How Did We Get Into this Mess? There are two kinds of intelligent mistakes and I would like to illustrate this from Jared Diamond because he is careful about his sources. In “Guns, Germs and Steel” he came out in favor of the African origin of Smallpox. This was dealing himself into an academic flame war that has raged for decades and may continue for centuries. The only thing that can be said definitely is that the India, Africa and Persian Gulf trade predates recorded history and maybe even agriculture and civilization so determining the real homeland of smallpox is a hopeless task. I am not going to give the evidence for Indian smallpox genesis here because I see no need to stick my foot in that bear trap but the evidence was available prior to Diamond’s publication of GG&S. “Collapse” on the other hand was in its final stages and maybe at the printer’s before the thesis of “1421” took off and Mayan inscriptions were translated and correlated with each other to disprove Diamond’s theory of Mayan collapse and probably his theory on Greenland.
Vaccines: What not to do What diseases kill or disable in job lots, have existing vaccines and have at least a rare incidence here in the US? Bubonic Plague, animal small pox that can crossover to human populations, Anthrax and TB. So why isn’t everyone vaccinated against these diseases? Good question. A better question is why is there widespread vaccination against relatively low death and disability rate diseases such as measles , mumps and chicken pox but not major killers such as these?
Transition Problems When it comes to Libertarian/Constitutionalist/Religious Conservative politics while there are large areas of disagreement the basic ideas can be put together in a mix all factions can stomach:
$120 bbl oil permit sideways motion for the index? Much, even most, of politics has involved obscuring costs and magnifying benefits. This technique has been getting politicians in ever more trouble as the costs of obtaining and processing data and information has been going down throughout recorded history. It gets politicians in trouble in several ways. Rather than a laundry list of different problems just consider nuclear power.
The Standard Political Model Going back to at least the founding of the Chinese empire in 200BC and maybe even 3000 years earlier there was a standard political model based on the following facts:
Why don’t People Listen to Themselves? Today I was at one of my favorite forums and I witnessed something that made me shake my head. What follows is a paraphrased summary intended to protect the guilty: