Sunday, July 03, 2011
Links on Various Social
China will be a democracy by 2017 because all rich countries are democracies. I replied
The Guardian's hundred greatest books. Mostly written in the last hundred years. 5 on science, not a single one on economics, 17 biographies and memoirs (2 classifications)(all PC types); Germaine Greer is in Heinlein, Wells, Asimov, anybody like that, is out. So the Guardian is for semi-literates then. No surprise.
Religious end of the world prophecies from 30 to 1920 AD.
Prizes for innovative design
Al Fin on pre-natal testosterone exposure and genius, autism etc. I think they are linked and if the price of more genius is more autism I would happily pay it.
Cool pictures of the world's biggest vehicles
Proposal for an X-Prize for a brain-computer interface. I think this is something that a prize would work for. Such a link would change humanity but it is difficult to see that the team who produced it (I'm sure it would take a team) could charge enough to make them all billionaires, which would be a fair share of the profit.
How the Mississippi flooding is not caused by anthropogenic global warming or Man's inability to control nature (2 mutually incompatible ecofascist claims) but by ecofascist vetos over what the US Army Corps of Engineers is allowed to do to prevent it. On a much smaller scale this is what happened to the English village of Cockermouth - the ecofascists and media prevented the river being dredged and then blamed to inevitable flood on global warming; or the fires and floods in Australia )the Greens vetoed undergrowth clearance and dam building).
Will we ever see another Constitutional Amendment? Not because the Constitution isn't being changed but because all that is required to do it is judicial activism. It took an amendment to ban alcohol, merely a law to ban cannabis and the EPA thinks it can ban carbon dioxide by bureaucratic fiat.
He is assuming democracy as being the "end of history" ultimate.Roger Scruton on why environmental controls are better than the urban sprawl of American cities. I am on the other side but he is a very intelligent man and makes a strong case. Everything, including not being an environmentalist (the real sort not Luddites in stolen clothes) has a cost.
Perhaps a lot of people would prefer a competently run autocracy. Singapore, which is the template for much that has happened in China is a democracy but few ever vote for anybody but the ruling party, which is indeed highly competent and professional.
In the most developed countries we are seeing democracy superseded by a badly run but deeply entrenched bureaucratic state spending around 50% of national wealth and having an obedient media preventing real political debate. This is what we see in the US and to a greater degree in the EU, where only thee trappings of democracy remain.
Given a democratic choice I suspect most Chinese would choose Singapore over the EU. This is the choice that Russian people did make when they, freely and by an overwhelming majority, voted for Putin.
Given a truly free choice and free debate between those 2 options how do you think most Americans or Europeans would vote?
The Guardian's hundred greatest books. Mostly written in the last hundred years. 5 on science, not a single one on economics, 17 biographies and memoirs (2 classifications)(all PC types); Germaine Greer is in Heinlein, Wells, Asimov, anybody like that, is out. So the Guardian is for semi-literates then. No surprise.
Religious end of the world prophecies from 30 to 1920 AD.
Prizes for innovative design
Al Fin on pre-natal testosterone exposure and genius, autism etc. I think they are linked and if the price of more genius is more autism I would happily pay it.
Cool pictures of the world's biggest vehicles
Proposal for an X-Prize for a brain-computer interface. I think this is something that a prize would work for. Such a link would change humanity but it is difficult to see that the team who produced it (I'm sure it would take a team) could charge enough to make them all billionaires, which would be a fair share of the profit.
How the Mississippi flooding is not caused by anthropogenic global warming or Man's inability to control nature (2 mutually incompatible ecofascist claims) but by ecofascist vetos over what the US Army Corps of Engineers is allowed to do to prevent it. On a much smaller scale this is what happened to the English village of Cockermouth - the ecofascists and media prevented the river being dredged and then blamed to inevitable flood on global warming; or the fires and floods in Australia )the Greens vetoed undergrowth clearance and dam building).
Will we ever see another Constitutional Amendment? Not because the Constitution isn't being changed but because all that is required to do it is judicial activism. It took an amendment to ban alcohol, merely a law to ban cannabis and the EPA thinks it can ban carbon dioxide by bureaucratic fiat.
Labels: Big Engineering, eco-fascism, X-Prizes
