesian economy that devotes most of its efforts to useless pyramids and intangibles rather than producing concrete things, if only to keep people occupied and keep wealth in circulation.
Yet we’ve reached a point where even these measures are failing to create a job market that can distribute wealth enough to create a stable society.
I cannot help but conclude that we are approaching an age of small scale entrepreneurship because that’s how increasingly more people are going to have to make their money. In some ways it is actually an age of opportunity where more people will be free agents rather than hirelings. And perhaps society will actually benefit from vast numbers of useless pyramid builders being freed up to do things that actually yield a net positive effect.
If the payoff from scarce jobs does not outweigh the inconvenience and strain of being lorded over by bosses, alternatives become more attractive.
An initial consideration for finding a solid source of wealth, a viable business concept.
Does it have an economic “moat” that makes it difficult for competitors to challenge you or can anyone set up shop overnight?
“According to a 2000-year-old recipe for hair dye, the ancient Greeks and Romans were harnessing a scientific force that they had no idea even existed – they were using nanotechnology on their very own heads.
The Greeks and Romans used hair dye with some measure of frequency, most often for the purpose of dying their gray hair to black. Their dry mixture contained ingredients such as slaked lime and lead oxide, which – when exposed to human hair for approximately 3 days – causes nanocrystals made from lead sulfide to form inside the shaft of hair.
This reaction is caused when sulfur from the amino acids that are naturally present in hair keratins mix with the lead in lead oxide – initially, this is what causes the hair to turn black, but it apparently also causes lead sulfide nanocrystals that are highly similar to those found in modern, advanced scientific processes!
In simpler terms, the chemical compound that forms inside of the human hair is what colors the hair without damaging it – and the process by which the hair is dyed black is very similar to modern nanotechnology. Fortunately for the Greeks and Romans, this kind of lead-based hair dye is safe for human use, since the compound typically has trouble penetrating the skin.
Interestingly enough, the chemical engineering that came from this dye process – where the tiny crystal structures line up to form ‘quantum dots‘ – is something that scientists have admitted is a “current challenge in nanotechnology”, and is actually a process that researchers are currently trying to figure out how to develop on their own.”
“North Korean citizens, unable to count on a stable income or rationing, are moonlighting as security guards or coal haulers to make ends meet, eroding their allegiance to state authorities.
A South Korean research institute estimates that unauthorized economic activities, such as side businesses, account for 40-70 percent of citizens’ daily lives.
Experts say as much as 75 percent of the North Korean population does not depend on the state-owned economy at all.
The prevailing view is that the regime will lose more of its ruling power unless Kim Jong Un, who succeeded Kim Jong Il as North Korea’s new leader after his death on Dec. 17, reforms and opens up the economy…
At a shoe factory outside Pyongyang, only about 100 of the 750 employees report to the factory. Others buy materials, make shoes on their own and sell them in markets…
North Koreans at the dinner table used to talk about what Kim Il Sung, who founded the country, did and said. Today, they talk about how to make money instead.”
“IN the early 14th century, Venice was one of the richest cities in Europe. At the heart of its economy was the colleganza, a basic form of joint-stock company created to finance a single trade expedition. The brilliance of the colleganza was that it opened the economy to new entrants, allowing risk-taking entrepreneurs to share in the financial upside with the established businessmen who financed their merchant voyages.
Venice’s elites were the chief beneficiaries. Like all open economies, theirs was turbulent. Today, we think of social mobility as a good thing. But if you are on top, mobility also means competition. In 1315, when the Venetian city-state was at the height of its economic powers, the upper class acted to lock in its privileges, putting a formal stop to social mobility with the publication of the Libro d’Oro, or Book of Gold, an official register of the nobility. If you weren’t on it, you couldn’t join the ruling oligarchy.
The political shift, which had begun nearly two decades earlier, was so striking a change that the Venetians gave it a name: La Serrata, or the closure. It wasn’t long before the political Serrata became an economic one, too. Under the control of the oligarchs, Venice gradually cut off commercial opportunities for new entrants. Eventually, the colleganza was banned. The reigning elites were acting in their immediate self-interest, but in the longer term, La Serrata was the beginning of the end for them, and for Venetian prosperity more generally. By 1500, Venice’s population was smaller than it had been in 1330. In the 17th and 18th centuries, as the rest of Europe grew, the city continued to shrink.”
Because the guys in 1960 had spent years speaking on the radio, it seems to me they really keep their sentences tight and their rhythm unbroken while speaking. They’re pretty impressive.
On the other hand, neither candidate seems to be orchestrating their body language as we’d see now. Nixon is constantly licking his lips nervously and crossing his legs while JFK has to be told by the moderators to go up to the podium.
Many of you may know that Nixon was ill and exhausted before the 1st 1960 debate. He had also recently injured his leg.
Not realizing the significance of television (this was the first ever televised debate), Nixon didn’t bother with makeup or having his appearance manicured.
Sick and tired as he was, Nixon was visibly sweating under the stage lights. You can especially see the shininess on his chin making it kind of look like he’s drooling.
Most history books now opine that this debate lost the election for Nixon.
Obviously, one might wonder if television made short or unimposing candidates unelectable, gradually turning elections into a battle over personality and superficial appearances.
lard is making a comeback from its nadir after years of vilification by big food corporations eager to push their plastic substitutes (see “The Rise and Fall of Crisco
lard sold in grocery stores (if you are lucky enough to find it at all) contains preservatives like BHT added to prolong its shelf life, I look for farmers who sell what they can’t use. Sometimes local butchers carry additive-free lard, or can order it for you.”
I personally have managed to find good quality lard at farmer’s markets, though even there it’s often scarce or out of stock.
I’m actually using some right now to fry up some collard greens until they get crispy and crunchy, a real treat.
Another of my favorite uses: fry up corn tortillas in lard until they’re crispy. As appetizers, can top with guacamole, salsa, or hot sauce. For dessert, great with Mexican cane sugar and cinnamon on top.
Also unbeatable for frying eggs and portabella mushrooms.
Vegetarians swear by plant foods,
Paleo types believe in animal foods.
I, however, am convinced the key lies in which fats you use.
This is what lard looks like when not processed into a uniform white odorless substance with preservatives. Not only is the flavor better, the pieces leave behind crispy golden cracklings at the bottom of the skillet.
Perhaps there’s a point where someone has caused enough mayhem that hyperbole doesn’t do them justice. So people turn to understatement and deprecation instead by using girly or childish nicknames?
Billy the Kid
Baby Face Nelson
Pretty Boy Floyd
From wiki:
“According to one account, when the payroll master targeted in a robbery described the three perpetrators to the police, he referred to Floyd as ‘a mere boy — a pretty boy with apple cheeks.’ Like his contemporary Baby Face Nelson, Floyd hated his nickname (emphasis mine).”
La Barbie(The Barbie Doll)
When younger he more resembles the Ken doll that gave him his nickname. Nevertheless, I suspect it’s mainly a commentary on his light hair and eyes.
La Barbie and celebrated US gangsters of the 1930s have something in common. They come from times and places characterized by widespread poverty and drug smuggling. Times when the government was seen as bumbling, corrupt, and ineffectual. Faith in the establishment was at a low.
You know the established order has failed when people start cheering for thugs.
Not only do/did people give these thugs these affectionate nicknames, they compose songs in their honor.
Violent gangsters of the 1930s figured prominently in US folklore such as in this famous ballad about the exploits of Pretty Boy Floyd.
Today, there’s a whole genre of ‘narcocorridos’; Mexican folk songs celebrating prominent cartelistas as heroes.
Naturally there’s one out there composed in honor of La Barbie, a nice guy who ordered murders and beheadings as a matter of routine.
“10 years on, Portugal’s drug policy is being held up as the model for other countries to follow. Rather than criminalising people found in possession of drugs, they are sent to a “dissuasion commission” for treatment and the results have been spectacular.
Portugal now has one of Europe’s lowest lifetime usage rates for cannabis and heroin abuse has decreased among vulnerable younger age-groups…
The share of heroin users who inject the drug has also fallen — from 45pc before decriminalisation to 17pc today.
Portugal’s previously high rate of HIV has also plummeted with drug addicts now accounting for only 20pc of all new cases, down from 56pc before. In 2001, new diagnosis of HIV was running at about 3,000 a year. Now, it’s down to fewer than 2,000 per annum.
Other measures have been just as encouraging. Deaths of street users from accidental overdoses also appear to have declined as has petty crime associated with addicts who were stealing to maintain their habit.
Furthermore, recent surveys in schools suggest an overall decrease in drug experimentation. It’s estimated that as much as €400m has been taken out of the illegal drugs market, with Portuguese police now focusing their attentions on high-level dealers rather than small-time operators…
‘It’s important to remember that ‘decriminalisation’ and ‘legalisation’ are two very different things. You can’t just walk down the street in Portugal smoking a joint or shooting up in the street…’
‘The drugs are confiscated and you are compelled to undertake a rehabilitation programme. It’s still illegal to be in possession of drugs, but the consequences are very different from here.’
The number of addicts registered in drug-substitution programmes rose from 6,000 in 1999 to over 24,000 in 2008, reflecting a huge rise in treatment but not drug use.” LINK
One finds people arriving at similar conclusions in Simplepolitik’s comment section and in the No Reason For Cheer article:
The unique conditions that resulted in a large American middle class have disappeared because American laborers are now in direct competition with people across the planet, many of whom can survive on much lesser wages because of their locally lower costs of living. Employers can be counted on to pay as little for labor as they possibly can.
The natural tendency will be towards an oligarchy of a few rich who control the money and the resources, the natural state of human history while 1945-1990s was a freakish exception to the norm.
I, however, see this as being at odds with all the new technologies that make abundant information and the means of production available to independent private citizens.
If jobs cease to be profitable or reliable for the average person, many will drop out of the game and turn to a gift economy of social favors with their immediate clan or turn to small scale grey market entrepeneurship.
As I discussed in a previous post, Southern Italy’s underworld was born as a reaction to incompetent rulers levying heavy taxation and today it also thrives as a reaction to a horrible economy and high taxes.
If the payoff becomes low enough or jobs are simply unattainable, grey and black markets can surge in importance.
Looking at present trends, I definitely do not see job numbers returning to any 90s status quo.
However, I also see a gradual reduction in the importance of the traditional “job” as people adapt by relying heavily on the internet, tribal support networks, and small businesses.
Jobs suck anyway, so I wonder if in the long term this might actually represent an improvement in overall quality of life for millions of people?
“ARGUMENT IS WAR
Your claims are indefensible.
He attacked every weak point in my argument. His criticisms were right on
target.
I demolished his argument.
I’ve never won an argument with him.
You disagree? Okay, shoot!
If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out.
He shot down all of my arguments.
It is important to see that we don’t just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can
actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We
attack his positions and we defend our own. We gain and lose ground. We plan and use
strategies. If we find a position indefensible, we can abandon it and take a new line of
attack. Many of the things we do in arguing are partially structured by the concept of war.
Though there is no physical battle, there is a verbal battle, and the structure of an
argument—attack, defense, counterattack, etc.—reflects this. It is in this sense that the
ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor is one that we live by in this culture; it structures the actions we
perform in arguing…
Our conventional ways of talking about arguments pre-suppose a metaphor we are hardly
ever conscious of. The metaphor is not merely in the words we use—it is in our very
concept of an argument. The language of argument is not poetic, fanciful, or rhetorical; it is literal. We talk about arguments that way because we conceive of them that way—and
we act according to the way we conceive of things.”
Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnsen. 2003. p.4
As C. Wright Mills notes, ‘He is always somebody’s man, the corporation’s, the government’s, the army’s…’
One can’t be too careful.
One management advisor told Studs Terkel: ‘Your wife, your children have to behave properly. You’ve got to fit the mold. You’ve got to be on guard.’
In Coming Up for Air (1939) George Orwell, speaking for his middle-class hero, gets it right:
‘There’s a lot of rot talked about the sufferings of the working class. I’m not so sorry for the proles myself…The prole suffers physically, but he’s a free man when he isn’t working. But in every one of those stucco boxes there’s some poor bastard who’s never free except when he’s fast asleep.’ “
“Late in 2010, scientists participating in a NASA news conference dropped a bombshell: they had found evidence that bacteria in California’s Mono Lake were metabolizing arsenic and using it in their life processes.
This was huge news, since arsenic is toxic for carbon based life. If some forms of life evolved a way to process it, this would open up a whole new field of biochemistry!…
However, almost immediately, the work came under attack. Biochemists accused the original team of not performing the research carefully (to put it delicately).
The original team, lead by Felisa Wolfe-Simon, has responded, saying they need to see a fully peer-reviewed paper before making up their minds.
I’ll note that emotions have run fairly high throughout this saga. Dr. Wolfe-Simon got a lot of attention…” LINK
A LOT of attention. Before being refuted she was ranked in the top 100 most important people of 2011 by Time magazine.
Hmm. Hyphenated name. To be “equal” with a hubby? According to wiki, alma mater is Oberlin, a super liberal college more known more for the arts than its science programs; the type of enivronment where feminism is likely to be strong.
Some of the credit for this article must be given to Eric.
“Se formó a partir de un grupo de militares que desertaron del Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFE), Grupo Anfibio de Fuerzas Especiales (GANFE) y de la Brigada de Fusileros Paracaidistas (BFP) del Ejército Mexicano”
For starters your average cartel isn’t made of defectors from the special forces.
That’s right. Special forces.
From the Mexican army rangers, to the Mexican paratroopers, to amphibious assault specialists(Mexican SEALs) these guys aren’t your typical narcos.
” que fueron entrenados por la CIA de los Estados Unidos, comandos de asesoría militar de la Sayeret Matkal israelí y de la GIGN francesa.[cita requerida] Por tanto, recibieron entrenamiento de élite que incluyó manejo de armas sofisticadas y trabajo de contrainsurgencia…Los primeros integrantes de los Zetas, en su tiempo de militares se capacitaron en la Escuela de las Américas[cita requerida] que al momento de su entrenamiento, había sido trasladada a Fort Braggs, en el estado de Georgia”
Worse, these guys all received training from US, Israeli, and French special forces and intelligence. Lots of these guys actually were trained IN the United States at the School of the Americas.
It gets worse:
“Además, en Los Zetas están integrados un indeterminado número de antiguos soldados de las fuerzas especiales de Guatemala (también entrenados por la CIA, y con cargos de genocidio en ese país).”
They were joined by Guatemalan ex-special forces, also trained by the CIA, who were fleeing genocide charges back at home.
It gets worse:
“Las últimas investigaciones han arrojado que este grupo delictivo ha comenzado a reclutar civiles jóvenes, incluso menores de edad…”
These guys are now recruiting kids. Kids who will presumably be effectively raised and trained by genocidal ex-special forces operatives…
GANFE – These cuddly Mexican special forces were one source of the original Zetas.
“Iran’s population growth rate dropped from an all-time high of 3.2 percent in 1986 to just 1.2 percent in 2001, one of the fastest drops ever recorded. In reducing its population growth to 1.2 percent, a rate only slightly higher than that of the United States…
The nation’s first family planning policy, introduced in 1967 under Shah Reza Pahlavi, aimed to accelerate economic growth and improve the status of women by reforming divorce laws, encouraging female employment, and acknowledging family planning as a human right.
this promising initiative was reversed in 1979 at the beginning of the decade-long Islamic Revolution led by Shiite Muslim spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini. During this period, family planning programs were seen as undue western influences and were dismantled…Khomeini pushed procreation to bolster the ranks of ‘soldiers for Islam,’ aiming for ‘an army of 20 million.’…
This strong pronatalist stance led to an annual population growth rate of well over 3 percent. United Nations data show Iran’s population doubling from 27 million in 1968 to 55 million in 1988.
During postwar reconstruction in the late 1980s, the economy faltered. Severe job shortages plagued overcrowded and polluted cities. Iran’s rapid population growth was finally seen as an obstacle to development. Receptive to the nation’s problems, Ayatollah Khomeini reopened dialogue on the subject of birth control. By December 1989, Iran had revived its national family planning program…
From 1986 to 2001, Iran’s total fertility-the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime-plummeted from seven to less than three.”
Having recently done some reading on WWI, I felt compelled to make a meme of General Douglas Haig, a man in charge of the British forces who stubbornly insisted that cavalry had a role in countering machine guns and who earned himself the warm fuzzy title, “butcher of the Somme” when he sent his men marching in orderly rank and file towards the enemy’s machine guns.
As if his other operations weren’t bad enough, Haig decided on an offensive on Passchendaele(Passion Valley, my what a pretty name) also known as Third Ypres, at exactly the time of year everyone warned him the ground would be muddy and impassable, especially with all the soil getting torn up by high explosives.
It has been estimated that Third Ypres saw the greatest number of deaths by drowning ever seen in a land batle.
Q: What do you get when you have millions of malnourished people under constant stress living in close quarters in filthy trenches?
A: the perfect incubator.
When we inject a vaccine we use a weakened version of the pathogen so our immune system easily catches up and develops the appropriate antibodies.
We have a reverse vaccine when we have full strength pathogens and millions of people with chronically weakened immune systems.
One thing leads to another until pathogens adapt at their leisure to all the defenses of weakened hosts.
The super flu of 1918 killed more people across Europe than WW1 did, compounding an already tremendous disaster.
As many as 50 million people were killed worldwide within 18 months.
The illness was unusual in that the majority of its victims were aged 15-44. A further clue that points to the young, strong soldiers the strain was adapted to?
The disease would often kill by inducing a cytokine storm, a massive immune overreaction. So perhaps all the more deadly if young and with a strong immune system?
“The year I turned 16, a new product caught my eye. Fruit Treasure, as Tang was named for the Chinese market, instantly won everyone’s heart. Imagine real oranges condensed into a fine powder! Equally seductive was the TV commercial, which gave us a glimpse of a life that most families, including mine, could hardly afford. The kitchen was spacious and brightly lighted, whereas ours was a small cube …
The drink itself, steaming hot in an expensive-looking mug that was held between the child’s mittened hands, was a vivid orange…
Until this point, all commercials were short and boring, with catchy phrases like “Our Product Is Loved by People Around the World” flashing on screen. The Tang ad was a revolution in itself: the lifestyle it represented – a more healthful and richer one, a Western luxury – was just starting to become legitimate in China as it was beginning to embrace the West and its capitalism…
To add to my agony, our neighbor’s son brought over his first girlfriend, for whom he had just bought a bottle of Tang. He was five years older and a college sophomore; we had nothing in common and had not spoken more than 10 sentences. But this didn’t stop me from having a painful crush on him. The beautiful girlfriend opened the Tang in our flat and insisted that we all try it. When it was my turn to scoop some into a glass of water, the fine orange powder almost choked me to tears. It was the first time I had drunk Tang, and the taste was not like real oranges but stronger, as if it were made of the essence of all the oranges I had ever eaten.”
If shiny little bits of trash or a sugary, artificially flavored drink mix were made scarce and claimed to be desirable by the herd, especially its fertile female contingent, we must predict that everyone would scramble to get it.
This is why I’ve long considered measures of intrinsic value(of a good to an individual) to protect ourselves from the caprices of an insane and self-destructive mass society.
I recognize that the individual cannot be held truly distinct from society, not even close, but I keep my model simple. It’s a basic method to clear away unwarranted hype and come out ahead of the crowd.
I’m supposing the boy in the story got a generous short term hypergamous payoff for following the fad and buying a can of orange flavored junk.
But guess what probably happened to his fawning groupies as soon as the Tang bubble popped?
We would see him left with a worthless powder for which he paid dearly and no long term or tactical gain to show for it.
Indeed, with that much less resources in his wallet, the less capital he has to impress the next round of herd females. Worse, he was probably spending scarce funds his family needed to feed itself and pay for rent and education.
Hmm. This is the opposite trend that most alarmists have been describing lately. It does occur to me though that the change may not be nearly enough to reverse the overall trend. Any further insights, dear readers?
“In 605 CE, a year after murdering his father and seizing the throne, the Chinese emperor Yang Guang established the world’s first meritocracy. Weary of making bureaucratic appointments solely on the basis of letters of recommendation, Yang set aside a number of posts for applicants who performed well on a new system of imperial examinations. In theory, any peasant who took the trouble to memorize 400,000 characters — which is to say, anyone who conducted six years of study with an expensive tutor — could join the country’s political elite…
As time went on, more and more people took — and passed — the exam’s first round. Test prep academies proliferated. Imperial officials started to worry: there were now more degree-holders than there were positions, which threatened to create an underclass of young men with thwarted ambitions. When the Ming dynasty fell in 1644, their successors, the Qing, resolved to make the test more difficult. By the middle of the 19th century, 2 million people sat the exam, but just over 1 percent passed its first round; only 300 candidates — .016 percent — passed all three.
Failure could be discouraging. In 1837, after botching the exam’s second round for a second time, Hong Xiuquan, an ambitious 23-year-old from a village near Guangzhou, suffered a nervous breakdown. The precocious Hong had come in first on the county-level test, but after he turned 15 his family could no longer afford the customary tutor. Nor could Hong afford to bribe the examiners, as many test-takers did. The notional possibility that anyone could pass the test concealed a bitter truth: for a poor countryman like Hong, making it past the second round was all but impossible.
Eventually he convinced himself and a band of other young men defeated by the test that he was Christ’s younger brother. A consensus emerged among the converts that it was Hong’s destiny to build a heavenly kingdom purged of sexual depravity. He assembled an army and began the work of conquering China…
So began the Taiping Rebellion, the bloodiest conflict of the 19th century. By the time Hong’s forces were defeated in 1864, 20 million people had died.”
The Taiping rebellion seriously ranks among the top 10 ten most destructive wars ever fought. There were clashes between massive armies numbering well into the hundreds of thousands. It lasted a full decade. The Taipings effectively had their own empire with its own government and capital city. The state religion was an odd hybrid of Christianity and Chinese philosophy.
They were popular with ethnic minorities such as the Hakka and regularly sent regiments of female warriors into combat.
A lesson here: Elites can be lulled into complacency by ruling over proles who will accept domination and oppression without complaint so long as just enough of them have just enough food in their stomachs.
Problems arise when society fails to incorporate educated young men:
French revolution: an urban phenomenon started by disaffected “overeducated” and “entitled” types. Not only did rural peasants not participate, they were typically loyal to the King and were even brought into the cities during riots to beat up urbanite hippy protesters.
Russian revolution: started up by an odd mix of urban Jewish intellectuals, Caucasian gangsters, lead by a man who was part Tatar. They were outsiders from the fringes of society. Hardly a grassroots movement arising from downtrodden ethnic Russian peasants!
Taiping rebellion: same as the other two. ”Entitled” guys lose patience and try to take matters into their own hands.
A critical mass of precocious young men who haven’t been cut into the game end up causing trouble sooner or later.
I certainly don’t mean to predict armed revolution in our own time because there are a thousand more effective, less risky means for disillusioned men to quietly express their displeasure.
And of course outright revolution typically makes things even worse, especially if it succeeds.
Indeed, I would hope these current generations of bright, outcast men choose to focus on making something better than what came before. To create something that can gradually, peacefully displace a decrepit old system by inherent superiority instead of trying to conquer by mere superior force.
The single most important thing that can be done right now: For groups of disaffected men to cultivate asset bases that free them from the conventional wealth system controlled by women and “successful” men. Without a basic amount of wealth that frees men from pressing financial necessity, nothing of significance can be done.
Step 1: Escape our Sisyphean dilemma of hating the system but being too broke to escape. To be full of ideas but never have time to develop them in full, to want to reach out to the like-minded but be bound to the land by wage slavery…
For centuries, the French had one of the largest and most effective militaries on the Continent.
Yet script writers give us this moment of comedy gold in Last of the Mohicans
“the French haven’t the nature for war. They would rather eat and make love with their faces than fight. *officers in the room all chuckle smugly*”
In 1753, when the movie takes place, this sentiment would have been absurd.
If anything, the British army was pathetically small and weak compared to the great armies of the Continent.
Over a century later Bismarck would say:
“If the British Army landed in Europe, I’d get the Belgian police to arrest them.”
Bismarck on the other hand certainly saw France as a real threat. As a German statesman, his ultimate nightmare was being crushed between a Franco-Russian alliance.
And, of course, he knew all too well the Prussian army had been crushed by Napoleon.
The French were a world class terror. So what the hell happened to the Anglo-American image of the French?
Our story begins when France lost Alsace and Lorraine to the Prussians thanks to the machinations of none other than Bismarck.
Though many people in that region were culturally German and spoke German anyway, this loss became an intolerable affront to France’s long military tradition and fanatically nationalist spirit.
From that point on, the French were determined to regain their losses and take their revenge, whatever the cost.
This atmosphere resulted in the rise of a breed of generals and officers who were haunted by the French defeat by the Prussians and were determined to learn the lessons of history.
At the decisive battle of Sedan, the French had lost the initiative and had been on the defensive until forced to agree to humiliating peace terms.
The solution: Never lose the initiative in the first place. Always attack.
It was with this attitude that the French military establishment approached WWI.
Far from being effete or absorbed in luxurious pleasures, the French were hyper-aggressive, often suffering twice the casualties as the Germans.
Hundreds of thousands and ultimately millions were killed often for no strategic gain whatsoever.
The generals on both sides ended up consciously designing strategies so that the other side would run out of men first rather than trying to achieve decisive strategic objectives.
It was Mutually Assured Destruction without nukes.
And guess what? The French won. Their political and military leaders got Alsace and Lorraine back. French National spirit had been avenged! Hooray!
Naturally, the belligerence that had characterized French sentiment seemed less of a good idea than it used to.
When the Great War promptly started up again after everyone took a 20 year break to grow more soldiers, the French were for some reason less than enthusiastic.
For nearly a year after war was declared there was “phoney war” where life pretty much went on as it had before. For some odd reason, no one, least of all the French, really felt like fighting.
When French defenses collapsed underneath the first German assault France promptly made its separate peace with Germany.
From this moment they’ve been characterized as effete “surrender monkeys” in the anglosphere.
The French however, truly had learned from history this time.
They could maybe still have spent years throwing away millions of lives defending abstractions such as national pride or lines on a map.
Instead they made their peace and consequently suffered very little compared to most nations in WWII.
Their cities and land stayed largely intact and they even got their own region of home rule under the Nazis.
The Vichy government was of course a puppet state, but the Nazis generally had other stuff to deal with. They preferred to let the French take care of their own internal affairs rather than having to waste their own energy on administration. For the most part the partnership worked great.
Our Surrender Monkey in chief who signed the surrender terms and headed the Vichy state was Marshal Petain.
A total wimp and a pushover, he routinely had seen more men die in a single day than the Americans lost in all of WWII.
Petain had been one of the few WWI French generals who seemed to actually give a shit about his men. He made sure his troops got rotated in and out of the trenches rather than being stuck there for months until being driven insane or having their feet rotted off.
Unmanly as he was, he was hesitant to throw away lives on suicide charges.
Given a treaty that could save millions of French lives, he signed it and then worked to sustain the peace as head of government.
His reward?
Petain was sentenced to death as a traitor after the war when he was almost 90 years old. Only on account of his age and service in WWI was he given a life sentence instead. He still managed to serve a surprising amount of his sentence dying at age 95.
After WWII, a humiliated French military establishment wasn’t satisfied with peace. They were anxious to re-establish French grandeur through more fighting.
Europe was broke many times over after the two world wars.
To even begin to put it in perspective:
The British had spent a quarter of their national wealth by the end of the war.
If the US did the same thing, that would be the equivalent of 50 trillion dollars or 10 Iraqs a year for 5 years straight.
Yet the French military tradition was old and it wasn’t going to die easy. They ended up spending huge amounts of American money trying to re-assert authority in their colonies.
The French military elites started where they had left off after WWI making notoriously disastrous moves such as parachuting an entire army into a hopelessly indefensible and unsuppliable position at Dien Bien Phu that was surrounded by Vietnamese artillery.
The average French person hadn’t too much reason to care any more about distant colonies that had never benefited them or about the military brass who were pretty thoroughly discredited by this point.
After even DeGaulle, himself a general, realized trying to hold on to the colonies was not going to work and that it didn’t have sufficient public support, he finally started to pull the plug.
Ancient militaristic strains in French culture decided they were going to go down kicking and screaming, especially after French colonists were expelled from Algeria.
DeGaulle had to survive multiple assassination attempts after finally calling it quits.
Thus, the development of the concept of the militarily inept, surrender loving French that we see in modern American culture and entertainment was a work in development not quite complete until at least the 1960s.
In Hollywood, on TV, in advertisements and previews, from marching bands it signifies pandemonium, imbalance, frenetic energy, catastrophe, albeit in a fun or humorous(to the viewer) way.
Oddly there was a sabre dance in real life and there was nothing funny about it.
To use this piece as a sound track would be even worse than the cliche of playing “It’s a Wonderful World” while the characters are subjected to tragedy and physical anguish in a slow motion montage.
We can make an additional leap if we consider that F-100 Sabres were used to combat MiGs.
MiG is short for Mikoyan Gurevitch.
The Gurevitch part was dropped but the planes made by Mikoyan aerospace were forever after known as MiGs nonetheless.
Artem Mikoyan was an Armenian, brother of Anastas Mikoyan who was among Stalin’s top ministers.
Khachaturian as it turns out was a Soviet(yes one of the best known pieces of all time in American popular entertainment came from the USSR) composer who happened to be prominent while Stalin was in power and he also happened to be Armenian.
As it happened, Anastas Mikoyan would have seen Khachaturian’s ballets premiere at the Bolshoi theatre. He would almost certainly have seen Sabre Dance, part of a ballet, Gayane, first performed in 1942.(While the USSR was being invaded by Nazi Germany.)
Indeed while google gives me no definite answer, we must consider it very likely that the two men must have known each other.
Indeed, Stalin, Mikoyan’s boss paid lavish attention to his artists and sure enough, Khachaturian was forced to compose odes to Stalin’s greatness.
The ballet, Gayane, that contains Sabre Dance was awarded with the Stalin Prize 1st Class in 1943.
“As ISRO’s 100th space mission, today’s launch is a milestone in our nation’s space capabilities,” said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who watched the launch live at ISRO’s space center at Sriharikota, north of Chennai.”
Many of you may have heard the opening theme to Final Fantasy X known as To Zanarkand.
Perhaps not so many have heard Humoresque No. 7 By Antonin Dvorak a Czech composer who lived in the 19th century.
You’ll know what I’m talking about about 1:20 into the song.
Dvorak is one of my favorite composers period. It shouldn’t surprise me to discover that Nobuo Uematsu got some ideas from him.
This is the original fight music from the very first final fantasy game.
What is it that this disparate crowd ranging from worldly pickup artists to celibate shutins have in common?
It can be reduced to a very basic level.
We are the silent dissenters hidden in the crowd for hundreds of generations of civilization always isolated and powerless against an overwhelming majority. We’ve always been dragged along forced to do what everyone else was doing even as we marveled at their lemming-like behavior.
We were that guy who thought “What a stupid, senseless world this is…” his last thought as he joined the crowd in a mad rush over the edge of the trenches and out into no man’s land.
We were the guy who knew that the glory of serving the state was just a waste of life and understood the ‘fair sex’ were as much competitors in a great game with conflicting interests as they were companions.
The internet has changed everything. For the first time in history, we’re able to find one another and communicate on a large scale. No longer can we be isolated like before and beaten into submission by an insane mass society, wasting our lives on everything we know to be wrong and false.
In Mala Fide was an important medium for this new communication. Some might see it being taken down as a bad sign or a sign that the manosphere is going away.
But I think IMF is being taken down because it has served its purpose.
I looked at the dismissive attitudes and complaints of some people when the news first came out.
The number one complaint? “It got too repetitive in its topics. It was getting boring.”
This surprised me a bit at first because it was one of the few sites on the web I could visit and find a community that made sense to me.
But then I understood that this is a sign of progress.
Just a few years ago, the notion of a ‘manosphere’ barely existed. The typical fare on sites like In Mala Fide and Roissy was gritty, rough, revolutionary.
These outrageous views attracted legions of trolls and sparked wars with the sites of those who adhered to the orthodoxy. These were exciting times.
It is telling that this sort of style has lost much of its impact.
For a growing populace this kind of stuff is just tiresome
preaching to the choir.
It’s no longer radical or revolutionary because a critical mass of people now take it for granted as truth.
The orthodox invaders who made writing for shock value so exciting have given up trying to challenge dissent. They’ve been forced to concede the manosphere its right to exist within its territory. The dissenters have won their independence.
Now what do they do with it?
The first phase was simply forming a group consciousness over time through simple observation, shock value, ridicule, and an overall passive-aggressive attitude towards the orthodox order: “enjoy the decline.”
IMF embodied this attitude.
However, passive ridicule and nihilistic indifference is no longer enough.
Over time as more cohesive groups begin to take shape dissenters will begin to see the potential for accomplishing more, maybe even gaining the power to begin changing the world in their favor.
As we move into this second phase of the manosphere, we’ll start to see the formation of tighter, more organized groups with more concrete goals and at least the beginning of serious thought about how to achieve them.
The rebels have finally formed an orthodoxy of their own and we will see them progressively establish themselves as a force to be reckoned with.
I’ve been wondering some time about the most efficient, easiest, most digestible means of transferring ideas on the internet, in writing.
I’ve noticed top ten lists are an extremely effective memetic container, but I also look to the past for guidance in finding effective mnemonic devices for transferring ideas.
Dissenting bloggers like me spill out pages and pages, but they only seem to reach people who already agree with them.
How does one convey a certain point of view without pages of pontificating?
I decided to make an attempt at condensing information and making it more accessible using verse.
I’m not trying to aspire to Homeric genius here. So don’t bother having a shit fit about the niceties of technique. I’m just trying to make certain key concepts as easy to understand in as little time as possible. One might even consider it an industrial operation.
Verse was the pre-modern mnemonic container of choice, so might it have any potential role still on the internet?
I have to admit, this sounds to my inner ear almost rap-ish.
Dear Young man,
I’ve come to warn you today
Everything they’ve ever told you
You must quickly throw away
I went down the path they showed me
They said it was the only way
I was too young
I was you
I believed grades would somehow matter
Believed youth’s brief day
Ought to be spent on sixteen years
Of endless classes.
Do what you love.
It doesn’t matter what degree
That sounded nice
And everyone agreed
Why would I not have believed?
The herd is always right.
They’ve told you to be good and kind
To earn your keep
To protect and provide.
Listen to them,
You become a flightless bird
Beaten, ignored, and despised.
In this world
The best competitor gets every prize.
That soft Eden they must have come from
Has long been left behind
This is a war of all against all
A desperate fight to survive
Won’t they thank you once you’ve done all they asked?
When nothing is as planned?
When you’ve reached the other side,
Won’t they accept you and understand?
Dear young man,
There’s no reward for defeat
Only successful young men really exist.
The rest are just a statistic.
Whether you fall in battle
Or can’t find that ‘career.’
You are a dead man just the same.
Not a student, not a boy, not a father, or even a man
Not an anything
You are lost from the world of social roles
Into a world of ghosts.
There you have no status or name.
You haunt the world of the living still
Bound to earth by debt’s heavy chains.
You received an impressive letter today
You’ve been accepted
But don’t become indebted
Until you know how you’ll make it all back
Don’t go into their trap until you know your way out
Don’t go unless you know how you’re making your cash.
In this world no one pays you a dime
Unless they have no better choice
Until there’s a gun to their head
You’re a homeless man without a voice.
Your parents are planning to retire
Your sister gets to live like a movie star
You’re the only one on your side
Don’t let them use you up for free!
Your life is already cheap enough
Don’t let them use you up.
They threw a million of you away
In a landfill called the Somme
Dear young man, you’re disposable
Take care of yourself.
You’re the only one who cares
Chorus:
Social obligation is a two way street
I want to help but I’ve got to eat
You want my toil and my loyalty
But I can’t do it all for free
You all say I’m a complainer, a loser
Entitled and spoiled
All I want is a living!
You want to have your ‘golden years’ and retire?
I tell you now,
You better make it worth my while.
You want to die in bed?
Why do I care?
I’ll be working until I fall over dead on the job.
Remember the bad guy from Cinderella Man, Max Baer?
In real life he doesn’t seem to have been nearly as much of an asshole. Plus he had his own day when he was cast as the hero in a story that seems very Hollywood.
“in 1933, a deadly serious warrior stepped into the ring against Max Schmeling of Germany. The Jewish six pointed Star of David blazed white on his trunks, sewn there by his Aunt Emma Edelstein. A cestus was tucked into his right glove and a small golden Star of David was in his left glove. Adolph Hitler had proclaimed the quietly anti-Nazi Schmeling as Germany’s symbolic hero of Aryan purity and declared a win over Max Baer was a win for Nazi Germany. While Baer was only half Jewish, he was Jewish enough for Hitler. With the help of Jack Dempsey, in his first financially successful role as fight promoter, the American public saw “The Battle of the Maxes” as a crusade against right verses wrong, as a fight of the United States and Jewish people worldwide against Nazi Germany.” LINK
Light, mobile technology is allowing swathes of Africa to essentially skip entire stages of development and avoid tons of infrastructure and overhead.
Could this be a good thing?
Railroads, factories, refineries…In the 19th century it became possible for a few people to control a few critical chokepoints of commerce and exploit them for all they were worth.
To some, these people were “captains of industry” to the worker on the street they were often known as “robber barons.”
Once one of them dominated a key commodity or transport system they could wield monopolistic powers with impunity.
Many people believed that “free” markets would naturally lead to the optimal public good, the regulations that could have stopped the near destruction of competition in the economy didn’t yet exist.
John D. Rockefeller grew up poor in rural America, his father absent most of the time womanizing and plying money-making schemes, his mother overworked at home on the farm.
Because they never knew when people would come calling to collect debts incurred by the father, they always had money in reserve and kept close track of finances.
When Rockefeller got his first job in Cleveland he started keeping a personal ledger poetically named “Ledger A” that he used to keep track of every penny that passed through his hands.
To put this worship of order and precision in perspective, Ledger A became Rockefeller’s personal Rosebud, a sacred artifact he later had locked away in one of his private vaults.
It was with this methodical spirit that Rockefeller continued to accumulate wealth and assets. He saw commerce itself and the accumulation of capital as a sacred mission.
Realizing that drilling for oil itself tended towards booms and busts, Rockefeller had the brains to focus on refineries that could bring in steady profits whether or not there were localized surges or shortages.
He also leveraged his growing economy of scale to get discount rates from the railroads which allowed him to sell his product cheaper than the competition. Soon everyone had to push for these discounts or go out of business. To a few victors who could push the railroad transport prices lowest went the spoils.
This price war over the railways is why today we have interstate commerce laws. Because Rockefeller could use railroads to help him sell more cheaply than the competition wherever he went, no one else stood a chance.
State governments and the feds tried to make regulations to prevent companies like Standard Oil from operating across state borders without having to answer to any set of local laws. Soon,companies had to operate under the laws of a single state.
Standard Oil simply split up into nominally separate companies, one for each state and all were governed from a seemingly innocuous holding company.
As government continued to try to restrict the reach of robber barons, men like Rockefeller kept finding ways to honor the letter of the law while circumventing its spirit.
Rockefeller responded to concern over the growing size of his company by maintaining every appearance of competition.
Companies he bought out would keep their old names and management. No one would even know anything had changed except for a few people at the top of the hierarchy.
He also allowed an insignificant sliver of the industry to remain somewhat independent so he could always make the claim that some competition existed.
Because of these stealthy tactics, few people realized just how big Standard Oil had become until it was too late. Whereas other Robber Barons liked to behave like celebrities, Rockefeller kept quiet operating largely behind the scenes. He didn’t truly become a household name until long after he had taken over.
Perhaps more than anyone, Rockefeller invented the modern corporation with its precisely organized state-sized bureacracies.
Because Rockefeller found himself in charge of so much, much of his effort was spent simply figuring out how to delegate tasks.
He also invented much of the modern corporate culture even becoming one of the first executives to organize much of his social life around holes of golf.
Like many magnates of his time, Rockefeller seemed to feel a certain tie to a homeland and people that today’s borderless tycoons would be hard-pressed to understand.
That Rockefeller retained some kind of moral vision and notion of a higher purpose even as he gained absolute power seems unthinkable after all the horrors of the 20th century and the dominance of disconnected kleptocrats in the 21st century.
It truly is amazing in retrospect that he actually tried to build things and give back to the society that gave him his wealth rather than relentlessly hoarding everything he had by running his operations out of multiple countries.
Indeed in the 21st century, today’s Robber Barons have transcended obsolete nation states.
They play the laws of one zone against the other for their gain much as Rockefeller once did with the laws of different U.S. states.
As unpopular as the notion of some kind of world governing system is, some kind of international commerce system may become necessary to stem the depredations of billionaires who reap all the benefits of playing a game of arbitrage within the current decrepit and outdated international system: If one nation objects to being exploited by them, they simply take their money somewhere else with a government more amenable to their desires.
If particular countries try to enforce regulations, elites can simply split different operations into different countries all under different names just like Rockefeller used to do in the states with bits and pieces of Standard Oil.
In our age of multi-national corporate entities effectively acting outside of the laws of nation states, we would do well to pay attention to the lessons we can learn from men like John D. Rockefeller.
Source: Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr.
Mass protests in Russia have proven to be a predominantly urban phenomenon.
Indeed many conservative, socially conservative rural Russians look on the protesters with suspicion.
Even so:
“They are far from content with the current political system, which they see as hopelessly corrupt and inept at providing basic services. Their support for Putin grows thinner by the month, and a major economic crisis could quite easily provoke them on a massive scale.”
“The ultimate challenge for Russia’s liberal activists is to forge these two strands of dissatisfaction into a united coalition for change. And the top priority for the Kremlin is to prevent that from happening.”
“52 percent of Russians opposed the demonstrations, compared with 32 percent that supported them. Only eight percent said that they were willing to march in one.”
“Whereas Moscow crowds have rallied behind abstract concepts, such as fairness and democracy…Russians are most concerned with the state’s dwindling ability to provide essential services, such as health care, education, housing, personal security, and effective courts.”
“Nine of the country’s 83 regions together produce more than half the country’s GDP… In 2010, 41 of the regions received more in federal aid than the combined net profits of all their local enterprises…Redistribution from rich to poor regions…has been central to more than just the country’s economy. Since 1991 it has been crucial to winning elections…
Putin, with his earthy aphorisms, jibes at the West, and macho stunts…riding horses bare chested- aimed to tap into the culture of the provinces.”
“Reacting to the chaotic change of the 1990s Russians began to show a preference for centralization, hierarchy, and state control. Disappointment with Putin’s ineffective and corrupt top-down governance is now pushing Russia backk toward a desire for more open and less intrusive leadership.”
Source: Foreign Affairs The Other Russia: Discontent Grows in the Hinterlands
Mikhail Dmitriev and Daniel Treisman
“In the 1990s, the United States controlled 60 percent of the global weapons market. Today, it is responsible for only about 30 percent.”
“The formula for success was simple: by producing. A range of affordable yet sophisticated weapons, the Pentagon and its contractors would crush any rivals.”
“By focusing on cutting-edge technology and developing excessively expensive defense systems, Washington has left the door open for foreign competitors to market practical weapons at an affordable cost.”
Why this matters:
1. “Today’s conventional arms, such as aircraft and missiles, involve highly complex feats of engineering. Because the up front expenses are astronomical, the price can be lowered on a per-unit basis only by producing many copies. That makes exports all the more vital.”
2.(the big one) “When Washington makes a weapons deal, the partner country is unlikely to deploy those arms in a manner at odds with the United States’ interests, which would threaten its access to those very weapons. So the more weapons Washington sells, the more control it has over security decisions made abroad.”
You want those replacement parts to keep your hardware running when you need it? You’ll just have to behave yourself.
Source: Foreign Affairs September/October 2012 Arms Away
Johnathan Caverly and Ethan B. Kapstein
