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The Soviet Robber Barons and Top 0.1%

Jan 9th, 2021 by

M0re from Pipes:

The massacres of 1937-38 virtually wiped out the ranks of “old Bolsheviks,” whose place was taken by newcomers. In 1939, 80.5 percent of the executive personnel of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party had joined since Lenin’s death 15 From their ranks came the top officials of the party and government, the so-called nomenklatura, which not only monopolized all positions of authority but enjoyed unique privileges, forming a new exploiting class. Membership in it guaranteed permanent status and became de facto hereditary. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the nomenklatura numbered some 750,000 members—with their families, around 3 mil lion persons, or 1.5 percent of the population, approximately the proportion of service nobles under tsarism in the eighteenth century. And the favors it enjoved resembled those of the magnates of that age. In the words of a member of that elite:

the nomenklatura is on another planet. It’s Mars. It’s not simply a matter of good cars or apartments. It’s the continuous satisfac tion of your own whims, the way an army of boot-lickers allows you to work painlessly for hours. All the little apparatchiks are ready to do everything for you. Your every wish is fulfilled. You can go to the theater on a whim, you can fly to Japan from your hunting lodge It’s a life in which everything flows easily. You are like a king just point your finger and it is done !
The rank and file of the party, the “boot-lickers,” whose numbers had swollen immensely under Stalin, served this elite corps as attendants.

Posted in Central Planning, Disingenuous, If I Really Hated the Poor ..., Socialism, Special Privilege | No Comments »

All Systems Need to Be Resilient in the Presence of Evil

Jan 8th, 2021 by

From Richard Pipes’ incredible book Communism: A History

 

The Great Terror struck at the party membership as well as ordinary citizens. At its height, in 1937 and 1938, at le one and a half million people, the vast majority of them in nocent of any wrongdoing even by Communist criteria, were hauled before troikas, tribunals made up of the first secretary of the regional party, the procurator, and the local security police chief. After summary proceedings often lasting no more than a few minutes and from which there was no appeal, the defendant would be sentenced to death, hard labor, or exile. Abstention from politics offered no security, nor did wholehearted commitment to the regime. At the pinnacle of the Great Terror, the Politburo issued “quotas” to the police authorities, instructing them as to what percentage of the population in their district was to be shot and what percentage sent to camps.

 

For example, on June 2, 1937, it set a quota of 35,000 persons to be “repressed” in Moscow city and Moscow province, of which number 5,000 were to be shot.” One month later, the Politburo provided each region with quotas of persons to be “rounded up” nationwide; 70,000 of them were to be executed without trial. A high proportion of the victims of the Great Terror were persons with a higher education considered difficult to control and prone to engage in “sabotage.”

 

How much the purge affected the party elite can be seen from the fact that of the 139 members and candidate members of the Central Committee elected at the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, 70 percent were executed. ”

 

 

Posted in Central Planning, Socialism | No Comments »

The Universality of Science

Jan 8th, 2021 by

From the wonderful Freeman Dyson,

There is no such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions. But there is one common element in these visions. The common element is rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the locally prevailing culture, Western or Eastern as the case may be. The vision of science is not specifically Western. It is no more Western than it is Arab or Indian or Japanese or Chinese. Arabs and Indians and Japanese and Chinese had a big share in the development of modern science. And two thousand years earlier, the beginnings of ancient science were as much Babylonian and Egyptian as Greek. One of the central facts about science is that it pays no attention to East and West and North and South and black and yellow and white. It belongs to everybody who is willing to make the effort to learn it. And what is true of science is also true of poetry. Poetry was not invented by Westerners. India has poetry older than Homer. Poetry runs as deep in Arab and Japanese culture as it does in Russian and English. Just because I quote poems in English, it does not follow that the vision of poetry has to be Western. Poetry and science are gifts given to all of humanity.

For the great Arab mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyam, science was a rebellion against the intellectual constraints of Islam, a rebellion which he expressed more directly in his incomparable verses:

And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky,
Whereunder crawling cooped we live and die,
Lift not your hands to It for help,
—for it
As impotently rolls as you or I.

For the first generations of Japanese scientists in the nineteenth century, science was a rebellion against their traditional culture of feudalism. For the great Indian physicists of this century, Raman, Bose, and Saha, science was a double rebellion, first against English domination and second against the fatalistic ethic of Hinduism. And in the West, too, great scientists from Galileo to Einstein have been rebels.

Posted in Methodology, Science | No Comments »

Courage for Our Time

Jan 7th, 2021 by

Let the victors, when they come,

When the forts of folly fall,

Find thy body by the wall!

  • Matthew Arnold

Posted in Humans | No Comments »

304 Greenbush Street, Dickson City, PA

Dec 26th, 2020 by

My father-in-law’s home was, for many many years, heated by coal. (In my own apartment in NYC, we had oil heat, which I contend is no better). The job of the coal delivery driver was not at all fun. He had to muscle and finagle an enormous truck close enough to the house so that he could get the coal from the truck down the truck chute into the coal bin into the chute that sends the coal into the basement of the home. It was the job of the delivery man to make sure all of the coal ended up in the basement. This sounds easier than it really was. After nestling the truck close to the home, he raised the bed of the truck high enough to have gravity help him, and a boom extended to the house. The slope from the truck to the house was not very high, so unless the coal was very wet (depending on the form you bought with rice being the most common, but there were sometimes pea or nut or stove coal sizes) it was really hard to get it to slide down to the basement. So the delivery man often had to shovel the majority of the FIVE TO SEVEN TON load of coal into the basement.

That’s when the real fun began. The coal had to be fed constantly into the home furnace. So remember, every single home had an active burning COAL furnace in the home. If you’ve ever been to a foundry at a colonial village, you can begin to imagine what that would be like inside your home. With anthracite, it actually burned cleaner than you think. Some furnaces had little augurs that helped feed the coal automatically into the furnace, others required more care and attention. My father-in-law’s home required a little attention, not just to the amount of coal being fed in, but to the way it was burning. They spent their days and nights anxious about the color of the flame. If it burned blue, that was clean and largely “safe” … what they feared was an orange flame, which indicated that noxious gases were being emitted as the coal was burned.

Once the coal was burned was the problem of the coal ash. If you have ever seen coal ash, it has the consistency of well sifted kitchen flour – very soft and light. Little did the kids realize how toxic (coal ash is full of impurities and is itself very radioactive) the ash was, nor did the adults. It wasn’t just radioactive, it was full of toxins that when rinsed into waterways would be extraordinarily harmful to wildlife and human health. Well, what did the kids and households do with the coal ash? Much was taken away in the trash. But it was also repurposed for other things. The most common use for the coal ash was that it was dumped onto the (very hilly) dirt road outside. As the streets were not paved they constantly washed away down the hill and into the local streams and valleys. And Scranton’s famously great weather and heavy coal truck traffic took a toll. So the residents of Greenbush simply dumped the coal ash right into the roadways to continue “repaving” them, and filling potholes. Obviously this contributed to the already thick particulate pollution problem they all dealt with, and continued the assault on the fresh water sources all over the city.

But the kids were even more creative. As Scranton and Dickson City sits amidst a great landscape of hills, mountains and knolls, it was a great place to go sledding. The kids often sledded in places that ended down at roadsides. So, just like any clever kids, they tried to both make the sledding more fun (i.e. making jumps) and safer (stopping themselves from skidding into moving traffic). What do you think the kids used? They often made the jumps out of snow, but since the coal ash was everywhere and was famously pillow soft, they used enormous piles of coal ash to stop themselves from whooshing right into the oncoming traffic.

Happily Grandpa Racibor is 83 and still with us and has been one of the healthiest people I have ever met. He is also one of the toughest people I have ever met.

 

Posted in Environment, Family | 1 Comment »

304 Greenbush Street, Scranton, PA

Dec 25th, 2020 by

My father-in-law;s family emigrated from Poland to end up working in the coal mines of Scranton, PA (really Dickson City).  Here is the home he grew up in:

Just wanted to share a few things about his life not so long ago. Just northwest of this house up the hill was one of very many coal mines that sustained, and paradoxically destroyed, these communities. The mine up the hill from here, once the easily accessible underground seams ran out, started strip mining. Among the fun things that resulted from that strip mine (and the regular mine) were large open water ponds of mine drainage that made their way into local water sources. Legend has it that the mine owners had very little problem obtaining environmental “permits” to engage in these practices, as Scranton then, as now it seems, was not unusual in its degree of corruption. Not only as these drainage pits harmful (indeed probably still the biggest threats to water in PA) they provide a lovely glimpse into the nature of the corruption in American cities all over the place.

Scranton was “famously” run by the Irish as the legend has it. When my father-in-law returned from military service in the late 1950s and sought a teaching position at the local school, at the interview once he said his name was “Carl Racibor” and when asked to repeat it, he knew he had no chance to earn that spot. The spoils system operated all over the city. This is what happens in an identitarian world. A world where merit is discarded and positions of all types are allocated based on some immutable characteristic of a person.

Despite reforms being made to the system back in the 60s, a good number of people live with the legacy of such “spoils” and of course trust in the current system is no higher than it was back then. And in case any of you have not been to Scranton lately, I highly recommend it.

 

Posted in Family | 1 Comment »

Good Enough for Thee But Not Good Enough for Me, Episode 58847613

Dec 23rd, 2020 by

 

Posted in Government Gone Wild, If I Really Hated the Poor ..., Special Privilege | No Comments »

The Dark Days End

Dec 21st, 2020 by

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

By Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Posted in Flotsam and Jetsam | No Comments »

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to All

Dec 17th, 2020 by

Posted in Economic Illiteracy | No Comments »

We Wish You An Unexamined Christmas and a Science Free New Year

Dec 17th, 2020 by

Here is some of the advice on how we can spread Christmas Cheer in a sustainable way: (their suggestions indented).

Give creatively, thinking beyond material things (e.g. dance lessons, concert tickets, massage therapy, donations towards a cause etc.)

Because things like dance lessons do not require studios, transportation to the facilities, and materials and emissions. Nope.

 

Purchase a pesticide-free tree

Why are they focusing only on Christmas? That either seems non-inclusive, or suggesting that only Christmas celebrators are the ones harming the planet. Do we know if real-trees are “more sustainable (whatever that means) than fake ones? What about a fake tree made from fully recycled materials? What about the transportation to the tree farms? And so on.

 

Support local businesses and farms to reduce CO2 emissions

Empirical evidence should be easy to find here. We know, for sure, that “local food” has a much larger environmental impact than non-local food, do you understand why that make in fact be possible for other goods and services? In any case, what about the pandemic?

 

Opt for curbside pickup or purchase in store instead of having your order shipped

See above. You are VERY likely to emit more CO2 by your drive to the store, than on the incremental emissions from a gift coming to you from an Amazon delivery truck. Again, this is at least an empirical question.

 

Reduce food waste by storing them for future meals

Their writing on waste, for years, is such that people seem to generate waste for fun. I can’t remember being anywhere in my previous 46 years of life, whether it be on a backpacking trip, a community luncheon, a restaurant, a family or friend’s meal, where stuff is “just thrown out” …

 

Use kitchen drying rags to wrap gifts; it’s like two gifts in one!

Now talk about spreading cheer!

  • Recycle gift wrap, cardboard boxes, and cards
  • Use paper bags and recycle them after use
  • Recycle any plastic bottles and glass

There is a large and growing literature on whether recycling saves resources, saves energy, reduces CO2 emissions, and so on. The research, at best, says recycling is totally inconsequential and if you were being non-sympathetic you can find a huge amount of the work demonstrating the negative effects.

None of these, ever, has ever been presented with any evidence that they do any environmental good (they don’t, even if they didn’t all backfire, the magnitude of their impacts are negligible compared to the actually massive impacts we have on the planet through land use, habitat destruction, water quality, air quality), and of course any questioning is regarded as bullying.

 

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Posted in Disingenuous, Environment | 1 Comment »

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