Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Quickies



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A round-up of news items, columns, articles and blog posts that caught our eye this past week.






Glenn Reynolds presents his own Occupy cirriculum:

2) Bourgeois vs. Non-Bourgeois Revolutions: A Comparison and Contrast. The Occupy movement left its major sites—McPherson Square in D.C., Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, Dewey Square in Boston—filthy and disheveled. By contrast, the tea party protests famously left the Washington Mall and other locations cleaner than they found them, with members proudly performing cleanup duties.

This unit would note that social-protest movements are sometimes orderly and sometimes disorderly as a matter of approach, and it would compare the effectiveness and ultimate success of such relentlessly bourgeois movements as the tea party, the pre-1964 Civil Rights movement, Women's Suffrage activists, and the American Revolution, against such anti-Bourgeois movements as the post-1968 Black Power and New Left movements, and the French Revolution.

Which accomplished more lasting good? Is Max Weber's Protestant work ethic applicable to social movements?









Southern talk:

We have utilize a few, uhh, coloquialisms of our own but being native Southern Californians, we don't know if the following accounts for regional-speak:

Busy? "Busier than a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest."

See you tomorrow? "Lord willing and the river don't rise."

Someone forget or srew-up your name upon a subsequent meeting? "Call us what you want, just don't call us late for dinner."






Spinsters.com on capitalism and charity:

Capitalism, aka the free market, is the best assurance of individual and societal prosperity. Turns out, capitalism is also the best spur towards charity and generosity to the less fortunate. People are most generous to others when their own needs are secure. Capitalism provides the economic security necessary to inspire charity. The cold-hearted businessman is a tired Marxist myth.





B-Daddy has a round-up of news events himself and which includes this take-down of the faith-based global warming climate change community from the Wall Street Journal:

The Trenberth letter tells us that decarbonization of the world's economy would "drive decades of economic growth." This is not a scientific statement nor is there evidence it is true. A premature global-scale transition from hydrocarbon fuels would require massive government intervention to support the deployment of more expensive energy technology. If there were economic advantages to investing in technology that depends on taxpayer support, companies like Beacon Power, Evergreen Solar, Solar Millenium, SpectraWatt, Solyndra, Ener1 and the Renewable Energy Development Corporation would be prospering instead of filing for bankruptcy in only the past few months.

B-Daddy has long claimed that the warmers rejection of a carbon tax in return for dropping the income tax is proof of their purely statist intentions and we believe him.






Terrific: We're No. 1!...

... in per capita debt.








It's come to this: Asian American Journalists Association releases guidelines on Jeremy Lin media coverage.






Headline: Exclusive: State Department quietly warning region on Syrian WMDs

The State Department has begun coordinating with Syria's neighbors to prepare for the handling of President Bashar al-Assad's extensive weapons of mass destruction if and when his regime collapses, The Cable has learned.

This week, the State Department sent a diplomatic demarche to Syria's neighbors Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia, warning them about the possibility of Syria's WMDs crossing their borders and offering U.S. government help in dealing with the problem, three Obama administration officials confirmed to The Cable. For concerned parties both inside and outside the U.S. government, the demarche signifies that the United States is increasingly developing plans to deal with the dangers of a post-Assad Syria -- while simultaneously highlighting the lack of planning for how to directly bring about Assad's downfall.



Who wants to bet that we will find quite a bit of Hussein-era Iraqi WMDs should this come to pass? However, we're glad we are thinking this issue through ahead of time vs. supporting a completely haphazard and unauthorized kinetic military action in Libya to protect civilians take out military targets take out a foreign leader and which resulted in thousands of RPGs going unaccounted for. There has been pretty much zero media coverage of this circumstance in the past 4-6 months.




Gotta run... may be back with more fun later today.

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

i would be fine if only a few thousand rpgs were unaccounted for.

that nagging voice in my head says quadafi's stockpile was a little more technologically extensive.

Doo Doo Econ said...

The Obama administration may be concerned about the radical Islamists in Syria who are looking to overthrow the pragmatic Islamic extremist who is connected to Iran. It would be tragic if the wrong radical Islamists attacked Israel before the international anti-semetic villification is complete.

If enough Israeli are killed it might remind everyone of the truth of the situation and undermine President Obama's policies. More proof can be found in the Obama administrations decision to not replace Israeli F16 that are lost in a strike to reduce Irans nuclear potential. Delay until villification is complete and those old "rat" posters can be reprinted in Russian poster art style.

I try to be conservative on this issue, but President Obama is transparent in his neglect and contempt for Israel. He clearly associates Israel with British empirialism from the "Dreams from My Father." I doubt it is pure racism that drives his policy, but it is just as dangerous.

SarahB said...

Nice graph. If Greece is burning, should we take up a pool on when it begins here?

B-Daddy said...

Thanks for the link.
With regard to the debt per capita, I might like to see that compared to per capita income. Our debt carrying capacity is linked to income.

This is why the Greek debt is worse than the Italian or Irish ones; the Greeks are steadily destroying their ability to earn income due to their socialistic legacy.

Greece per capita income is in the $28-29K range against debt of $39K.
But those are old numbers for Greece and probably still falling, hence the crisis.

The U.S. per capita income is closer to $48-49K against $44K of debt.

Ireland per capita income: $39K
Ireland per capita debt: $44K

Italy per capita income: $30-31K
Italy per capita debt:$40K

Seems like the Greeks are in the worst shape and the Italians are next. The Spanish are in the best shape of all, wonder why they worry the markets?