[neverdem]

February 2009 Print Edition

[Cicero]

“In Darwin we trust,” eh? I don’t think it works that way.

[weegee]

“If you find yourself in a position where you make everything yourself rather than buy it from someone else, then you are by definition poor.”

Some would call that “independent” and not a member of the global economy.

[JasonC]

"How does that fit with my story that it shuts down because of a Malthusian thing"

Answer, it doesn't, it is always an institutional-political check, and never a population one. Population falls after economies collapse, and economies collapse when idiotic statism destroys them. That is, in fact, the only persistently encountered check in past periods of commercial and economic progress. In China as he mentions, but also in Rome, etc.

It is never a Mathusian story. Malthus believed population is detrimental to progress, but he was simply and totally wrong about it. The true mystery is why anyone still takes it seriously, given the staggering amount of empirical evidence against it. There is apparently some huge innate tendency to fixed-pie thinking, and an inability to conceptualize the idea of people truly supporting themselves, as they must whenever they consume only a portion of the value they actually earn and add.

[PsyOp]

Darminism aside, the main point is valid. More freedom from government interference and cheap energy drives human progress and lifts all boats.

[neverdem]

Decline of carbon dioxide-gobbling plankton coincided with ancient global cooling

Protective Gene Variant Becomes Bad Actor On A High-Fat Diet

Playing golf can 'damage hearing'(thin-faced titanium drivers)

FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.

[GOPJ]

The fall of the Berlin Wall was also a very important moment in my life. It told me that all those people who said that the Soviet Union was actually a lot better place than it was made out to be, and I’d come across tons of them in my life, were plain wrong, not just a little bit wrong.

Hint to the New York Times : if the shoe fits, wear it.

[SunkenCiv]

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	Gods Graves Glyphs	Thanks neverdem. In The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation (1997), Ridley... warned that government can subvert our natural tendency to cooperate. "We are not so nasty that we need to be tamed by intrusive government, nor so nice that too much government does not bring out the worst in us," he concluded. Reviewing the book for reason, the UCLA economist Jack Hirshleifer noted that "Ridley leans in the anarchist direction." To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach
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[SunkenCiv]

amazon search

[Question_Assumptions]

Ping for later.

[grey_whiskers]

I recalled one conversation I had around 1985. A singer who is now a famous labor activist and a highly respected elder statesman, Billy Bragg—I happened to sit next to him on an airplane. He had just come back from playing East Berlin. He was perfectly friendly, but he spent most of that plane ride trying to persuade me that East Germans were much happier than West Germans and it was complete bollocks, this propaganda from the West that they were unhappy. And he’s hugely respected still as a Labour Party grandee.

What a cretin -- why didn't Ridley put 2+2 together to realize that the Labour Party, Communists, and liberals are the greatest current threat to liberty and wealth?

And *priests* cause problems because "well, in the Middle Ages you had usury laws and they didn't help"?

Knee-jerk, reflexive, anti-Christian bias...

Cheers!