It really is too bad I did not have time to get into the ethics of private property. Oh, well.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman

Arguably, then, parties of the left need to maintain not only the appearance of electability, but possibly more importantly the appearance of extremism, because when they become reasonable, all momentum for reform is lost.

more more....so Mill saying let's have a try and understanding perfectly the second law... amazing... this is the good thing abbut reading the classic directly.. you would be amazed about the things Darwin or Kant or Hume were supposed to have said but they never actually said....or even state exactly the opposite.

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

And thanks for this, Migeru, I am starting to fill some gaps in my education!

I can resist anything but temptation.- Oscar Wilde

Anyway, I really enjoyed this and look forward to the next installment.  Thanks.  You and I are going to have to start a book club of some sort when I arrive in Britain.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

Teaser: In the event no major upheaval in the world power structure occurs, the Caucasus and the 'Stans' continue to be a five-way toss-up between Russia, China, India, America and Europe.

In the event a Turkish-Iranian alliance arises, the area falls wholly into an emergent Islamic axis -- somewhat religious and modernist, while the more reactionary regions (see: Saudi Arabia, Sudan) are argued over by outside powers (China v United States).

Africa winds up being the grand prize of the 21st century. Where great power politics as-is prevail, Europe, the Islamic bloc, China, the United States, India, and even Russia get involved. It's a real mess, but armies go where the treasures are, and poor Africa, ever the victim, is lined up to be fought for once again.

Or is it?

You were interested, very much so, in the rise (renaissance, rather) of at least one South American power -- Argentina. There is at least one more -- Brazil.

Latin America comes to be divided between Argentina in alliance with Colombia, China gets a toehold via Peru and Mexico, Russia forges an alliance with Brazil and Venezuela.

All three blocs go to town in Africa, forging a trio of ostensibly 'Third World' alliances both there and farther afield, even planting flags in Europe and Asia; it's quite the scene.

Short Form

There are about twenty different alliance groupings possible if but one roll of the dice goes their way, and about six that are robust in most every scenario.

The one consistency is that the world is already multipolar whether Washington admits it or not, and it's only going to get even more diversified a portfolio of power, to the point that radical restructuring of wealth, trade and influence is going to occur, unless somebody puts a foot down on a lot of other people's necks.

Which, I suppose, is what the Bushies have been attempting, albeit quite clumsily, to do all along.

Why pick on the Iranians? Why plant a flag in Iraq? Simple: tolerating the peaceful and uncontested formation of a modernist Islamist bloc is a virtual death sentence for American influence in the Eastern Hemisphere. Al Qaida rehearsing plane hijackings is not what keeps the Americans up at night. Nor is Saddam Hussein wondering which village to gas next week. Not even the dispute over the Occupied Territories in Palestine gets much mileage.

What gives the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom ulcers is the nightmare scenario of Turkey, Iran and one other major player -- Egypt, perhaps, or Pakistan -- and that alliance either being chums with the new Sino-Indo-Russian entente, or going solo and becoming a new nuclear power (which, since the Paks already have the bomb, it would be instantly).

Suddenly, giving the Turks the cold shoulder for two decades doesn't seem like such a good move.

Oh, little detail: No one ever second-guesses the fact that the Turks have a nuclear energy program of their own.

Good thing the Turks are always on the right side of human rights. Good thing the Turks always have stable democratic institutions. Good thing the Turks have never had an aggressive foreign policy.

Else I might be a bit worried about their new friends, the Iranians, and their new tag-team strategy vis a vis the Kurds on northern Iraq.

Have Keyboard. Will Travel. :)

Science by making the resource base more homogeneous, erases the restrictions once thought to reside in the lack of homogeneity.

Jesus H/F Christ.  

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

the decision will probably depend mainly on one consideration, viz. which of the two systems is consistent with the greatest amount of human liberty and spontaneity.

Spontaneity. I like that word in this context.

No TV, no internet, no recorded music, no movies, no phones... and some source of income that provided one with plenty of free time.  So... letter writing, socializing - including a highly developed art of conversation, gambling, flirtation... and for the less socially minded - reading and writing. Lots and lots of reading and writing.  Plus a lot less stuff to be learned about any subject before one could be considered qualified to write about it by oneself and others.

Great piece btw. More please.

We cannot, indeed, foresee to what extent the modes of production may be altered, or the productiveness of labour increased, by future extensions of our knowledge of the laws of nature, suggesting new processes of industry of which we have at present no conception.

This statement falls into a pattern still familiar today -- the confusion of science (which advances by learning new things) with technology (which advances by making new things). One cannot predict what one will learn, simply because to do so would require that it already be known. Predicting (more accurately, inferring) that something can be made, in contrast, is routine in technology development. No new laws of nature are involved in developing a next-generation aircraft, merely the working out of the intricate consequences of intricate systems based on materials and principles that are already known. Well, give or take some fix-up and debugging.

In practice, of course, many of the most interesting advances in technology result when science discovers new materials and phenomena, and many of the most interesting advances in science rely on technology to make new instruments and tools. The conceptual distinction remains important, however, even when the activities are intimately intermixed within a single research group.

Because technology need not rely on new knowledge of nature, applied physics can be used to determine some facts about as-yet-unimplemented revolutionary technologies. These facts typically tell us more about the lower bounds on future achievements because, although careful inference can establish possibilities, it cannot so easily establish impossibilities (unless some natural law would obviously be violated -- perpetual motion, and all that). Describing upper limits on what can be done is naturally more difficult because it would require a proof of the unworkability of an unbounded set of possible designs, and because science may turn up new, exploitable materials and phenomena. Describing lower limits on what can be done is possible because this requires only that particular, high-margin-of-safety designs will work as physics says they will.

This knowledge regarding feasible developments is of first-rank importance to policy development, yet is commonly ignored.

Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.

The economist's notion of infinite substitutability bears some resemblance to the old alchemists' dream of converting base metals into precious metals. All you have to do is rearrange atoms! But the potential for rearranging atoms is itself scarce, so the mere fact that everything is made up of the same homogeneous building blocks does not abolish scarcity. Only Maxwell's Sorting Demon could turn a pile of atoms into a resource, and the entropy law tells us that Maxwell's Demon does not exist.

Converting base metals into precious metals requires, of course, something far more difficult than rearranging atoms. The process must transmute atomic nuclei, which requires roughly a million times more energy.

Daly then states that the potential for rearranging atoms is scarce, which is true, but only because the required energy (that is, in the technical sense, "free energy") is scarce. It doesn't require Maxwell's Demon to do the job -- the impossible demon would decrease entropy by sorting atoms according to their thermal energies, which is quite different from moving them around and sorting them by their kinds.

Does anyone know whether Daly has been influenced by Rifkin? Referring to "the entropy law" and declaring that it prohibits unmixing atoms is an error that Rifkin first popularized.

Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.

One of these conditions is, universal education; the other, a due limitation of the number of the community.

Please note point #2, which follows Malthus.


Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.