RE DK CURRENT POST LEADERSHIP

"Such crises, of course, are opportunities as well, and in the past they have produced Washington Hamilton and Jefferson; Abraham Lincoln; FDR and the leading figures of his administration; Benjamin Disraeli, Otto von Bismarck, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle.  They have also produced Napoleon, Hitler, and Lenin.  Yet in the western world there is not a single leader of remotely comparable stature on the horizon." DK

The colonial and American leaders he mentions, unfortunately, were not, in my view, in the same class with the others he names: Disraeli, Bismarck, Churchill, de Gaulle, Napoleon, Hitler, Lenin.

You might want to ask why?

What about Xi, Abe, Putin? 

Versus Cameron, Obama, Merkel, etc., etc.?

Think about it.

FOR LA GAMAGA

Honey:

Let the Pope take care of this merdre. 

He gets paid for it. 

PS Stick to Catholicism, going forward, little apostate that you are.

Kindness is the absolute cheapest thing. Cheaper even than money.

Why needlessly stir up the Chinks?

RE 1763

It seems R R Palmer had decided on 1763, too. 

I just bought his book...

RE DK CURRENT POST

"No one, now, can deny that the western world is in a political crisis comparable to those of 1789-1815, 1859-71, and 1929-45.  It is, and will almost surely remain, less violent, but it may be just as consequential.  And like the first of those crises, it comes, more than anything else, from a complete breakdown of understanding between the elites and the masses of the people." DK

Thought provoking....

These are some of my thoughts on the above:

Western Civilization has been in a political crisis, more or less continually, since around 1763, the end of the Seven Years War. 

Its religious crisis, which he does not discuss, but which actually partially underlies the political crisis, goes back to before Luther, and was violent throughout Europe until the mid 17th Century.

RE HOW THINGS FELL APART FOR WESTERN CIVILIZATION THE CONTAGION OF LIBERALISM

"Perhaps in another twenty years more people will discover the keys to understanding how things fell apart, and how--for better or for worse--something new was put in their place." DK

He is talking here about how things fell apart in recent history, not in the longer term, for Western Civilization, as I normally am. 

The Milner Group view of civilization, was of civilization singular, and the only one they recognized was the British, really. That was plain in about 1900 to 1915 and after.  See for example The Anglo-American Establishment, pb, p. 133. They didn't even acknowledge France or Germany as being fully civilized.

Their big delusion was thinking that British Civilization could be generalized, globalized, could die to be born again.

Let's call it ' The Contagion Of Liberalism '.

BILL CUNNINGHAM

An ' aristocratic ' proletarian.

Only someone like that could say money is the cheapest thing and mean it.

ENLIGHTENMENT FALLACIES

I mentioned that the Enlightenment began in anti clericalism.

Most Americans won't know even what that meant.

It meant anti Catholicism.

RE CHINA BREXIT AND GLOBALIZATION

BBC China warns over reversal of globalization, bad for the world and bad for China.

China is the world now, really. 

You can see what they mean.

EU

Terms search eu

WHO REALLY MADE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION ON THE GROUND

Most all historians think first of bourgeois capitalists.

Most civil libertarians here would think first perhaps of rural anti urban, anti aristocratic, farmers.

Many liberals and leftists here would think of urban proletariats.

Actually, there were almost none of those, as representatives in the Estates General for the Third Estate.

So who were they, overwhelmingly?

Lawyers.

RE MERITOCRACY HE TOLD THEM MAINLY THEY WERE JUST LUCKY

http://bozonbloggon.blogspot.com/2012/06/michael-lewis-princeton-baccalaureate.html

RE DK POST RE MASS MURDERERS

"She argued that childhood could produce mass murderers in at least two ways.... " 
"I have no doubt, myself, that stories of tragic childhoods in one way or another lie behind every mass killing about which we read today." DK

Unfortunately, mass murderers can be produced in many other ways than this.  

Asperger's Syndrome is just one main source...

See, for example, Randall Collins' post here:

http://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2015/10/even-without-gun-control-warning-signs.html

"...In both cases, the shooter lived alone with his mother, who was devoted to caring for him. Both shooters had Asperger's syndrome, and both mothers strongly indulged their strange behavior...." Randall Collins 

Terms search: Lowry

RE THE BELL CURVE MERITOCRACY POST MILNER GROUP GLOBALIST FOIBLES

Maybe Brooks (a conservative) was looking at Reich's (a liberal)  work, The Work Of Nations, globalist meritocratic symbolic analysts staying on shore for that moment, nonsense like that.  

Smart cheap symbolic analysts, of course, are a dime a dozen in the global economy....

Take a look at Seymour Itzkoff, an acquaintance of mine from a while back. I read one of his books, not on intelligence, but rather on Feuermann.  He very kindly autographed it for me. Feuermann's cello was a b piccolo. I think Isserlis still plays it...

I have a variation on that, but with full length form b f holes, and shorter more rounded c's than the typical Strad b piccolo; it is actually more beautiful, aesthetically, than either the Strad b piccolo or form b. The upper belly wood, on the base side, is on the blog front page.

He, Itzkoff, has even more of a jaded slant on intelligence in America.

These are not my views, but they are there, and have influenced people, perhaps the likes of David Brooks, re so called meritocracy, and its shadow, dumbocracy.

RE MERITOCRACY BELL CURVE DAVID BROOKS

Where did Brooks get his wild ass idea that we had become a meritocracy in, say, 1980 or so?

I don't know, but I am prepared to speculate....

One of the authors of The Bell Curve, Herrnstein,  had written a book, prior to that one, in which he had claimed that the US had become or was becoming a meritocracy.

BINGO!

RE ENLIGHTENMENT FALLACIES MERITOCRACY

David Brooks said, a while back, that we have had a meritocracy here since about 1980.

What nonsense. 

Randall Collins debunked that delusion of our educational and professional system rather well, I thought, with The Credential Society, long ago.

RE EQUALITY MERITOCRACY AND RACE

Let's say a few words about these vexed questions taken together.

The Bell Curve of course set off a fire storm.

 I never read it. I reviewed the executive summary on wikipedia.

The criticisms of The Bell Curve methodology, Graves', at the end of the article, seem to me to sound well founded.

I want to talk briefly about something else along these lines.  It is very obvious to me that certain races have various advantages and disadvantages, of undetermined magnitude, as far as I can see. 

Let me give just one glaring example of a kind of meritocracy not normally alluded to.

IF you study history, you will see that the history of survival of laborers, under various conditions, varies by race.

The most well documented example of the relative survival merits of the negro race over white or Indian races is in connection with the history of slavery in tropical conditions, in Africa, the West Indies, South America, and the Southeastern Seaboard of the United States.

This racial advantage of blacks was recognized fairly early on, and resulted in the relative value of negro, Indian, and white slaves or indentured servants, for work in tropical conditions.  Slaves and indentured servants were valued differently based on their race.

Blacks were worth twice that of whites, and one and a half times the value of Indians, of comparable physical condition at time of purchase. Professor Allison, of Suffolk University in Boston,  makes this point quite well in his video lectures for the Teaching Company, Before 1776.

ENLIGHTENMENT FALLACIES AMONG THESE LIFE LIBERTY PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

Apparently, reading the Declaration, these are not the only inalienable rights.... 

There are still others, of undetermined number, possibly hundreds, apparently. 

How would you ever know how many unenumerated inalienable rights there are?

ENLIGHTENMENT FALLACIES CAN'T SHAKE A STICK AT ALL OF THEM

How about ' self evident truths '?

ENLIGHTENMENT FALLACIES

Unfortunately, inalienable rights is yet another.....

RE KENNY G COURTESY RANDY FERTEL SITE

https://youtu.be/c0E6a8SMYGc