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.