In a boring and unusually uncharismatic speech, Obama explains that America’s credit rating downgrade is not his fault, and it is not his job to fix it.
Author: Jim
London riots
The police shot Mark Duggan in London, as they beat up Rodney King in Los Angeles. Likely Mark Duggan needed killing, and it was instant justice, or possibly not. There is disagreement over who fired first. Real violence, not astroturf mock violence, ensued. There have been three days of rioting, looting, and racist assaults by …
The size of the difference between universalism and communism
Moldbug points out that universalist regimes such as the US government and its satellites, suppress dissent too, though by means less drastic and obvious than communist regimes, and that universalist regimes had disturbingly cozy relationships with communist regimes, were full of fellow travellers until there was no one left to travel with. He proposes, therefore, …
Communism or universalism
Mencius Moldbug proposes to explain what is wrong with the current political order by pointing out what it has in common with communism, thus he proposes to call the current regime communist, in that genuine opposition is for the most part successfully repressed. According to Moldbug Communism is “Democracy without authentic political oppositionâ€. Not so. …
The prehistory of the left
Vladimir, Moldbug, and Foseti discuss the prehistory of the left, also known as the United States Government. Prehistory ends, and history starts, in the 1950s, because history before then got rewritten beyond recognition.
US federal government burn rate is 8% of GDP
The burn rate is a eight percent of GDP. Total debt is one hundred percent of GDP.
Science stagnating in the west
John Goodman reminds us: How many new drugs, Dr. Lajos Pusztai asks, were approved for breast cancer treatment in the past decade? His answer: seven. None was much different from drugs already on the market.
Stagflation
Once again, the economic news is “unexpected†bad. Official inflation is supposedly 3.2% annualized while real GDP is supposedly 1.3% annualized. I suspect actual inflation is higher, which would mean that actual growth was correspondingly lower, but even if we take these figures at face value, they still do not support the Keynesian account of …
The debt limit charade
US politicians are engaged in passionate debate and confrontation over the debt limit and spending. The question is whether to “cut†two trillion over the next ten years, which is to say, about two hundred billion dollars a year, which is to say, whether, after ten years, spending will be five or six trillion dollars …
How well run is Oslo?
According to the bloggers who speak for our ruling elite (such as Matthew Yglesias) Norway is wonderfully well run. But according to the terrorist Breivik, it is run much like Chicago, where the ruling party’s political mobilization of the disproportionately criminal underclass has produced a criminal party.