The French Red Terror, the Soviet Great Terror, the Cambodian autogenocide, and many others were all examples of what I call left political singularities. Left wing repression tends to make things lefter, which tends to worsen left wing repression, which makes things even lefter, which …  The process only stops when the latest despot starts to realize he is not left enough, he is being outflanked on the left, is …
Fun hate fact about the bell curve
Today’s hate fact is hyperexponential decay. The normal survival function (the number of cases in a normal distribution that are more than x, one minus the cumulative distribution) approaches zero as x increases hyperexponentially, which is to say, very fast. This often makes it possible, under many common circumstances, to draw conclusions about individual cases, to infer a particular person’s character and or ability from his race or sex, and …
Government hires protestors to demand more government
Powerline found an interesting job advertisement in Craigslist: Under the job category “new york craigslist > brooklyn > jobs > government jobsâ€, people looking for a government job are invited to: “ FIGHT TO HOLD WALL STREET ACCOUNTABLE NOW! MAKE A DIFFERENCE! GET PAID!†I knew they were getting paid to protest, but until now there was some deniability – students were being turned out to protest by their professors, employees …
The cause of the decline
Lately there as been a lot of concern about the increasingly visible decline of the west, notably Peter Thiel on “The End of the Futureâ€:
Short summary of “Fast and Furiousâ€
Many blogs have covered all this for a long time, in great depth, among them Human Events. I am not going to do so, but I need to mention such an important event, if only for my own records:
The Great Recession
Pinker on violence
Pinker argues that there has over time, been a great decline in violence, mistaking progressivism for progress. “The better angels of our natureâ€
Herman Cain wrote his own book
Often when a politician campaigns for an important post, he promotes a book about his life. And almost always that book is ghost written. I compared the partial transcripts of his interview with O’Donnell, with an extract from the book discussed by O’Donnell. They are similar in style. Likely the book was edited by a white editor, because most English language books are edited by a white editor, but if …
Progressives are not commies.
Commies propose the government run everything by a central plan. Progressives propose the government run everything with no plan at all. Commies believe that underdevelopment is a sin committed by wealthy capitalists against poor people, and propose to fix this by commanding stuff to be developed. Progressives believe that development is a sin committed by wealthy capitalists against Gaea and the trees, and propose to fix this by prohibiting stuff …
US dollar rises, because Euro smells even worse
The value of the US dollar has risen, as valued by gold and by the fiat currencies of countries that are relatively solvent. The apparent cause of this is not that there has been any improvement in the prospects for the US dollar, but that a chaotic dissolution of the Euro zone looks likely, so traders are switching to the most liquid asset that there is.