Tag: Henry Wallace
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When spells break
Thinking about broken spells and busted myths today. When spells break, weird shit happens. We’ve had a lot of broken spells in the last 30 Bush years. 9/11 broke the spell of “terrorism” and Wilsonian “democracy” imperialism. 2008 broke the spell of honest banking. 2020 broke the spell of “public health” as a healing profession…
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Unanswered question
Lately I’ve been using the car dealer castes as clarifiers. Dealers had three categories. Conservative Prospects were interested in simplicity and reliability, uninterested in status. Step-up Prospects were interested in flashy impressive status. Luxury Prospects wanted lasting quality and didn’t care much about flash. The Prospects correlate perfectly with the ancient castes and Orwell’s party…
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One solvable problem
Right now the biggest SOLVABLE problem is housing prices. The total takeover of all government by lunatic devils is NOT SOLVABLE. Many people have incomes that should be enough to raise a family, when judged against overall cost of living OTHER THAN HOUSING. The New Deal enacted price controls on rent, which remained until 1952**.…
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The Sonnabend solution
Thinking about Hudson led to a random thought about governments. Studebaker and Packard made plenty of identifiable constant mistakes, obvious to outsiders at the time, not just in hindsight. Above all Studie overpaid shareholders and underpaid factories and research. Packard kept trying to compete in luxury cars after Cadillac unquestionably owned the niche, and outsourced…
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Answering a different question
One phrase in Henry Wallace’s speech on the Red Menace wants more explanation. He called Herbert Hoover the Engineer of the Great Depression, and observed that Hoover was part of the cabal who were engineering the permanent Red Menace in 1948. Conventional history says that Hoover was a ‘fall guy’ for Wall Street, accidentally allowing…
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First ads
Someone on substack was defending the need for advertising when done for honest purposes. I commented: Yes! Advertising is part of nature. “Buy my pollen, get a free honey drink!” This seems like something I must have written here already, but oddly I didn’t. Despite all my musings on the Duane Jones book, and my…
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Powerful analogy
Compact Mag details the rise of greenlash in this week’s EU parliament election. Germany has taken the craziest green path in the last 10 years, shutting down its clean nuclear plants and also banning Russian gas, resulting in more coal power. Coal is genuinely dirty, but coal automatically becomes pure as angel hair when Gaia…
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Pits and spoons
Briggs is trying to bring real human experience back into science. In this piece he analyzes claims of telekinesis and speculates on quantum action. He doesn’t reach any conclusions. I think he may be starting from an unproductive angle. Our thinking on these subjects is narrowed down by our intuitive sense that force is a…
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Stoller gets one
Matt Stoller sometimes bears down hard on companies that are just natural monopolies like Google. Gaining most of the customers by providing the best service is honest competition, not predation. This time he’s found a nasty mob-style predator. The feds and some states are suing a software company called RealPage that coordinates rentals among the…
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Interesting “coincidence”
Thinking about the parallels between 1968 protests and 2024 protests led to an enticing “coincidence”. The NSA web was started in 1968 by ARPA, founded by Bezos’s grandpa. The web’s first users were universities. The publicly announced first use was tracking academic research so NSA could coordinate and steal and manipulate. Reminded me of a…
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Wallace as always
Around the same time when John Langan in Hollywood was envisioning aperture cards as an aid to filing and sorting film clips, others were envisioning the same idea as an aid to scientific references. Atherton Seidell is credited with the first published mention of the idea. (Sync: Another Atherton was involved in commercializing the Langan…
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Sounds familiar
Paying attention to Zimbabwe now. One story about Mugabe’s corruption mentioned ‘farm invasions’, which needed more explanation. From Cato’s account, which may be biased: = = = = = START CATO: In the early 2000s, Zimbabwe’s former dictator Robert Mugabe gave the green light to his paramilitary supporters to invade commercial farms, seizing some 23…
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Reconstructing a bombed country
In previous item I wrote: WPA definitely employed white-collar workers who had been discarded along with the skilled laborers when Wall Street bombed America down to bedrock. Stirred up a thought. The Marshall Plan was based on the New Deal. Marshall was rebuilding and restoring and resettling Europe after the Krauts bombed it down to…
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Reprint on Platonic crap
Reprinting this from just a few months ago because I feel like it. = = = = = START REPRINT: Via MindMatters. = = = = = START QUOTE: Mark Balaguer defends the proposition that mathematics belongs to an eternal realm. This realm is frequently referred to as the Platonic realm. Mathematics is like nothing…
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What’s the problem?
Headline: Oil and gas companies must pay more to drill on federal land under new Biden admin rule. Conservatives are squawking as usual, but this is a rare example of government applying the correct incentives. Government desperately needs to function more like a business. Businesses charge individual customers for individual services. This leads to more…
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