Negative Railroad

An observation by Steve Sailer, interesting even without its context:

Ironically, when I left the "Collapse" exhibit, with its warnings about overpopulation, at Los Angeles's Natural History museum, I turned out of the parking lot onto Martin Luther King Boulevard, where the billboards were in Spanish. In LA, the African Americans have been pushed off even MLK Blvd. by Latin American immigrants.

I read years back that South Central, the notorious crack-and-gang neighborhood in L.A., was rebranded as South Los Angeles. Not necessarily by some wishful-thinking community organizers, but as recognition that Latinos had moved in and improved the character of the place.

TJIC shows his best form ripping the current President and Big Media:

So why, exactly, is this being spun as an Obama victory?

Measured as a percentage of total economic output — the gauge that economists say is most meaningful — the deficit would be 10 percent of gross domestic product… well below the records set during World War II.

Fascinating!

The deficit was 25% when we assembled the largest armed forces in the history of human civilization, and conquered two continents at once.

…and with Obama’s socialist experiments, we’ve only run up a 10% deficit!

That is news – he’s doing a heck of ajob!

Just go read it.

Vox Day writes:

A private sector job which exists solely to comply with government-dictated paperwork is every bit as government-manufactured and unproductive as a public sector job. And that is precisely the type of job which is going to disappear entirely once the debt edifice collapses and the extent of the dollar-denominated imaginary economy is revealed. Just as stripping out the debt-funded component of GDP reveals that there has been no actual economic growth for decades, stripping out the paperwork jobs will demonstrate that the real labor force is still roughly 2/3rd male, just as it was in 1950.

Australia is “down under”. But that’s only an artifact of where the ancient mapmakers lived. This view is equally valid in the geographic and astronomical senses:

H/T: Theo Spark

At a campus coffee shop, sitting near a PoliSci major and a Planning major. There is so much nonsense, I wish I could just record the whole dialog. It has been a perfect stereotype of what Big Ed does to mushy young minds.

Individualism creates an environment where, if everyone can succeed and you don't, it is your fault. People need to recognize the system is at fault.

Yup, Jenny, in a Utopia without personal responsbility, nothing bad would ever happen.

I may need to work up a better-documented rant about this. But I have had enough of people proudly proclaiming their extended unemployment benefits. Getting laid off is not an invitation to twiddle around working on your novel. YOU NEED A JOB!

Twiddling on a novel is not a job. It will not lead to a job. You need to develop a new skill that someone will actually pay you to practice.

If people are afraid to take a job because it pays less than the job they lost and choose to spend another six months on the dole, they are parasites. GET OFF THE PUBLIC TEAT!

The Deepwater Horizon seems to have finally become background noise in the news cycle. The New Orleans Times-Picayune isn’t featuring a “day counter” on their website anymore. Up through about Day 78, it was at the top of the front page.

It‘s Day 84, and BP may be about to close the leak with a new cap. That’s no cause for panic or angst, so I guess it isn’t worth top-value pixels.

And after 84 days of wailing and hand-wringing, how many birds have actually died?

Less than 200:

The area where law and economics overlap is intensely interesting to me. The common law represents centuries of wisdom, for example, about who is responsible for what, under which circumstances. The section of law about righting wrongs between unrelated parties is called Tort Law. A central principal in torts is the concept of negligence. We expect people to know certain things, to expect certain things, and to take some care not to hurt anyone.

But accidents happen. Despite the protective glass, hockey fans get hit by pucks. And sometimes oil platforms explode.

So we have to decide who was harmed by whom, and how much the injury is worth. Putting values on things is what economics tries to do.

MaxedOutMama writes:

Current policy makers seem stuck on the idea that if the government does a thing that is highly destructive when a private entity does it, the activity will somehow become economically functional due to the government interference. That defines "Stuck on Stupid".

My quibble is over calling out only current policy makers. For most of organized history, government has been seen as some sort of divine agency, above the laws of men. Only perhaps during the first century of the United States was government not seen as a special exception to the rules of morality and wisdom. The Founders explicitly overturned the Divine Right of Kings.

Sure, the Failed Obama Administration™ is expanding the assumption of state divinity into new territories in the U.S.A.

“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”

Price is determined by the operation of the laws of supply and demand. Value is determined by the operation of human whim and preference.

In classical and Marxist economics, the correct price for a good is something that can be calculated precisely in terms of material and labor required to produce that good. Classical/Marxist theory implores people to adjust their perception of value to align with those correct prices. People ultimately serve the means of production.

A U.S. Judge has upheld an anti-gay activist’s right to participate in this weekend’s Gay Pride celebration in Minneapolis. Pride leases a downtown park as the center of their festival. They thought they should have exclusive control over who can be there. The Minneapolis Park Board, surprisingly, sided with the activist.

The Park Board figured that it is still a public park, and anyone who wants to be there should be allowed to show up. The activist, a Christian evangelist, had been a regular at Pride for a decade without causing a ruckus. Maybe his message wasn’t well received, but the gays did at least tolerate him. Now the gay community is getting more exclusive. According to their lawyer:

The Blues is a product of a distinctly American culture. Its peak and decline parallels American passenger railroading. The peaks left us with a wealth of blues songs about the rails. Since riding the railroad is something that our parents and grandparents did, the blues tunes are charged with a personal melancholy that puts the past right into your heart.

Here’s maybe my favorite of all:

Via TJIC, a graphic explanation of how a blowout preventer works, and what failed on the Deepwater Horizon.

Take a look. And remember, this thing is installed and operated by remote control a mile under the sea. Cool. Except the “failure” part…

I find great truth in the maxim that righties think they have better ideas while lefties think they are better people. Ideas can be tested by logic and experiment. It can be difficult to judge a person’s character, and even harder to do so on the basis of bumpersticker slogans or blowhard talking points.

Leftism is much about identity and self-reassurance. This image lifted from the intertubes represents a whole class of self-congratulatory stickers, t-shirts, icons and other in-crowd swag.

Liberals are possessed of noble qualities, while conservative is a synonym for mean. And everybody knows Mean People Suck.

…Immortality is the recollection one leaves in the memory of man.

Quoted from: Napoleon Bonaparte