This is the proper revenge

They screw u? Write a country song about it and send it viral.

Wrote this elsewhere and needed to bring it back.

Part 1
When I approached history from the older western culture model, periodization was simple as it was just the traditional “ancient, medieval, modern” model and the “rise of the middle class” thesis.

But now with wanting to switch to learning the new global history model, the old periodizations and even the uber-successful “rise of capitalism” theses arent as useful.

Introduced to the new global history by Peter Stearns, I’ve been working off his understandings and, especially, his use of 1000 as roughly beginning the modern era where contact among civilizations has been constant and uninterrupted. But now I’m moving in a new, experimental direction that roughly argues the main historical drive has been the pendulum swings from sweeps of time where “core, settled areas” tend to raid the frontier zones and their peoples to the opposite times when the frontier peoples are on the move and raiding the settled cores.

The Bronze Age would be the rise of the civilizational cores and 1200 B.C would mark a switch to the frontier peoples power. That time would last until the rise of the Classical civilizations. The next switch was 200-400 A.D.

The amazing thing about this scheme is that it implies that we are probably only now coming to a time when we can say the settled cores could come back into power.

Since i would say that civilizational cores are highly inegalitarian with the lower social orders unable to project force, and the frontier zones as the opposite, the period after 200-400 would include the following eruptions of frontier peoples:

1) Germanic Tribes and Central Asians (i.e. Huns) from 300-600
2) Arabs from 600-800
3) Northmen 800-1000
4) Seljuk Turks 1000-1200
5) Mongols 1200-1300
6) Ottomans 1300-1500

And here’s where it gets weird… to be continued.

Part 2

So, if the sweep of history is the balance between settled cores and frontier zones, what does the modern period after 1500 represent?

Well, the Western Europeans were not the old Roman farmers of the latifundia. They were the descendants of the invading Franks, Angles, and Vandals/Visigoths/Berbers/Arabs/Etc. of old Hispania.

And, they were certainly not the central powers of the time– that would have been the Islamic World (especially the Ottomans) and China. They were indeed inegalitarian, yes, but were the lower orders locked down? Compared to the caste system, Confucian order, or the Sultan’s sway? And the force projected outward hit what: the settled cores of MesoAmerica and the Andean High Plains, the Sinic and Indian cores, and, later, the core regions of Islamic civilization even.

Further, after the eruption of the European frontier peoples, who came out on top of the pile? The most frontier of the contenders: the English. Indeed, how often have I argued in my American History class that the chaotic English tradition never seemed like much to the more centralized powers of France and Spain, but that it was actually it’s strength!

And as Europe became rich, industrialized, and sent their lower orders abroad (most often to the Western hemisphere), it has slowly become a settled core area like the old Sinic and Subcontinent cores.

So who took Europe down? Well, one of them was that great frontier region that was pretty much unsettled even 1000 years before: Russia.

The other one is that nation which is at the top of the pile now. Makes WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and the Iraq War look different, doesnt it? Europe shows signs of wanting out from under the American imperium. Korea and Vietnam made sure the United States knew not to encroach to close to the Sinic core. The Iraq war probably will have the same outcome for the Islamic core.

If the American civilization grows rich, fat, and with the lower orders locked down, would we have a return to a concert of classical cores taking their battles to frontier zones like resource rich sub-Saharan Africa?

Part 3

Some odd things pop out of this hypothetical schemata.

For one, we are in an era of history that began around the time of Diocletian and Emperor Xian!

Another is that disease comes to be one of the prime movers of history as it has continually weakened the civilizational cores and left them open to invasion for the last 1700 years. The disease vectors have been constant since then because the frontier raiders have made sure they circulate among the major civilizational cores. Probably, the fall of the classical civilizations and the modern eruption of the Europeans would have both been impossible without the great plagues of the 3rd, 6th, and 14th centuries.

Another is that the suppression of the lower orders is most easily accomplished by cracking down on “unauthorized” violence. Frontier peoples are probably egalitarian precisely because personal violence is common. And what is it that Europeans and bluestaters believe about ownership of firearms?

And, perhaps, frontier peoples are always more patriarchal than the settled cores? Or, at the least, poor men are as valuable as rich women; while the opposite is true in the cores.

On a different facet of free speech

I think a good working definition of how corrupt a system is might be “how different are what everybody KNOWS  and what everybody SAYS?” I long for– in a deep and abiding way– places where you can talk freely and for people who love to talk about things as they are without worrying about what offenses and dangers and snares lay about.

In corrupt situations (where, alas, I seem to have mostly lived and worked), I can actually feel the physical pressure of trying to keep quiet, as I corrupt myself. The interior agitation shoots out in lots of different ways, and, most often, I project my own inability to bravely speak onto others.

A common target is often American journalism. It’s pose of neutrality may (I only say may) have at one time served an important purpose. If so, that was then. This is now. The pretense of neutrality only covers up the material interests of the social and economic class who still write and consume our middle-brow (but sinking… witness recent coverage of celebrity deaths) cultural talk. American journalists don’t speak truth to power, because they ARE  power.

I’ll give one example, before I retire to try to figure out what I was really trying to say before my mind pulled in different directions in an not-entirely-conscious attempt to avoid offense and keep its corruption safe:

A recent political fracas (as always, of relatively meaningless consequence) was led by the three cities of Atherton, Palo Alto, and Menlo Park. Within today’s set rules, it had to be written as if environmental concerns alone were driving their arguments. What the hell is served by that? I know many of the true believers in those cities really believe that they are driven by noble goals and that their wealthy situation is not at all served by their ideology. But that’s because they don’t understand history, politics, or, themselves! Jeeez Louise!? Atherton and Palo Alto…. and we have to pretend as if something isnt all about money and power and discuss it in the ridiculous frame to make the robber hipsters look good?

{ok– a stew of thoughts became mushed together. failed entry. bummer. but i hope i can work out the thoughts over time by starting from somewhere}

Yikes!

In addition to all the broken internal links, I lost some entries in moving the Y!360 blog to WordPress. I figured I could live with that, because I didnt look like a whole lot, but I just found one that I really valued that didnt make the jump. So here is a repeat from October 7, 2006:

GASPing for breath

I got an idea for naming it when everyone agrees it actually happened. Lets call it the “The Big GASP.”

It will stand for the “Great Asset Sucker Punch.”

As for what led to it? Well, what is an asset? It’s a claim on a future income stream. Another word for it is “capital,” as in “capitalism.” The original etymology refers to cattle– as in a herd that you can increase in size with good management.  The idea is “tomorrow’s money.”

So, assets should be priced on the availabilty of a future income from them. Easy enough. Except….

Except for people got carried away by three things that did indeed happen, but were not to be permanent:

1) Demographics. The Baby Boom increased competition for assets. Population in the industrial world, though, will now start decreasing at an ever-faster pace. Europe, Japan, and Russia will all be competing for the worst population death-spiral.

2) Globalization & Liberalization. The return on assets was strengthened, and individual assets became more efficient because regulation and socialism went into retreat and the market worked its magic. However, the new centre-piece of the  global economy, China’s manufacturing prowess, will be show its increasing instability because it wasnt really a part of liberalization, only globalization.  It is instead a system of of misallocation of capital directed by authoritarian oligarchs. Globalization cant depend on countries that arent really capitalist (liberalism has always understood itself to be both an economic and political system– see any issue of “The Economist.”)

3) Alan Greenspan & Moral Hazard. Some asset choices turn out to be incorrect. The system needs these to be cleansed out regularly, so that capital can be allocated correctly. In the world of finance, the problem can be particularly pernicious because it is there that the assets themselves get valued. Mistaken valuations need to be corrected in a good, old-fashioned shitstorm. Mr. Greenspan, though, always chose to dump money into the market whenever there was a threat of actually holding people to their mistakes. Financial virtue was denigrated in favor of letting vice thrive. The “Greenspan Put” meant that no one payed. But that can only go on so long before capital outgrows itself and the implosion that follows any Ponzi scheme brings down everyone without regard to virtue or vice.

So, when the market returns and assets are repriced according to the true nature of their future income streams? Well, its going to suck.

It’ll give us a Big GASP. Housing, securities, the whole shebang.

“GASPing for breath

I got an idea for naming it when everyone agrees it actually happened. Lets call it the “The Big GASP.”

It will stand for the “Great Asset Sucker Punch.”

As for what led to it? Well, what is an asset? It’s a claim on a future income stream. Another word for it is “capital,” as in “capitalism.” The original etymology refers to cattle– as in a herd that you can increase in size with good management.  The idea is “tomorrow’s money.”

So, assets should be priced on the availabilty of a future income from them. Easy enough. Except….

Except for people got carried away by three things that did indeed happen, but were not to be permanent:

1) Demographics. The Baby Boom increased competition for assets. Population in the industrial world, though, will now start decreasing at an ever-faster pace. Europe, Japan, and Russia will all be competing for the worst population death-spiral.

2) Globalization & Liberalization. The return on assets was strengthened, and individual assets became more efficient because regulation and socialism went into retreat and the market worked its magic. However, the new centre-piece of the  global economy, China’s manufacturing prowess, will be show its increasing instability because it wasnt really a part of liberalization, only globalization.  It is instead a system of of misallocation of capital directed by authoritarian oligarchs. Globalization cant depend on countries that arent really capitalist (liberalism has always understood itself to be both an economic and political system– see any issue of “The Economist.”)

3) Alan Greenspan & Moral Hazard. Some asset choices turn out to be incorrect. The system needs these to be cleansed out regularly, so that capital can be allocated correctly. In the world of finance, the problem can be particularly pernicious because it is there that the assets themselves get valued. Mistaken valuations need to be corrected in a good, old-fashioned shitstorm. Mr. Greenspan, though, always chose to dump money into the market whenever there was a threat of actually holding people to their mistakes. Financial virtue was denigrated in favor of letting vice thrive. The “Greenspan Put” meant that no one payed. But that can only go on so long before capital outgrows itself and the implosion that follows any Ponzi scheme brings down everyone without regard to virtue or vice.

So, when the market returns and assets are repriced according to the true nature of their future income streams? Well, its going to suck.

It’ll give us a Big GASP. Housing, securities, the whole shebang.”

A Noobie 4th!

A Paradox

Life is, simultaneously, extremely complex and the most simple thing imaginable.

Josh Reighley was quoting someone else, but it fit his wisdom perfectly, when he tweeted recently that “we have convinced ourselves that the Gospel is difficult and practicing it is easy….. when in reality, the Gospel is simple, and practicing it is difficult.”

Yes, there might be difficult scientific and mathematical specialities, and there are ideas that dont make gut-sense at all (most things that pop out of the fact that C is constant, no matter how fast one is moving in relation to C, get really bizarre), but these complexities themselves might be subsumed into the very simple idea that we should be extremely humble about what we can actually know, or even do know now, both as a species and as individuals.

I mention this concept of humility before what we don’t know, because I think it is very hard for moderns to accept that there are limitations on our individuality. We wish to believe that we can know all, or will know all, or– worst case– already DO know it all (paging Dr. Dawkins….).

The limitations of our knowing will always take us back to culturally-embedded repositories for the wisdoms that are the most difficult to acquire and most easy to forget. One can know from the very start that they are deeply-embedded wisdoms because they don’t make initial sense to the modern individualist on first perusal.

But there will always be received tradition, revealed religion, and classic country music.  It’s that simple.

Here goes….

I’ve opened up comments.

I should warn, though, that my first plan of action is to not respond or reply, but just let people say their piece.

Thesis: supply-side problem. Corollary: disaster approaches for China

I think the root of our economic situation is excess capacity created by years of loose fiscal and monetary policy. The rate of return on capital always falls when excess liquidity ends up creating more supply than demand (with the global auto industry being one of the best examples).

Without a virtue principle that eliminates less productive capacity, the situation worsens. Capitalism REQUIRES some way of distinguishing between good and bad investment. Maybe there just needs to be a better phrase than “moral hazard,” because the issue is more than that. It’s about whether markets work or don’t work. Right now, we are not letting them work.

I say that all to preface the following contention: the worse the capital allocation system has been abused, the worse the fallout will eventually be, and of the three major capital allocation systems, the Asian model has always been the least dependent on actual market performance. Japan’s generation-long descent into deflation should never have been a surprise considering its mercantilist methods of allocating capital outside true market mechanisms. China doubled-down on a similar bet in the last decade and took the rest of the world along with it. It’s collapse will be spectacular, and will be the leading geopolitical event of 21st century world history.

The European and American models of capital allocation have developed many flaws, and that will result in much pain too, but it is in China that I say we will watch the true implosion of the 1989-2009 global capitalist system.

The Marathon

I try to avoid, almost fanatically, the incessant coverage of “sex scandals,” but one recently caught my attention and I was disappointed with how it was discussed.

Marriage and monogamy are hard work, and I would say they definitely have particular pitfalls for men. However, in “sex scandals” (where in the last generation the American press seems to have picked up the model pioneered by “The Sun”), the attacks on straying men seem motivated less and less by a belief in marriage itself. I’m not sure exactly what cultural subtext is playing out instead,* but I want to offer an alternative template to the MSM’s.

Marriage is most like a marathon. If a fellow racer falls, would it be sporting or helpful to stand around and kick them? Not really. Instead, you would want to see them get back in the race. The fall was embarrassing and, in some cases, may sadly make finishing the race impossible, but the goal should NEVER be to celebrate the fall. The goal is to hope for all runners’ safety and success, to re-dedicate yourself to the course, so you can someday say, as someone long ago put it, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”

——-

*At first I just guessed it’s always different political factions looking for payback for when their guy faced the firing squad, but I’m also now wondering if it’s really an attempt to undermine the very notion of monogamy as possible?

The Fruits of All Those Web 2.0 Changes as a New Evolution Approaches

These two stories are signs of changes in how the internet works:

Facebook to Twannounce “Twivacy Changes” Twomorrow?

&

Bit.ly’s Grand Plans, And Their Inevitable Clash With Digg.

The World Wide Conversation that is replacing the World Wide Web is built on information filtered through PEOPLE. “I.T.” now is more “I & P T” with people back in the loop in a serious way as they interact with information and choose which of it to bring front and center and into the conversation.

As companies, I really like Bit.ly, and I really dont like Facebook. Facebook, from its very beginnings, has had a Microsoft feel, and I just dont believe that its corporate DNA values openness and sharing. They may play at opening up their walled-garden, but I simply don’t believe them.

Bit.ly, though, I wish to point out, will possess information more valuable than what Google knows right now. They are starting to be able to sense which information is filtering forward and into the WWC. That is going to be worth some serious dough. They could devleop the first really useful prediction formulas. That could be very, very big! Time is money. Information is money. Information at the RIGHT TIME? That’s a fortune.

Some letters by his bed, dated 1962.

In authority-driven systems, name-checking is in important ritual to symbolize filial loyalty and your humility before the wisdom of the ages. And, thus, in my kind of music, name-checking is key. After much rooting around, I have decided that the ultimate name-check appears to be George Jones. He beats even Hank. I would want it to be The Hag or even Willie. But, no, the social grouping has made its decision. It’s The Possum.

Jones, FTW.

How are so many drawn away from things that have lasted and survived?

Doesn’t the Internet show quite well the problem of not believing and living by fixed principles? The speed with which the herd thunders from topic to topic, the way the mob changes its enemies to heroes (and vice versa) overnight, the symbols which lack any meaning or weight– doesn’t it begin to seem worth it to disregard the scorn and derision of the bien pensants who lead such an empty society?

The wise of every age have always started with the conviction that the popularities of the moment, the fleeting pleasures of flesh and flash, and the lauds of the empty powers do not provide lasting comfort or solace.

Wisdom endures. Individual lives do not.

OK– Seeing if going back to “old school” works

I’m going to try and return to blogging as my main internet output and Twitter as the place for quicker, more conversational stuff. The stuff I like to say doesnt easily fit in 140 characters, unfortunately. I’ll try to keep a connection of the two by using "Twitterfeed."

I hope I can find a space for frequent small postings that are in-between what blogging used to be and what Twitter is now.

This is now my official blog with all of my archives back to 2005.

I was able to import two other blogs here, so that all of my blogging is now centralized!

FT.com / Comment / Opinion – Latvia’s currency crisis is a rerun of Argentina’s

FT.com / Comment / Opinion – Latvia’s currency crisis is a rerun of Argentina’s.

the start of the next leg down when this spreads to Scandanavian capital holders, then similarly from the Balkans to the Southern Mediterannean? In debt deflation, every round of debt destruction starts a cascade somewhere else……

Traditional History Courses – Disappearing or Just Evolving? – NYTimes.com

All the news FROM 1995 that’s fit to print!!

Boomers to This Years Grads: We Are Really, Really Sorry – WSJ.com

“Julie Meador, who just graduated from the University of Kentucky and listened to the speaker at her commencement apologize for the financial mess her class is inheriting, said she isnt thinking about saving the world just yet. The 21-year-old marketing major is earning $7.50 an hour as a part-time sales associate at the Gap while looking for a position that allows her to put her degree to use.”

Karl Denninger Angered, Bans Everyone – Vox

Karl Denninger Angered, Bans Everyone – Vox.

I love KD, but this accurately captures his personality!

Matt Taibbi – Taibblog – True/Slant

“Can you imagine what a craven, bumlicking ass-goblin you’d have to be to get a job working for the Wall Street Journal, not mention up front that you used to be a Goldman Sachs managing director, and then write a lengthy article calling your former boss a “national hero” — in the middle of a sweeping financial crisis, one in which half the world is in a panic and the unemployment rate just hit a 25-year high?”

via Matt Taibbi – Taibblog – True/Slant.

Sabbatical

I’m taking a sabbatical from MOJOdad for a bit. Check the sidebar for other places you can find me, though.