Col. Jeff Cooper on Riots

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

I caught this video — without the audio, on the BBC’s site — the other night, and it made me queasy:

These police weren’t deployed to keep a peaceful gathering from getting out of hand; they were deployed to keep a riot from getting further out of control.

Where are the riot guns? When a young man throws a torn-up barricade at the police and then charges them, it’s a pretty clear-cut case of asking for it.

Borepatch shares Col. Jeff Cooper’s advice on riots:

It would seem desirable to devise a system which would make sure, first, that the riot would stop; and second, that only the leaders would feel the weight of social disapproval.

Let us consider such a means — the 22-caliber rimfire rifle. This weapon, properly sighted and equipped with a noise suppressor, may be used with surgical delicacy to neutralize mob leaders without risk to other members of the group, without noise and with scant danger of death to the subject. A low-velocity 22 bullet in the lung will not knock a man down, and in these days of modern antisepsis it will almost never kill him if he can get to a hospital in a reasonable time. It will, however, absolutely terminate his interest in leading a riot.

The Israelis apparently read Cooper‘s To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth, which is named for the three great lessons taught young Persian men during that empire’s heyday.

Posted in Crime, Policy, War, Weapons | No Comments »

Analyzing an Embarrassing Problem

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

Metabolomics — the study of the chemical fingerprints that cellular processes leave behind — is well suited to analyzing an embarrassing problem — dandruff:

Dandruff is thought to be a complex inflammatory response to a common fungus on the scalp that disrupts the normal process of shedding skin cells. When people with a healthy scalp shed dead skin cells, enzymes digest the connections between the cells so the cells slough off individually, and invisibly. In some people, however, the immune system, for reasons that remain unknown, reacts to the fungus in a way that disrupts the typical enzyme process. This causes clusters of thousands of dead cells to be shed at the same time, resulting in visible flakes and itch. Dandruff affects millions of people in the U.S.

At Procter & Gamble, researchers hunted for molecules signaling inflammation of the outermost layer of scalp skin. The aim was to identify biological markers that indicate deeper changes going on within the skin tissue. Samples of skin cells were taken from the scalps of several hundred participants, some with dandruff and others with healthy skin. Researchers analyzed the chemicals that the cells from healthy scalps had produced and compared them to the dandruff sufferers. They eventually identified several markers of inflammation that differed between the groups. The markers can now be used to monitor participants in trials of new dandruff products to determine whether someone’s condition is improving, says Kevin Mills, a senior scientist in P&G’s beauty and grooming division and an author on the study that was published in January in the International Journal of Dermatology.

Another P&G dandruff study, published last month in Acta Derm Venereol, a Norwegian journal, used similar methods to look for chemical markers that were related to itching, a symptom that dandruff sufferers often complain about. They identified elevated histamine markers in dandruff sufferers, confirming the idea that histamine is involved in itch and could be targeted in future treatments. Dr. Mills says the findings could help advance research in skin conditions, including psoriasis and eczema.

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An Epitaph for Britain

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

John Derbyshire, quoting Lord Melbourne, shares this epitaph for Britain:

What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.

He disagrees with his editors that “Race… does not seem to be the explanation” for the riots:

Or rather, while it may not be the explanation, it’s a big part of the explanation; though the protocol over there seems to be that you have to be differently-raced yourself to say this out loud.

Plainly there are white kids among the rioters. Equally plainly, blacks are wildly over-represented. The population of the U.K. is two percent black. Does anyone think the proportion of black people among the rioters is two percent? It looks to me more like 60-70 percent.

Race was also a big factor in the police non-response to the riots. In London especially — but other jurisdictions take the lead from London — the police have been thoroughly race-whipped by the PC establishment. The Macpherson Report of 1999, which charged the Metropolitan force with “institutional racism,” was a turning-point. The mentality of the London police leadership now is pretty precisely that of General George Casey. The Daily Telegraph’s David Green has a good article on this.

The native British underclass is unruly, to be sure (see our own Tony Daniels on this in the current U.K. Daily Mail). They are quite capable of breaking windows without instruction.

The British, however, have lived with their class problem for a millennium and more. To deliberately add a race problem on top of that, as the post-WW2 British did, for no reasons other than sentimentality, crank economics, and post-imperial noblesse oblige, was an act of folly for which history offers few parallels. A few brave souls among Britain’s leaders said so at the time, but they were shouted down and hustled out of public life.

(I’ve mentioned Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech before.)

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British Degeneracy on Parade

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

I was waiting for Theodore Dalrymple to weigh in on the British degeneracy on parade in his homeland:

The ferocious criminality exhibited by an uncomfortably large section of the English population during the current riots has not surprised me in the least. I have been writing about it, in its slightly less acute manifestations, for the past 20 years. To have spotted it required no great perspicacity on my part; rather, it took a peculiar cowardly blindness, one regularly displayed by the British intelligentsia and political class, not to see it and not to realize its significance. There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.

Posted in Policy, Theodore Dalrymple | No Comments »

Not a Grenade Launcher

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

Israeli defense contractor Rafael Armament Development Authority calls its Firefly wireless camera, which can be shot 500 feet in the air by a grenade launcher, a revolutionary concept in tactical intelligence:

The Firefly can make the difference between life or death on the battlefield. Soldiers shoot it off and for eight glorious seconds it gives them a bird’s eye view of the terrain around them, tipping them off to enemy positions. Then it crashes back to earth.

I’m thinking that a remote-control helicopter or airship, with far more than eight seconds’ air time, would make a much better vehicle for the camera, but a few hackers decided that the real problem is that private citizens can’t buy 40mm grenade launchers — so they decided to build their own version that launches from a perfectly legal 37mm flare gun.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

A Father’s Search for a Drug for Down Syndrome

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

Neuroscientist Alberto Costa switched specialties and dedicated his life to devising a drug for Down Syndrome when his daughter, Tyche (pronounced “Tishy”), was born with the condition:

In 2006, using mice with the equivalent of Down syndrome, Costa published one of the first studies ever to show that a drug could normalize the growth and survival of new brain cells in the hippocampus, a structure deep within the brain that is essential for memory and spatial navigation. In people with Down syndrome, the slower pace of neuron growth in the hippocampus is suspected to play a key role in cognitive deficits. Follow-up studies by other researchers reached conflicting results as to whether the drug Costa had tested, the antidepressant Prozac, could produce practical gains on learning tests to match its ability to boost brain-cell growth. Undeterred, Costa moved on to another treatment strategy. In 2007 he published a study that showed that giving mice with Down syndrome the Alzheimer’s drug memantine could improve their memory.

Now Costa has taken the next step: he is completing the first randomized clinical trial ever to take a drug that worked in mice with Down and apply it to humans with the disease, a milestone in the history of Down-syndrome research.

I’m amazed that Muriel Davisson was able to breed Down-syndrome mice:

Davisson, now semiretired from Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Me., spent the 1980s developing a mouse, known as Ts65Dn, that had many of the traits associated with Down syndrome, including, incredibly, the distinctive facial characteristics associated with the disease and the same slightly uncoordinated gait.

Here’s where the whole situation starts to creep me out:

But the effects of that revolution on Down research may yet be cut short. A competing set of scientists are on the cusp of achieving an entirely different kind of medical response to Down syndrome: rather than treat it, they promise to prevent it. They have developed noninvasive, prenatal blood tests which would allow for routine testing for Down syndrome in the first trimester of a pregnancy, raising the specter that many more parents would terminate an affected pregnancy. Some predict that one of the new tests could be available to the public within the year.

Costa, like others working on drug treatments, fears that the imminent approval of those tests might undercut support for treatment research, and even raises the possibility that children like Tyche will be among the last of a generation to be born with Down syndrome.

“It’s like we’re in a race against the people who are promoting those early screening methods,” Costa, who is 48, told me. “These tests are going to be quite accessible. At that point, one would expect a precipitous drop in the rate of birth of children with Down syndrome. If we’re not quick enough to offer alternatives, this field might collapse.”

Posted in Science | 1 Comment »

The Thinking Man’s Yobs

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

The fact that London’s burning, literally, has me thinking of The Clash and their impressive-to-teens political stances:

The band’s music was often charged by a leftist political ideology.[62] Strummer, in particular, was a committed leftist. The Clash are credited with pioneering the advocacy of radical politics in punk rock, and were dubbed the “Thinking Man’s Yobs” by NME.[63] Like many early punk bands, the Clash protested against monarchy and aristocracy; however, unlike many of their peers, they rejected nihilism.[34] Instead, they found solidarity with a number of contemporary liberation movements and were involved with such groups as the Anti-Nazi League. In April 1978, the Clash headlined the Rock Against Racism concert in London’s Victoria Park for 80,000 people;[33] Strummer wore a T-shirt identifying two violent left-wing groups: the words “Brigade Rosse” — Italy’s Red Brigades — appeared alongside the insignia of the Red Army Faction — West Germany’s Baader-Meinhof Group.[64][65]

How brave of these thoughtful young English musicians to come out against the Nazis in 1978! Of course, coming out against the Nazis is just a (mildly) clever way of calling your opponents Nazis. No real Nazis are harmed in the process.

It’s hard to take their angry claims of non-violence seriously when they sing — or chant, really — about rioting and wear shirts emblazoned with the symbols of terrorist groups responsible for numerous shootings, bombings, and kidnappings.

Their politics were made explicit in the lyrics of such early recordings as “White Riot”, which encouraged disaffected white youths to become politically active like their black counterparts; “Career Opportunities”, which addressed the alienation of low-paid, routinized jobs and discontent over the lack of alternatives; and “London’s Burning”, about the bleakness and boredom of life in the inner city.[45] Artist Caroline Coon, who was associated with the punk scene, argued that “[t]hose tough, militaristic songs were what we needed as we went into Thatcherism”.[66] The scope of the band’s political interests widened on later recordings. The title of Sandinista! celebrated the left-wing rebels who had recently overthrown Nicaraguan despot Anastasio Somoza Debayle, and the album was filled with songs driven by other political issues extending far beyond British shores: “Washington Bullets” addressed covert military operations around the globe, while “The Call-Up” was a meditation on US draft policies.[67] Combat Rock’s “Straight to Hell” is described by scholars Simon Reynolds and Joy Press as an “around-the-world-at-war-in-five-verses guided tour of hell-zones where boy-soldiers had languished.”[68]

When punk rock took off, England was in a terrible state. For instance, London had massive piles of trash towering over people’s heads due to a garbage strike.

So, with the obvious failure of the post-war consensus, these disenchanted youths turned away from Labour and toward Thatcher and the Conservative Party, right?  Um, no, not so much.

The band’s political sentiments were reflected in their resistance to the music industry’s usual profit motivations; even at their peak, tickets to shows and souvenirs were reasonably priced.[34] The group insisted that CBS sell their double and triple album sets London Calling and Sandinista! for the price of a single album each (then £5), succeeding with the former and compromising with the latter by agreeing to sell it for £5.99 and forfeit all their performance royalties on its first 200,000 sales.[33][69] These “VFM” (value for money) principles meant that they were constantly in debt to CBS, and only started to break even around 1982.[1]

The Clash’s first single, White Riot, makes the juvenile political statement that white “youths” should riot like their black counterparts — for, well, something:

Lyrically, the song is about class economics and race and thus proved controversial: many people thought it was advocating a kind of race war.[1] Rather, lyricist Joe Strummer was trying to appeal to white youths to find a worthy cause to riot, as he felt blacks in the UK already had. It contains a positive message in the lines “Are you taking over / Or are you taking orders? / Are you going backwards / Or are you going forwards?”

The song was written after Joe Strummer and bassist Paul Simonon were involved in the riots at the Notting Hill Carnival of 1976.

London’s Burning, which sounds awfully political, is about getting bored in traffic:

It is sung by Joe Strummer (and Mick Jones in the chorus), who starts the song shouting “London’s Burning!” two times. The song continues talking about the problems in the England’s traffic lines, who makes people stay in the car until the night falls, feeling bored and far of their homes. This message is clearly seen in the next verse: “I’m up and down the Westway, in an’ out the lights/ What a great traffic system — it’s so bright/ I can’t think of a better way to spend the night/ Then speeding around underneath the yellow lights”

Career Opportunities sounds sincere — if oblivious to just why the situation might be so bleak:

The song attacks the political and economic situation in England at the time, citing the lack of jobs available, particularly to youth, and the dreariness and lack of appeal of those that were available. They specifically mention service in the military and police forces in addition to jobs that are often perceived as being ‘menial’ such as a bus driver or ticket inspector, as well as “making tea at the BBC”.

The line “I won’t open letter bombs for you” is a reference to a former job of Clash guitarist Mick Jones, opening letters for a British government department to make sure they weren’t rigged with mailbombs.

English Civil War, from their next album, attacks the burgeoning British National Front — which would go on to receive 0.6 percent of the vote in the 1979 general election. The left-wing Clash chose a still from the 1954 animated Animal Farm film for the single’s cover art — which seems appropriately Orwellian.

Oddly, The Guns of Brixton, from London Calling, is not about the race riots in Brixton in 1981 — because it was recorded in 1979.

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American Tinderbox

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

While London’s burning, Americans might worry about their own tinderbox, Walter Russell Mead warns:

For some time now, residents of some US cities have noted occasional incidents of seemingly random, racially motivated violence in which young Black males are involved. The hot weather and bad economy seem to be combining to generate a small but possibly significant uptick this year. The national media are doing their best to avoid looking too closely at this disturbing phenomenon, and perhaps for good reason. What the United States doesn’t need is a media firestorm that triggers copycat violence.

I suppose repeating the stories on right-wing blogs won’t trigger much copycat violence — but will lead to more middle-aged, middle-class, middle-American guys (legally) carrying:

Whites as well as Blacks have lost faith in the government and the intellectual and cultural elites. Some whites resent what they see as excessive privilege for Blacks reflected in affirmative action. Many believe that the federal government and the (largely white) upper middle class establishment wants to marginalize the traditional white majority in the US through a combination of deliberate immigration policy aimed at reducing white preponderance in the population and by favoring immigrants and non-whites for education and employment.

For people who feel this way, the reluctance of the mainstream media to cover racial flash mobs is sinister and disturbing. If there were no racial dimension to these mobs they would surely receive much greater publicity and there would be much stroking of chins and learned talk about what the phenomenon meant. Even if there weren’t many examples, our naturally sensationalist media would hype the story to make it big. Youth, violence, Facebook and YouTube: this is an explosive combination and it is exactly the kind of story circulation chasing news outlets would feature.

Given America’s history and the lurid attraction race still holds for the public mind, the racial dimension of (many but not all of) these incidents makes this an even more compelling story. Certainly if random mobs of white kids were attacking peaceful Blacks going about their daily business the media and the commentariat would be deeply engaged. The articles I’ve linked to have been carefully couched and worded in ways that downplay the drama and the human interest. It is understandable and even meritorious that this is so; as I suggested at the beginning of this post no sane person would want to increase the chance that what is still a marginal and occasional pattern of behavior would go viral and enter the mainstream — and to vary the metaphor still further, mainstream media attention is like oxygen for this kind of potential firestorm.

But to a significant number of Americans out there, this restraint looks like just another case of an anti-white elitist media bending over backward to hide the real truth from the American people. Should this phenomenon grow and should the media continue to downplay both the extent and the racial nature of the violence, look for a deep and angry response. Many American whites are young, angry, poorly educated and male. So are many Spanish speaking immigrants. These guys also know how to organize a mob on Facebook.

Mead cites a number of violent flash mob stories, but there’s now an entire site dedicated to the genre.

Posted in Crime, Policy, War | No Comments »

Movers and Shakers in Sports & Leisure

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

There’s a certain dark humo(u)r in Amazon.co.uk’s Movers and Shakers in Sports & Leisure:

Mencius Moldbug notes the remarkable upsurge — in the last 24 hours! — in transatlantic attention to our romantic national pastime:

Now that’s what I call a special relationship! Can an expansion team be far behind? The London Chavs, perhaps? But why is no one buying gloves? UK readers please note: barehanding a long fly ball is no joke.

You’re displaying remarkable perspicuity, however, in voting aluminium. Admittedly, the “Bronx” brand exerts a powerful fashion attraction. But not only is the aluminium bat cheaper, it’s almost impossible to break. There’s not much use in a broken baseball bat. And remember: the strike zone starts at the knees.

He also links to this transcript of the messages going out over Blackberry’s BBM service:

Everyone from all sides of London meet up at the heart of London (central) OXFORD CIRCUS!!, Bare SHOPS are gonna get smashed up so come get some (free stuff!!!) fuck the feds we will send them back with OUR riot! >:O
Dead the ends and colour war for now so
if you see a brother… SALUT!
if you see a fed… SHOOT!
We need more MAN then feds so Everyone run wild, all of london and others are invited! Pure terror and havoc & Free stuff….just smash shop windows and cart out da stuff u want! Oxford Circus!!!!! 9pm, we don’t need pussyhole feds to run the streets and put our brothers in jail so tool up,
its a free world so have fun running wild shopping;)
Oxford Circus 9pm if u see a fed stopping a brother JUMP IN!!! EVERYONE JUMP IN niggers will be lurking about, all blacked out we strike at 9:15pm-9:30pm, make sure ur there see you there. REMEMBA DA LOCATION!!! OXFORD CIRCUS!!!
MUST REBROADCAST TO ALL CONTACTS!!!

Since when are English police called feds?

Posted in Business, Crime, Policy, War, Weapons | No Comments »

Hedge Fund Cult Leader Ray Dalio

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

Kevin Roose describes Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater hedge fund as a billion-dollar cult:

Dalio, a tall, gaunt 61-year-old man with a swoop of gray hair, is an adherent of “radical transparency,” a management theory that calls for total honesty and accountability. He’s also a longtime practitioner of Transcendental Meditation and has built its precepts on self-actualization into Bridgewater’s office culture. (He’s even brought in David Lynch, the film director and unofficial TM spokesman, to lead a seminar for his staff.) Dalio expects employees to openly criticize not just the cafeteria fare but also each other; behind-the-back gossip is strictly prohibited. “Issue logs” track mistakes ranging from significant (poorly executed trades) to small (one employee is said to have been issue-logged for failing to wash his hands after a trip to the bathroom) and can result in “drilldowns,” intense sessions — one insider compares them to a cross between a white-collar deposition and the Spanish Inquisition — during which managers diagnose problems, identify responsible parties (“RPs,” in Daliospeak), and issue blunt correctives. Other employees can withdraw recordings of these proceedings from the firm’s “transparency library.”

Should Bridgewater employees need a refresher on the house rules, they can consult their copy of Principles, the 110-page manifesto Dalio has written to codify his philosophies about life, work, and the pursuit of greatness. The book used to be given to all Bridgewater employees in paper form and is now distributed via a custom app. Dalio’s axioms are studied with Talmudic intensity at the firm, and conversations with employees tend to be sprinkled with company jargon: “ego-barrier,” “probe,” and the ultimate Bridgewater insult, “suboptimal.”

“Empathy and kindness aren’t a top priority there,” says a former Bridgewater employee. The firm’s culture of absolute candor is designed to strip out emotional considerations and emphasize cold, Vulcan logic in all decision-making — the thin-skinned need not apply. But firm loyalists insist it sounds worse than it is. “Every organization is absolutely riddled with problems,” says one, “but we have a way of fixing them.” Dalio’s Principles, acolytes say, allow the firm’s researchers and traders to sidestep office politics and ego-stroking and focus on what really matters: beating the markets.

Which Bridgewater has certainly done. Last year, the firm put up the best numbers in its 36-year history, notching a nearly 45 percent gain in its most aggressive fund on its way to a total haul of more than $15 billion. Those returns — which CNBC ­noted were greater than the 2010 profits of Google, Amazon, Yahoo, and eBay combined — vaulted Bridgewater even further ahead in the hedge-fund rankings and reportedly netted Dalio a personal windfall of more than $3 billion.

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The Sport of Bouldering Climbs in Popularity

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

New York City hosted a giant bouldering competition in Central Park recently, and this was apparently enough to get the Times to cover the sport:

For decades, rock climbing was a sport about reaching places thousands of feet off the ground. These climbs can take days and require sleeping up on the rock. Spectators watch with binoculars below. Pinning ropes to the rock along the way is a necessary safeguard, and learning how to climb with a rope is a lengthy undertaking that long kept the sport on the fringe.

But in recent years, another, younger type of climbing — called bouldering — has opened the sport to a far wider group of participants and spectators. Bouldering requires no ropes because it centers on short climbs, usually up to 18 feet and lasting no more than five minutes. It is easier in many places to find a low rock to climb than it is to find a giant cliff.

And it is easier to watch friends, or professionals, when they are right in front of you.

Posted in Fitness | 2 Comments »

Neandertal Genes in All Non-African Populations

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

I don’t have much to say about Yotova et al.’s recent Molecular Biology and Evolution paper, An X-Linked Haplotype of Neandertal Origin Is Present Among All Non-African Populations, but here’s the abstract:

Recent work on the Neandertal genome has raised the possibility of admixture between Neandertals and the expanding population of Homo sapiens who left Africa between 80 and 50 Kya (thousand years ago) to colonize the rest of the world. Here, we provide evidence of a notable presence (9% overall) of a Neandertal-derived X chromosome segment among all contemporary human populations outside Africa. Our analysis of 6,092 X-chromosomes from all inhabited continents supports earlier contentions that a mosaic of lineages of different time depths and different geographic provenance could have contributed to the genetic constitution of modern humans. It indicates a very early admixture between expanding African migrants and Neandertals prior to or very early on the route of the out-of-Africa expansion that led to the successful colonization of the planet.

Did we really have to change the spelling of Neanderthal to match the original German pronunciation?

Posted in Science | 3 Comments »

How Debt Has Defined Human History

Monday, August 8th, 2011

David Graeber discusses how debt has defined human history — in the Wall Street Journal:

In fact, contrary to popular belief, credit has been the predominant form of money in world history. In ancient Mesopotamia, elaborate credit systems predated coinage by thousands of years. Periods in which people assume that money really “is” gold and silver, let alone use cash in most everyday transactions, are more the exception than the rule. Ancient empires, for instance, used coins mainly to pay soldiers, and when those empires dissolved in the early Middle Ages, society didn’t really “revert to barter,” as its often believed, but returned to elaborate credit systems — denominated in Roman (and then Carolingian) currency that no longer actually physically existed.

The remarkable thing was that they were able to maintain these credit systems despite the lack of any reliable state authorities willing or able to enforce contracts. How did they do it? Two ways: but both involved insisting that there were values that were more important than mere money.

The first was the cult of personal honor. In most parts of the world, in the Middle Ages (Europe was only a partial exception), merchants had to develop reputations for scrupulous integrity — not just always paying their debts, but forgiving others’ debts if they were in difficulties, and being generally pillars of their communities. Merchants could be trusted with money because they convinced others that they didn’t think money was the most important thing. As a result, “credit,” “honor,” and “decency” became the same thing — an identification which passed into ordinary life as well. As a result in England, where probably 95% of all transactions in a Medieval village were on credit, and decent people tended to avoid the courts, people still speak of “village worthies,” or “men of no account.” The apogee of this system though was the world of Medieval Islam, where checks were already in wide use by 1000 AD, and letters of credit could travel from Mali to Malaysia, all without any state enforcement whatsoever. In Melaka, the great Indian Ocean entrepôt, merchants from as far a way as Ethiopia or Korea notoriously avoided written contracts, preferring to seal deals “with a handshake and a glance at heaven.” If there were problems, they were referred to sharia courts with no power to have miscreants arrested or imprisoned, but with the power to destroy a merchant’s reputation, and therefore, credit-worthiness, if he were to refuse to abide by their rulings.

This latter brings us to the second factor: the existence of some sort of overarching institutions, larger than states, usually religious in nature, that ensured that credit systems didn’t fly completely out of hand. For much of human history, the great social evil — the thing that everyone feared would lead to the utter breakdown of society — was the debt crisis. The masses of the poor would become indebted to the rich, they would lose their flocks and fields, begin selling family members into peonage and slavery, leading either to mass flight, uprisings, or a society so polarized that the majority were effectively (sometimes literally) reduced to slaves. In periods where economic transactions were conducted largely through cash, there are many parts of the world where this actually began happen. Periods dominated by credit money, where everyone recognized that money was just a promise, a social arrangement, almost invariably involve some kind of mechanism to protect debtors. Mesopotamian kings used to rely on their cosmic ability to recreate society to declare clean slates, erase all debts, and simply start over. In ancient Judea this was institutionalized in the seventh-year Jubilee. In the Middle Ages, Christian and Islamic bans on usury and debt peonage, far from being impediments to trade, were actually what made most trade possible, since they ensured ordinary people were not entirely impoverished, and had the means to purchase the merchants’ wares, and because those religious systems became the foundation for networks of honor and trust.

This provides a hint of why we have been experiencing such a succession of debt crises. In this new phase of credit money that we’ve entered since 1971, we did exactly the opposite. Instead of setting up great overarching institutions designed to protect debtors, we created institutions like the S&P or IMF, essentially, designed instead to protect creditors. It has become increasingly apparent that the system simply doesn’t work.

That last portion hints at the fact that Graeber isn’t simply an anthropologist; he’s also an anarchist, which makes his appearance in the Journal unusual.

Graeber actually had plenty to say here, on this very blog, when we discussed his take on the origins of money.

Posted in Business, Economics, Policy | 2 Comments »

South California Secession Proposal

Monday, August 8th, 2011

I don’t really know what it means that the Riverside County Board of Directors approved a proposal for 13 California counties to secede from the Golden State for more discussion and debate:

The board approved fellow member Jeff Stone’s call for a meeting. The board voted 4-0 under the caveat that no Riverside County staff or funds be used for the meeting, according to the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin.
[...]
The next meeting is planned for the fall at which officials from around Southern California will discuss their issues with current state politics in a summit. Stone has asked that the 51st state proposal remain as an option if no other solutions could be reached.

South California would encompass Fresno, Imperial, Inyo, Kern, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Mono, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego and Tulare counties, which have a combined population totaling approximately 13 million people.

The proposed 51st state would be the fifth largest by population, more populous than Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania. South California would take nearly a third of the population away from California, making the Golden State the second-largest state after Texas.

Eleven of the 13 counties in proposed South California traditionally vote Republican, a fact noticed by California Gov. Jerry Brown’s office last week.

“If you want to live in a Republican state with very conservative right-wing laws, then there’s a place called Arizona,” Brown spokesman Gil Duran said.

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

Scott Adams on the Benefits of Boredom

Sunday, August 7th, 2011

Back in 2003, we had something called boredom, Scott Adams (Dilbert) quips:

We’ve won the war on boredom! If you have a smartphone in your pocket, a game console in the living room, a Kindle in your backpack and an iPad in the kitchen, you never need to suffer a minute without stimulation. Yay!

But wait — we might be in dangerous territory. Experts say our brains need boredom so we can process thoughts and be creative. I think they’re right. I’ve noticed that my best ideas always bubble up when the outside world fails in its primary job of frightening, wounding or entertaining me.

I make my living being creative and have always assumed that my potential was inherited from my parents. But for allowing my creativity to flourish, I have to credit the soul-crushing boredom of my childhood.

Posted in Media | 2 Comments »

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