Guns are mere tools.

Much of Latin America has fun laws as restrictive or more so than Europe. But they have more fun crime and violence than the US. They're left out because they're not OECD countries.

UK violent crime rate is higher than the US, Russia has more murders than the US. We don't see this because they're not using guns, they use knives. ( Read more... )

They say that then never do anything about how piss poor mental health access is. Even with insurance copays are higher. Medicines are expensive and chronic. Public mental health has huge delays and shortages and availability issues. Much insurance doesn't cover it at all. And to top it off it's NOT MENTAL HEALTH. Mental health sufferers are ( Read more... )

Key summary

"Four concepts lead to understanding collapse, the first three of which are the underpinnings of the fourth. These are: 1. human societies are problem-solving organizations; 2. sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance; 3. increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita; and 4. investment in ( Read more... )

MAGA Chuds and Federist Society yahoos will bring down the Republic and the Empire and instead of being great again we're going to see fragmentation and rapid decline.

Once SEC can't enforce it's rules the confidence of international and possibly domestic investors in the stock market will tank, and with it the market.

It's almost amusing in a ( Read more... )

A cybernetic system designed with high latency, high rigidity and long relaxation time isn't going to function.

The kludges should've been replaced by a modernized actual system long ago. But worship of the past prevented that.

Most nations update their constitution fairly often to reflect new circumstances. Even the Framers expected this. Yet we act ( Read more... )

They intend on gutting the administration of regulation. Tie up all enforcement because courts are already overloaded, slow things down by jury trials, and for e Congress, notoriously slow to legislate everything where legal bribery can skew regulations, and Congress isn't equipped to actually regulate.

Not to mention once again hurl stare decisis ( Read more... )

There goes the kludges to an archaic, obsolete 18th century mechanism which allowed the system to creak along into the 21st century. We're not an agrarian society of self sufficient farmer-artisans producing our own food and goods on homesteads in a world of slow communications and mostly local economics, few large institutions, and separated by ( Read more... )

Holland's Understanding Marxist Economics discusses the post revolution evolution and discusses how it's a staged take over, and how Engels remarked Marx thought the cheapest and easiest way to transition was to compensate the capitalists.

Which is actually given in Engels's Principals of Communism as one of the steps.

Combined with inheritance tax ( ( Read more... )

It's been an 11 year hiatus it seems since I last posted here.

A lot has happened in that time.

However I am increasingly frustrated by the inability to write substantial entries and commentaries on the platforms I have been using and really missed the flexibility offered by Livejournal's platform.

I don't have much time anymore to write like I used ( Read more... )

www.unc.edu/~jstimson/apsa07F.pdf