The Liberal Reward of Labour

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[A] house divided against itself shall not stand.

— Matthew 12:25 , KJV Standard, 1769.


At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

— Aristotle (384 – 322 BCE)


War can make murders out of otherwise decent people.
That may come as a shock to some of the viewers who perceive these mass murderers as horrible beasts.
Not so.

— Ben Ferencz (1920 – 2023), Prosecuting Evil, 2018.

Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790)

Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes!

(13 November 1789)


Can sweetening our tea, &c. with sugar, be a circumstance of such absolute necessity?
Can the petty pleasure thence arising to the taste, compensate for so much misery produced among our fellow creatures, and such a constant butchery of the human species by this pestilential detestable traffic in the bodies and souls of men?

(The Somersett Case and the Slave Trade, The London Chronicle, 20 June 1772)


Well, Doctor, what have we got:

• a Republic, or
• a Monarchy?

A Republic, if you can keep it.

(Mrs Powel of Philada & Benjamin Franklin, Constitutional Convention, 1787)

The Liberal Reward of Labour

Naomi Oreskes (1958):
In recent months 14 states have introduced or passed laws weakening labor protections for minors, even in notoriously dangerous industries, such as meatpacking.
Nonenforcement of existing laws that limit the hours and types of work that can be performed by kids is also on the rise.
This past year the number of minors illegally employed—including children as young as 13—increased by 37 percent. …
Advocates of weakened protections for children claim that the states—not the federal government—should decide; that attempts to regulate the workplace represent a federal power grab; and that the defenders of strict limits on child labor are socialists …
(Child Labor Laws Under Attack, Scientific American, September 2003, p 82)

The persistence of hyperconcentrated wealth

	Europe		United States
Wealth Cohort	1913	2018	2018
Top 10%	89%	55%	74%
Middle 40%	10%	40%	14%
Bottom 50%	1%	5%	2%
Top 10% : Bottom 50%	445:1	55:1	185:1
Europe = Average of United Kingdom, France, and Sweden.

Thomas Piketty (1971):
The sharp increase of the top decile share, especially in the United States, reflects a gradual and worrisome erosion of the share owned by the rest of the population.
The lack of diffusion of wealth is a central issue for the twenty-first century, which may undermine the confidence of the lower and middle classes in the economic system …
(Figure 13.10, Capital and Ideology, 2020)

Financial assets held in tax havens

Thomas Piketty (1971):
By exploiting anomalies in international financial statistics and breakdowns by country of residence from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Swiss National Bank (SNB), one can estimate that the share of financial assets held in tax havens is:

• 4 percent for the United States,
• 10 percent for Europe, and
• 50 percent for Russia.

These figures exclude nonfinancial assets (such as real estate) and financial assets unreported to BIS and SNB, and should be considered minimum estimates.
(Figure 12.5, Capital and Ideology, 2020, emphasis added)

Adam Smith (1723 – 90)

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. …

Wherever there is a great property, there is great inequality.
For every rich man, you must have hundred poor.
And that rich man must live every time in fear because of the jealousy of others.
And if it is not for the firm hand of the magistrate … he would not be able to keep his capital safe. …
[Civil government,] in so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense

• of the rich against the poor, or
• of those who have some property against those who have none …

Poverty, though it no doubt discourages, does not always prevent, marriage.
It seems even to be favourable to generation.
A half-starved Highland woman frequently bears more than twenty children, while a pampered fine lady is often incapable of bearing any, and is generally exhausted by two or three.
Barrenness, so frequent among women of fashion, is very rare among those of inferior station.
Luxury, in the fair sex, while it inflames, perhaps, the passion for enjoyment, seems always to weaken, and frequently to destroy altogether, the powers of generation. …

But poverty, though it does not prevent the generation, is extremely unfavourable to the rearing of children.
It is not uncommon, I have been frequently told, in the Highlands of Scotland, for a mother who has born twenty children not to have two alive. …
This great mortality, however will everywhere be found chiefly among the children of the common people, who cannot afford to tend them with the same care as those of better station.
Though their marriages are generally more fruitful than those of people of fashion, a smaller proportion of their children arrive at maturity. …

Every species of animals naturally multiplies in proportion to the means of their subsistence, and no species can ever multiply beyond it.
But in civilized society, it is only among the inferior ranks of people that the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the human species; and it can do so in no other way than by destroying a great part of the children which their fruitful marriages produce. …

The liberal reward of labour, by enabling them to provide better for their children, and consequently to bring up a greater number, naturally tends to widen and extend those limits.
It deserves to be remarked, too, that it necessarily does this as nearly as possible in the proportion which the demand for labour requires. …
It is in this manner that the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men,

• quickens it when it goes on too slowly, and
• stops it when it advances too fast.

It is this demand which regulates and determines the state of propagation in all the different countries …

The liberal reward of labour, therefore, as it is the effect of increasing wealth, so it is the cause of increasing population.
To complain of it, is to lament over the necessary cause and effect of the greatest public prosperity.

(The Wealth of Nations, 1776)


Rise of the Machines

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Matilda's brain

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The Founding of Israel

Housing for shelter not investment

Michelle Simmons

Order and Chaos

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Order and Chaos

Order, the known, appears symbolically associated with masculinity …
This is perhaps because the primary hierarchical structure of human society is masculine, as it is among most animals …
It is because men are, and throughout history have been,

• the builders of towns and cities,
• the engineers, stonemasons, bricklayers, and lumberjacks,
• the operators of heavy machinery.

Order is:

• God the Father, the eternal Judge, ledger-keeper and dispenser of rewards and punishments. …
• the peacetime army of policemen and soldiers. …

Chaos, the eternal feminine, is … the crushing force of sexual selection.

— Jordan Peterson (1962), 12 Rules for Life, 2018.


Fascists did not value masculinity per se – only that of some male members of the dominant race.
Socialists and communists (despite their own macho inclinations) were seen as the fomenters of ‘feminine’ indiscipline – while the fascist revolution was characterized by manly order.
The Nazis saw the Jews and Poles as ‘feminine’ races, achieving their goals through devious plots rather than masculine openness.

— Kevin Passmore (1962), Fascism: A Very Short Introduction, 2002.


[The] Western subjugation of the female is … a function of biblical thinking.

— Joseph Campbell (1904 – 87), Love and the Goddess, The Power of Myth, Episode 5, 1988.


The overthrow of mother right [with the advent of farming and pastoralism] was the world historic defeat of the female sex.
The man took command in the home [and] the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.
This degraded position of the woman … has gradually been palliated and glossed over, and somewhat clothed in a milder form; [but] in no sense has it been abolished.

— Friedrich Engels (1820 – 95), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884.


[Even] the most thoughtful and fair-minded of [men] fall back on conservative assumptions about the inevitability of present:

• gender relations, and
• distributions of power,

calling on precedent or sociobiology and psychobiology to demonstrate that male domination is natural and follows inevitably from evolutionary pressures.

— Peggy McIntosh (1934), White Privilege and Male Privilege, 1988.

Kevin Passmore

Proto-fascists drew on contemporary science (or rather pseudoscience) as well as irrationalism. …
Social Darwinists feared that the comforts of modern society, coupled to assistance to the poor, would lead to social degeneration and decadence.
They preached ‘eugenicism’ as the answer …

It is no accident that doctors and lawyers were prominent in the far right.
[They feared] that professions were overcrowded with Jews and women, and [disliked] government plans to introduce ‘socialist’ health-care programmes.
Doctors and lawyers espoused eugenicist theories, which they thought gave them the right to play god. …

This was all the more significant given that it was within the framework of eugenics and racism that many of the elites confronted the advance of democracy at the turn of the century – the much feared ‘age of the masses’.
Racist and eugenicist ideas represented, for some, a new, more effective means to govern and control the dangerous masses. …

[After the Great War, governments became preoccupied with ensuring that their nation was fit to survive in the difficult international situation of the post-war world. …
In its most radical form, adopted by fascists everywhere, national strength implied:

• economic self-sufficiency behind tariff walls,
• repression of socialism and incorporation of the workers into the national community,
• encouragement of women to abandon careers and equality in favour of having babies for the nation,
• assimilation or expulsion of ethnic minorities, and
• the introduction of eugenic social welfare schemes designed to improve the physical fitness of the nation.

(Fascism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2002)


Bicentennial Man

Real Men Eat Meat

Singing to babies

RICO

Union Man

Ethnic Cleansing in Colonial Australia

Dr Death

Anti-Science Aggression

Equality of Opportunity

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Equality of Opportunity

Parental income and university access, United States, 2014

Thomas Piketty (1971):
In 2014, the rate of access to higher education (percentage of individuals age 19–21 enrolled in a college, university, or other institution of higher education) was barely 30 percent for children of the poorest 10 percent in the United States and 90 percent for the richest 10 percent.
(Figure I.8, Capital and Ideology, 2020)

Robert Putnam (1941):
The class gap in college completion, which was already substantial 30 to 40 years ago, has steadily expanded. …
Kids from low-income backgrounds … are working more or less diligently to improve their prospects in life, but no matter how talented and hardworking they are, at best they are improving their play at checkers, while upper-class kids are widening their lead at three-dimensional chess. …
As the twenty-first century opened, a family’s socioeconomic status had become even more important than test scores in predicting which eighth graders would graduate from college. …
[Academically] high-scoring poor kids are now slightly less likely (29%) to get a college degree than low-scoring rich kids (30%).
(Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, 2015, emphasis added)

The fall of the bottom 50 percent share of total income in the United States, 1960–2015

Thomas Piketty (1971):
The share of the bottom 50 percent of the income distribution fell from about 20 percent of total income in the United States in the 1970s to 12–13 percent in the 2010s.
During the same period, the top centile share rose from 11 percent to 20–21 percent.
(Figure 11.5, Capital and Ideology, 2020)

Low and high incomes in the United States, 1960–2015

Thomas Piketty (1971):
It is now well known that the explosion of inequality in the United States since 1980 was due to an unprecedented increase in very high incomes, especially the famous '1 percent'. …
In 1970, the average income of the poorest 50 percent was $15,200 per year per adult, and that of the richest 1 percent was $403,000, for a ratio of 1 to 26.
In 2015, the average income of the poorest 50 percent was $16,200 and that of the richest 1 percent was $1,305,000, for a ratio of 1 to 81.
All amounts are in 2015 dollars. …

[One] of the main consequences of the extremely high marginal rates (70–90 percent) on top incomes between 1930 and 1980, especially in the United States and United Kingdom, was to put an end to the most extravagant executive pay.
By contrast, the sharp reduction of top tax rates in the 1980s strongly contributed to the skyrocketing of executive pay.
Indeed, if one looks at the evolution of executive pay in listed companies in all the developed countries since 1980, one finds that variations in tax rates explain much of the variation in executive pay — much more than other factors such as sector of activity, firm size, or performance. …
In the 1950s and 1960s, the top executives of major British and American firms had little interest in fighting for huge raises … because 80–90 percent of any raise would have gone directly to the government.
In the 1980s, however, the nature of the game changed completely.
The evidence suggests that executives began to devote considerable effort to persuading others that enormous raises were warranted, which was not always difficult to do, since it is hard to measure how much any individual executive contributes to the firm’s success.
What is more, compensation committees were often constituted in a rather incestuous fashion.
This also explains why it is so difficult to find any statistically significant correlation between executive pay and firm performance (or productivity). …

In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States had by far the highest minimum wage in the world.
In 1968–1970 the federal minimum wage was more than $10 an hour in today’s dollars.
Since 1980, however, the failure to raise the minimum wage regularly gradually eroded its value in real terms: in 2019 it was only $7.20, representing a 30 percent decline in purchasing power over half a century — remarkable for a country at peace and growing economically. …
Many works have shown that the drop in the minimum wage in the United States contributed strongly to the declining position of low-wage workers since the 1980s in a general climate of decreased worker bargaining power.
(Figure 11.7, Capital and Ideology, 2020)

Adam Smith (1723 – 90)

What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between [masters and workers], whose interests are by no means the same.
The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little, as possible.
The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of labour.

It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms.
The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily: and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen.

We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it.
In all such disputes, the masters can hold out much longer.
A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks, which they have already acquired.
Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year, without employment. …

Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. …
Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate.
These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy till the moment of execution …

(The Wealth of Nations, 1776)


The Frontier

Murder in the Pacific

Trump Takes on the World

Bruce Powell

Sana Marin

A man who would be king

Wonderland

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Wonderland

John Tolkien (1892 – 1970):
War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory.
I love only that which they defend.
(The Two Towers, The Lord of the Rings, 1954)

John Kipling, 1897–1915

Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936):
My son was killed whilst laughing at some jest.
I would I knew what it was, it might serve me in a time when jests are few.
(A Son, Epitaphs of the War, 1914–18)

Josephine Kipling, 1892–99

Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936):
Her brows are bound with bracken-fronds,
And golden elf-locks fly above;
Her eyes are bright as diamonds
And bluer than the sky above.

In moccasins and deer-skin cloak,
Unfearing, free and fair she flits,
And lights her little damp-wood smoke
To show her Daddy where she flits.

For far—oh, very far behind,
So far she cannot call to him,
Comes Tegumai alone to find
The daughter that was all to him!
(Merrow Down, Just So Stories, 1902)

Alan Milne (1882 – 1956):
Don't underestimate the value of doing nothing.
Of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering. …

Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known. …

So, they went off together.
But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing.

Christopher Milne, 1920–96

Eric Rauchway [Professor of History, University of California, Davis]:
When [Woodrow Wilson] was a university professor, he said that he feared that teaching woman was atrophying his mental muscles.

Woodrow Wilson (1856 – 1924):
We have made partners of the women in this war ...
Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?
(Appeal for Women's Suffrage, 1918)

(The American Presidency with Bill Clinton, 2022)

James Webb Space Telescope


The Murdochs: Empire of Influence, CNN, 2022

Rupert Murdoch (1931):
[There’s] a real challenge to confront: a wave of censorship that seeks:

• to silence conversation,
• to stifle debate,
• to ultimately stop individuals and societies from realizing their potential.

This rigidly enforced conformity, aided and abetted by so-called social media, is a straitjacket on sensibility.
To many people have fought too hard, in too many places, for freedom of speech to be suppressed by this awful woke orthodoxy. …
There are many goals still to come and challenges to overcome.
Well, I'm far from done.
(Acceptance Speech, Lifetime Achievement Award by the Australia Day Foundation UK, Australia House, 23 January 2021)

The Korean Fertility Crisis

Monetizing Your Children

Rawls' Theory of Justice

Criminalizing Poverty

Think with Pinker

Bruce Powell

The Road to Freedom

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Theodore Roosevelt (1858 – 1919):
Leave it as it is.
You can not improve on it.
The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.
What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you …
(Grand Canyon, 6 May 1903)

We must handle the water, the wood, the grasses … so that we will hand them on to our children and children's children in better and not worse shape than we got them. …
(David Grubin, TR, PBS American Experience, 1996)


Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679):
In [the natural condition of mankind], there is

• no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently
• no Culture of the Earth;
• no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea;
• no commodious Building;
• no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force;
• no Knowledge of the face of the Earth;
• no account of Time;
• no Arts;
• no Letters;
• no Society; and which is worst of all,
• continuall feare, and danger of violent death;

And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
(Leviathan, 1651)


Silvia Federici is & Alice Markham-Cantor:
[The] following were the crimes of 65-year-old Margaret Harkett, who was hanged at Tyburn, England, in 1585:

Keith Thomas (1933):
She had picked a basket of peas in a neighbor’s field without permission.
Asked to return them, she flung them down in anger; since when, no peas would grow in the field.
Later, William Goodwin’s servants denied her yeast, whereupon his brewing-stand dried up.
She was struck by a bailiff who had caught her taking wood from his master’s ground; the bailiff went mad.
A neighbor refused her a horse; all his horses died.
Another paid her less for a pair of shoes than she asked; later he died.
A gentleman told his servants to refuse her buttermilk; after which they were unable to make butter or cheese.
(Religion and the Decline of Magic, 1971)

(Witch Hunts, Scientific American, May 2023, p 48)

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Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970)

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it.
If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance with his instincts, he will accept it even on the slenderest evidence.


The glorification of the State, and the doctrine that it is every citizen's duty to serve the State, are radically against progress and against liberty.
The State, though at present a source of much evil, is also a means to certain good things, and will be needed so long as violent and destructive impulses remain common.
But it is MERELY a means, and a means which needs to be very carefully and sparingly used if it is not to do more harm than good.
It is not the State, but the community, the worldwide community of all human beings present and future, that we ought to serve.
And a good community does not spring from the glory of the State, but

• from the unfettered development of individuals:
• from happiness in daily life,
• from congenial work giving opportunity for whatever constructiveness each man or woman may possess,
• from free personal relations embodying love and taking away the roots of envy in thwarted capacity from affection, and above all
• from the joy of life and its expression in the spontaneous creations of art and science.

It is these things that make an age or a nation worthy of existence, and these things are not to be secured by bowing down before the State.
It is the individual in whom all that is good must be realized, and the free growth of the individual must be the supreme end of a political system which is to re-fashion the world.

(Proposed Roads to Freedom, 1918 / 2014)


Trump: My beautiful mind paper boxes

Putin and the Presidents

Blocked: The battle over youth gender care

Fox News and January 6

The American Presidency

Why Putin and Russia went to war

Kathleen Folbigg

No so black and white: a history of race from white supremacy to identity politics

The Psychologist from Hell

Non-Random Evolution

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Richard Dawkins (1941)

[Fred Hoyle (1915 – 2001) compared] the spontaneous formation by ‘chance’ of a working enzyme is like a hurricane blowing through a junkyard and spontaneously having the luck to put together a Boeing 747. …


[To] invoke chance, on its own, as an explanation [for objects such as eyes and protein molecules], is equivalent to vaulting from the bottom to the top of Mount Improbable’s steepest cliff in one bound.
And what corresponds to inching up the kindly, grassy slopes on the other side of the mountain?
It is the slow, cumulative, one-step-at-a-time, non-random survival of random variants that Darwin called natural selection.
The metaphor of Mount Improbable dramatizes the mistake of the sceptics quoted at the beginning of this chapter.
Where they went wrong was to keep their eyes fixed on the vertical precipice and its dramatic height.
They assumed that the sheer cliff was the only way up to the summit on which are perched eyes and protein molecules and other supremely improbable arrangements of parts.
It was Darwin’s great achievement to discover the gentle gradients winding up the other side of the mountain. …


Darwinism is widely misunderstood as a theory of pure chance. …
One stage in the Darwinian process is indeed a chance process—mutation.
Mutation is the process by which fresh genetic variation is offered up for selection and it is usually described as random.
But Darwinians make the fuss that they do about the ‘randomness’ of mutation only in order to contrast it to the non-randomness of selection, the other side of the process.
It is not necessary that mutation should be random in order for natural selection to work.
Selection can still do its work whether mutation is directed or not.
Emphasizing that mutation can be random is our way of calling attention to the crucial fact that, by contrast, selection is sublimely and quintessentially non-random.
It is ironic that this emphasis on the contrast between mutation and the non-randomness of selection has led people to think that the whole theory is a theory of chance. …


The Darwinian explanation for why living things are so good at doing what they do is very simple.
They are good because of the accumulated wisdom of their ancestors.
But it is not wisdom that they have learned or acquired.
It is wisdom that they chanced upon by lucky random mutations, wisdom that was then selectively, non-randomly, recorded in the genetic database of the species.
In each generation the amount of luck was not very great …
But, because the luck has been accumulated over so many generations, we are eventually very impressed by the apparent improbability of the end product. …
[Heredity] the basic ingredient [of] Darwinism, and hence life, will follow, more or less inevitably, on any planet in the universe where something equivalent to heredity arises. …


The message from the mountain is threefold.
First is the message we have already introduced: there can be no sudden leaps upward—no precipitous increases in ordered complexity.
Second, there can be no going downhill—species can’t get worse as a prelude to getting better.
Third, there may be more than one peak—more than one way of solving the same problem, all flourishing in the world.

Take any part of any animal or plant, and … ask: how that part has been formed by gradual transformation from some other part of an earlier ancestor? …
A famous example is the gradual derivation of our mammalian ear bones …
Fossil evidence clearly shows that these three bones, called the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup, are lineally descended from three corresponding bones that, in our reptile ancestors, formed the jaw joint.

(Climbing Mount Improbable, 1996)

Charles Darwin (1809 – 82)

Under nature, the slightest difference of structure or constitution may well turn the nicely-balanced scale in the struggle for life, and so be preserved.
How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods.
Can we wonder, then,

• that nature’s productions should be far ‘truer’ in character than man’s productions;
• that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship?

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly:

• scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest;
• rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good;
• silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.

We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long past geological ages, that we only see that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were.

(On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1859)

The Final Victory

Christian Krause:
Where cities once bloomed, the ruins reach up to the sky.
The war is our destiny.
We must accept it.
And it is proof of our unique greatness that we are not prepared to give in to our enemies.
Better dead than a slave!
Our task is to mature for victory or death.
(1945)

Margarete Krause:
The Führer is there, where the danger is greatest.
He is true to himself.
Should we not be true to him, unto victory or ruin?
We have no choice!
We must fulfil the destiny he gies us with our bravest hearts, with the best we have, loyal, upright, without hesitating or wavering.
(1945)

Johannes Tuchal {German Resistance Memorial Centre]:
The people supported the dictatorship.
At no point did a majority of Germans ever turn against Hitler.
It was always a very, very small minority of the German people who turned against him and grasped what the dictatorship had done to Germany.

Claus von Stauffenberg (1907 – 44):
It is time for something to be done.
Anyone who dares to do something must accept that he will probably go down in German history as a traitor.
But if he fails to act, he would be a traitor to his own conscience.

Adolf Hitler (1889 – 1945):
However great the crisis of the moment may be, we will master it in the end through our unbreakable will.
(30 January 1945)


Seven Days On Mars
Wagner

Soldiers of Fortune

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I don't need a ride

The cost of speaking out on Afghanistan

Human Capital

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Kenneth Minogue (1930 – 2013):
The Greek despotes and the Roman dominus both signify the specific form of power exercised by the master of slaves. …
The essence of despotism is … the unchecked power of the master. …
The sole object of the subjects must be to please.
There is … no public voice except that of the despot.

Such powerlessness is, oddly enough, the reason why despotisms are notable generators of spiritual enlightenment.
A reaction sets in against a world governed by the caprice of power, and thoughtful subjects take up mysticism, Stoicism, and other forms of withdrawal.
The essence of life is then found in a spiritual realm beyond that of the senses, and social and political life is devalued as illusion.
The result is usually scientific and technological stagnation …

All that one can confidently say about despotism is that able rulers will sooner or later be followed by mad or feeble heirs.
(Politics: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1995)

Thomas Piketty (1971)

Land of the Free

The total number of slaves on Euro-American plantations in the Atlantic region [peaked at] 6 million in 1860 (4 million of whom were in the southern United States, 1.6 million in Brazil, and 0.4 million in Cuba). …
[The] 4 million slaves exploited in the southern United States on the eve of the Civil War (1861–1865) constituted the largest concentration of slaves that ever existed. …
[The] market value of all slaves exceeded the value of all other private property (land, buildings, and equipment). …

[Politically,] the number of slaves played a key role in determining the number of seats assigned to each state in the House of Representatives and therefore the number of members of the Electoral College, which chooses the president: each slave counted for three-fifths of a free person. …
Of the fifteen presidents who served prior to the election of the Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1860, no fewer than eleven were slaveowners. …

In the 1850s, on the eve of the American Civil War, 75 percent of the cotton imported by European textile factories came from the southern United States.
[It] was this “empire of cotton,” intimately associated with slave plantations, that was the heart of the Industrial Revolution and more generally of the economic domination of Europe and the United States. …

The necessity of compensating slaveowners [for loss of their property] was obvious not only to the political and economic elites of the time but also to many thinkers and intellectuals. …
Tocqueville … proposed in 1843 that half the indemnity be paid to slaveholders in the form of government annuities (hence by increasing the public debt, to be repaid by the taxpayers) and the other half by the slaves themselves, who would work for the state for ten years at low wages, allowing the wage differential to be used to reimburse their former owners.
In that way, he argued, the solution would be “fair to all participating parties,” since the former slaveowners would, after ten years, be obliged to pay “the increased price of labor” due to emancipation. …
[He also] proposed that former slaves be deprived of property rights for a long period of time, from ten to twenty years, to give them time to acquire a taste for work and effort; this lesson might be lost if they were to discover the comforts of property too quickly (and “unnaturally”).

From Ownership Society to Social Democracy

OWNERSHIP SOCIETY (sometimes called proprietarian society):
A social order based on a quasi-religious defense of property rights as the sine qua non of social and political stability.
Ownership societies flourished in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. …
Proprietarian ideology is the ideology of ownership society, based on the sacralization of property rights.

[In] 1880 nearly 80% of the land in the United Kingdom was … owned by 7,000 noble families (less than 0.1% of the population), with more than half belonging to just 250 families (0.01% of the population), a tiny group that largely coincided with the hereditary peers who sat in the House of Lords. …

[The] House of Lords played a clearly dominant role in British becameralism until the last third of the nineteeth century. …
Specifically, all laws had to be approved in identical terms by both houses, effectively conferring a veto power over all legislation, including fiscal and budgetary matters and anything to do with property rights, on the House of Lords (and thus on a few hundred hereditary peers). …

In the early 1860s, roughly 75 percent of the seats in the House of Commons were still occupied by members of the [landed] aristocracy, which accounted for less than 0.5 percent of the British population at the time. …
[Before the] secret ballot was … introduced [in] 1872 … each individual vote was announced publicly and recorded …
Hence it was not easy for voters to make political choices that went against the wishes of their landlords or employers. …
The local member of Parliament (MP) was reelected in election after election and often in generation after generation.
In 1860 the House of Commons was still profoundly aristocratic and oligarchic. …

[The] famous Black Act of 1723 … stipulated the death penalty for anyone caught pilfering wood or poaching game on land they did not own.
Humble folk had taken to blackening their faces and trying their luck by night, and landlords in the House of Lords and their allies in the House of Commons were determined to prevent this.
Anyone who killed a deer, cut down a tree, poached fish from a breeding pond, pulled up plants, or abetted or incited such activity fell under the shadow of the act and could be sentenced to death by hanging without trial of any kind.
Initially intended to expire after three years, the law was renewed and reinforced over the next century until these acts of rebellion ceased and the proprietarian order was restored. …

Universal male suffrage was established in 1918, and the vote was finally extended to women in 1928.
This final phase of reform also witnessed the first decisive successes of the Labour Party.

The [Swedish] social democrats of the SAP came to power in the early 1920s …
The party subsequently held power more or less permanently from 1932 to 2006, and this long period in government allowed it to develop a very sophisticated welfare and tax system, which in turn achieved one of the lowest levels of inequality ever observed anywhere.
[Prior to] the early twentieth century, Sweden was a profoundly inegalitarian country …
In 1885, Sweden still had a law on the books allowing anyone without either a job or sufficient property to live on to be arrested and sentenced to a term of forced labor. …

[In] Sweden from 1865 to 1911 … the number of votes each voter could cast depended on the size of that voter’s tax payments, property, and income.
The men sufficiently wealthy to vote in elections for the lower house were divided into forty-odd groups, and each group was assigned a different electoral weight.
Specifically, each member of the least wealthy group could cast one vote, while each member of the wealthiest group could cast as many as fifty-four votes.

A similar system applied to municipal elections … with the additional wrinkle that corporations also had the right to vote in local elections, again casting a number of ballots that depended on their tax payments, property, and profits.
No voter in an urban municipal election, whether a private individual or a corporation, could cast more than one hundred ballots.
In rural towns, however, there was no such ceiling; indeed, in the municipal elections of 1871, there were 54 rural towns in Sweden where one voter cast more than 50% of the votes. …

[Yet] in the space of a few years Sweden moved from the most extreme hyper-inegalitarian proprietarian system … to a quintessential egalitarian social-democratic society once the SAP came to power in the 1920s …

People sometimes imagine that each culture or civilization has some “essence” that makes it naturally egalitarian or inegalitarian. …
In fact, everything depends on the rules and institutions that each human society establishes, and things can change very quickly depending on the balance of political and ideological power among contending social groups as well as on the logic of events and on unstable historical trajectories …
Sweden reminds us that equality is always a fragile sociopolitical construct, and nothing can be considered permanent: what was transformed in the past by institutions and the mobilization of political movements and ideologies can be transformed again by similar means, for better or for worse.

(Capital and Ideology, 2019)


Satanic Paedophillic Cannabilistic LGBT Nazi Drug Addicts

The Fall of King Roger

Whale Wisdom

The global rise of unhappiness

Race Suicide: Jews Will Not Replace Us

Replication in Psychology

Liberals Hate Medicare

The First Australian Civilization

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Expansion is everything
These stars … these vast worlds which we can never reach
I would annex the planets if I could

— Cecil Rhodes (1853 – 1902)

Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970):
The men who advocate an unpopular reform are exceptional in disinterestedness and zeal for the public good; but those who hold power after the reform has been carried out are likely to belong, in the main, to the ambitious executive type which has in all ages possessed itself of the government of nations.
And this type has never shown itself tolerant of opposition or friendly to freedom.
(Proposed Roads to Freedom, 1918 / 2014)


Thomas Lawrence (1888 – 1935) [Lawrence or Arabia]:
There is a preliminary Arab success, the British reinforcements go out as a punitive force.
They fight their way … to their objective, which is meanwhile bombarded by artillery, aeroplanes, or gunboats.
Finally perhaps a village is burnt and the district pacified.
It is odd that we don’t use poison gas on these occasions.
Bombing the houses is a patchy way of getting the women and children. …
By gas attacks the whole population of offending districts could be wiped out neatly; and as a method of government it would be no more immoral than the present system.
(France, Britain and the Arabs, The Observer, 1920)

Jared Diamond (1937)

Nomadism, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and minimal investment in shelter and possessions were sensible adaptations to Australia's ENSO-driven resource unpredictability.
When local conditions deteriorated, Aborigines simply moved to an area where conditions were temporarily better.
Rather than depending on just a few crops that could fail, they minimized risk by developing an economy based on a great variety of wild foods, not all of which were likely to fail simultaneously.
Instead of having fluctuating populations that periodically outran their resources and starved, they maintained smaller populations that enjoyed

• an abundance of food in good years, and
• a sufficiency in bad years.

The Aboriginal Australian substitute for food production has been termed "firestick farming."
The Aborigines modified and managed the surrounding landscape in ways that increased its production of edible plants and animals, without resorting to cultivation.
In particular, they intentionally burned much of the landscape periodically.
That served several purposes:

• the fires drove out animals that could be killed and eaten immediately;
• fires converted dense thickets into open parkland in which people could travel more easily;
• the parkland was also an ideal habitat for kangaroos, Australia's prime game animal; and
• the fires stimulated the growth both
  • of new grass on which kangaroos fed, and
  • of fern roots on which Aborigines themselves fed.

We think of Australian Aborigines as desert people, but most of them were not.
Instead, their population densities varied

• with rainfall (because it controls the production of terrestrial wild plant and animal foods) and
• with abundance of aquatic foods in the sea, rivers, and lakes.

The highest population densities of Aborigines were in Australia's wettest and most productive regions:

• the Murray-Darling river system of the Southeast,
• the eastern and northern coasts, and
• the southwestern corner.

Those areas also came to support the densest populations of European settlers in modern Australia.
The reason we think of Aborigines as desert people is simply that Europeans killed or drove them out of the most desirable areas, leaving the last intact Aboriginal populations only in areas that Europeans didn't want. …

Why did [Indigenous Australians] not develop metal tools, writing, and politically complex societies?
A major reason is that Aborigines remained hunter-gatherers, whereas … those developments arose elsewhere only in populous and economically specialized societies of food producers.
In addition, Australia's aridity, infertility, and climatic unpredictability limited its hunter-gatherer population to only a few hundred thousand [widely dispersed] people.
Compared with the tens of millions of people in ancient China or Mesoamerica, that meant that Australia had

• far fewer potential inventors, and
• far fewer societies to experiment with adopting innovations. …

European settlement reduced the number of Aborigines by two means.

• One involved shooting them …
  The last large-scale massacre, of 31 Aborigines, occurred at Alice Springs in 1928.
• The other means involved European-introduced germs to which Aborigines had had no opportunity to acquire immunity or to evolve genetic resistance. …

Within one century of European colonization, 40,000 years of Aboriginal traditions had been mostly swept away. …

How, except by postulating deficiencies in the Aborigines themselves, can one account for the fact that white English colonists apparently created a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy, within a few decades of colonizing a continent whose inhabitants after more than 40,000 years were still nonliterate nomadic hunter-gatherers?
Doesn't that constitute a perfectly controlled experiment in the evolution of human societies, forcing us to a simple racist conclusion?

The resolution of this problem is simple.
White English colonists did not create a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy in Australia.
Instead, they imported … 10,000 years of development in Eurasian environments. …
Europeans have never learned to survive in Australia or New Guinea without their inherited Eurasian technology. …
The people who did create a society in Australia were Aboriginal Australians.
Of course, the society that they created was not a literate, food- producing, industrial democracy.
The reasons follow straightforwardly from features of the Australian environment.

(Yali's People, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Chapter 15, 1997)


The Dark Universe

Onward Christian Soldier: Israel Folau

The War on Woke

Separate but Unequal

(Booker T Washington dinner at the White House, 16 October 1901)

The Right to be Unequal

Winner Takes All

Lock Him Up

Catch and Kill

The Right to be Unequal

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Soak the Rich

In order to succeed … the poor need, most of all, the spur of their poverty.

— George Gilder (1939), Wealth and Poverty, 1981.


Everything that is economically efficient is morally justified.

— Yegor Gaidar (1956 – 2009)

Margaret Thatcher (1925 – 2013):
[The] pursuit of equality itself is a mirage.
What's more desireable and more practicable than the pursuit of equality is the pursuit of equality of opportunity.
And opportunity means nothing unless it includes the right to be unequal and the freedom to be different. …
I would say, let our children grow tall and some taller than others if they have the ability in them to do so.
Because we must build a society in which each citizen can develop his full potential, both for his own benefit and for the community as a whole …
(Let Our Children Grow Tall, Institute of SocioEconomic Studies, 15 September 1975)


Ronald Reagan (1911 – 2004):
The minimum wage has caused more misery and unemployment than anything since the Great Depression.
(1980)


Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman:
The bottom half of the adult population has thus been shut off from economic growth for over 40 years, and the modest increase in their post-tax income has been absorbed by increased health spending. …
[The] stagnation of bottom 50% incomes and the upsurge in the top 1% coincided with:

• reduced progressive taxation,
• widespread deregulation (particularly in the financial sector),
• weakened unions, and
• an erosion of the federal minimum wage.

(Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Estimates for the United States, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 133, no. 2:553–609, May 2018)

Mean Wealth Holdings in the United States (2013) (Adapted from Table 3: Edward Wolff, Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1962-2013: What Happened Over the Great Recession?, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2014, p 51)
Percentile	Net Worth
P99-100	$18,623,400
P90-99	$2,266,400
P40-90	$242,800
P0-40	−$10,800

Income in the United States (1970) (US Department of Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1972, p 324)
Percentile		% of Total Income
P50-100 (50%)		77
P0-50 (50%)		23

Income in the United States (2012)
Percentile	# per 100,000 Taxpayers	% of Total Income	% of Total Income Tax
P99-100 (1%)	1,000	21.9	38.1
P99.999-100 (0.001%)	1	2.4	3.3
P99.99-99.999 (0.009%)	9	3.1	8.3
P99.9-99.99 (0.09%)	90	5.5	10.3
P99-99.9 (0.9%)	900	10.9	19.5
P50-99 (49%)	49,000	67.0	59.1
P0-50 (50%)	50,000	11.1	2.8

Peace in Our Time

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In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

— Douglas Adams (1952 – 2001), The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, 1980.


If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace and lead in gently all the sick, the halt and the lamed.
And they would smile me a weary thanks.

— D H Lawrence (1885 – 1930), 1908.

Nazi Party (NSDAP) Election Results
1928	2.6%
1930	18.3%
1932 (Jul)	37.3%
1932 (Nov)*	33.1%
1933 (Mar)**	43.9%
*Last free elections **Last contested elections

(Munich Agreement, 30 September 1938)

Adolf Hitler (1889 – 1945):
[The Jew] is and remains the eternal parasite, a freeloader and scrounger, foreever spreading like a bactarium, and wherever he appears, the host nation withers and dies away.
(Mein Kampf, 1925)

The hour will come at last in which the millions who despise us will stand by us, who with us will hail the new hard won, painfully acquired, German Reich we have created together, the new German kingdom of greatness and power and glory and justice.
(Election Campaign Launch, Berlin Sports Palace, 10 February 1933)

There will be no mercy now. …
Anyone who stands in our way will be butchered.
Every communist functionary will be shot where he is found.
The communist deputies must be hanged this very night.
Everyone in league with the communists is to be arrested.
Against the social democrats … too, there will be no more mercy.
(Reichstag fire, 27 February 1933)

On 30 January, [the day I was appointed Chancellor,] the die was cast in Germany.
And I don't think that our opponents, who were laughing then, are still laughing now!
(1933)

If international financial Jewry in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the peoples into a world war again, the the result will not be the Bolehevization of the Earth and thus the victory of Judaism, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
(30 January 1939)

(The Gates of Hell 1941 ‒ 1942, The Abyss: Rise and Fall of the Nazis, Episode 7, 2021)

Joseph Goebbels (1897 – 1945):
With regard to the Jewish question, the Fuhrer wants to wipe the slate clean.
That's not just a turn of phrase.
Global war is here, and the annihilation of world Jewry much be its necessary consequence.
(13 December 1941)


Franz von Papen (1879 – 1969) [Conservative Politician]:
We have hired [Hitler].
Within six weeks, we'll have pushed him so far into the corner, he will squeak.
(1933)


Otto Wels (1885 – 1930) [Social Democratic Politician]:
You can take our lives and our freedom, but you cannot take our honour. …
At this historic hour, we German Social Democrats pledge ourselves to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and socialism. …
We send greetings to the persecuted and oppressed.
We greet our friends in the Reich.
Their steadfastness and loyalty deserve admiration.
The courage with which they maintain their convictions and their unbroken confidence guarantee a brighter future.
(Reichstag, 23 March 1933)


Hannah Arendt (1906 – 75):
[The] Jewish moneylender [had] for centuries … been excluded from all greater business transactions and found his only opportunity in the economically unproductive and insignificant but socially important loans to people who had a tendency to live beyond their means. …

Which group of people would turn antisemitic in a given country at a given historical moment depended exclusively upon general circumstances which made them ready for a violent antagonism to their government.
But the remarkable similarity of arguments and images which time and again were spontaneously reproduced have an intimate relationship with the truth they distort.
We find the Jews always represented as

• an international trade organization,
• a world-wide family concern with identical interests everywhere,
• a secret force behind the throne which degrades all visible governments
  • into mere façade, or
  • into marionettes whose strings are manipulated from behind the scenes.

Because of their close relationship to state sources of power, the Jews were invariably identified with power, and because of their aloofness from society and concentration upon the closed circle of the family, they were invariably suspected of working for the destruction of all social structures. …

The first international anti-Jewish congress took place in 1882 in Dresden, with about 3,000 delegates from Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia …
The Jews very clearly were the only inter-European element in a nationalized Europe.
It seemed only logical that their enemies had to organize on the same principle, if they were to fight those who were supposed to be the secret manipulators of the political destiny of all nations.
(The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951 / 1967)


Claudia Wallis:
[A] huge study published this past summer in the New England Journal of Medicine found that taking vitamin D for five years did not reduce the rate of fractures in healthy adults ages 50 and older.
That result built on earlier findings, led by the same team, that D supplements do not improve bone density (or, for that matter, lower the risk of cancer or heart disease).
An editorial accompanying the fracture study declared that it’s time for medical professionals to stop pushing these pills and quit ordering so many blood tests for vitamin D levels.
“Food and incidental sun exposure likely provide enough vitamin D for healthy adults,” says endocrinologist Meryl LeBoff of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who led the study.
(A Diet for Better Bones, Scientific American, January 2023)


Steven Cummings & Clifford Rosen:
An estimated one third or more of US adults 60 years of age or older take vitamin D supplements, not including those who take multivitamins or other compounds containing vitamin D.
Yet controversy continues about its overall benefits.
In this issue of the Journal, LeBoff and colleagues report findings from an ancillary study of the Vitamin D and Omega-3 Trial (VITAL), which extend the results of that trial; taken together, VITAL and this ancillary study show that vitamin supplements do not have important health benefits in the general population of older adults, even in those with low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels.
(VITAL Findings — A Decisive Verdict on Vitamin D Supplementation, New England Journal of Medicine, 28 July 2022)


Michelle Obama (1964):
Emotions are not plans.
They don't solve problems or right any wrongs.
[Be] careful about letting them guide you.
Rage can be a dirty windshield.
Hurt is like a broken steering wheel. …
It you don't do something constructive with them, they'll take you straight into a ditch. …

Going high … happens over the course of a lifetime, the course of a generation.
[It] is demonstrative, a commitment to showing your children, your friends, your colleagues, and your community what it looks like to live with love, and operate with decency.
(The Light We Carry, 2022, pp 276‒7)

Clive Hamilton

The greatest speeches never heard

The Monster Study

You Bloody Fool

The Control Problem

The Man Cave

Harmony Day

John Howard (1963):
I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country …
(Response to the Cronulla Riots, 2005)

Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

Jonathan Haidt (1939):
People who think differently and are willing to speak up if they disagree with you make you smarter, almost as if they are extensions of your own brain.
People who try to silence or intimidate their critics make themselves stupider, almost as if they are shooting darts into their own brain.