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Many friends have expressed concern that this blog has been down for about two days. The attacker was Russian — 77.88.27.55 (ws3-095.yandex.ru).

Russia — for those readers too young to remember when it was a country that mattered — is a Central Asian petrostate best known for invading small neighbors and rampant alcoholism.

Fortunately my web host provided me tools to block the attacker, and responder quicker the next time the Russians try to shut me down (this was not the first time, and won’t be the last).

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I don’t mind that Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is bi/curious, but I do mind if he is sexually assaulting political underlings:

Rep. Massa describes a confrontation with Emanuel in a shower: “I am showering, naked as a jaybird, and here comes Rahm Emanuel, not even with a towel wrapped around his tush, poking his finger in my chest, yelling at me.”

Will Attorney General Holder investigate Rahm Emanuel for this sexual assault, or will Rahm get a free pass like the CEOs of AIG, Frannie Mae, and Freddie Mac?

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Never.

No matter what Congress says.

Tim Geithner is above the law.

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The idea is going around, pushed by the New Economics Foundation, Half Sigma, and others, that bankers are worth less than janitors to economic growth.

While janitors have a wealth creation – to -pay ratio of 10:1, speculators are net drains on the world economy

Rather than being wealth creators bankers are being handsomely rewarded for bringing the global financial system to the brink of collapse

Paid between £500,000 and £80m a year, leading bankers destroy £7 of value for every pound they generate.

There is no question that our economic crisis is a direct result of the Oligarchs (a) betting money they did not have, and (b) illegally colluding with the Treasury Department to bail them out for those bad bets.

If the US Government had been serious about protecting a ‘free market’ system of the national security crisis they created, it would have destroyed the wealth of the Oligarchs companies, and drafted the needed bankers until such time as the wealth they had destroyed had been restored. However, the US Government is not concerned with reestablishing a free market system. The Treasury Department has been captured by the Oligarchs.

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Props to Senator Jim Bunning, for exposing the slip-shod manner that the Democrats even went about changing the law in order to borrow and spend billions. The billions would have been spent on supporting the chronically unemployed (instead of retraining them), repairing the failing infrastructure of the 1950s (instead of building high speed rail), and other Old Left policies long on economic distribution and short on investment.

Jim Bunning, you are my hero of the day. Good show!

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Major props to President Obama and Secretary Duncan

Obama’s unveils ‘turnaround’ grants for schools

$900 million in grants will be available next year to low-performing schools that opt for one of four reform models, which include firing the principal and even closing the campus.

It was hard to imagine a better “education President” than George W. Bush, but Barack Obama is delivering!

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Warren Buffer, perhaps Obama’s most successful and influential supporter, tries to get Obama to save what’s left of his presidency by abandoning his push for ObamaCare

Americans should hope that President Obama ignores Warren Buffet’s warning. It is important that the White House is injured as badly as possible in the 2010 elections. Obama’s injury to his party will be greatest the more he pushes ObamaCare and the less he does to reign in Tim Geithner. So while it is best for the country for Obama to abandon his policy proposals and dismiss Tim Geithner, he should do so the day after the elections.

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The birth of modern science in the 19th century allowed the emergence of the modern state. Previously, the state could only spend extracted wealth in two ways:

• Consumption by elites
• Fighting other states
• Charity

The evolutionary consequences of these actions have been described by Greg Clark in his history, A Farewell to Alms. In the context of generations, it was not obvious which of these is the best strategy. Pre-scientific production methods meant that the population would equal a land’s carrying capacity, adjusted for hygiene.  Thus, luxuries and wars that reduced the number of people through starvation and death lead to an increase in quality of life, as the society’s essentially fixed resources were shared by fewer people. Conversely, charity lead to an increase in the population, leading to greater misery among more people.

In this pre-scientific, zero-sum world, people still competed for power — two stable solutions seem to have been found. The first involved monopolizing trade routes, allowing a small but technologically advanced population to live in significant comfort. The Mongol, Dutch, English, and Americans were examples of this strategy. The second involved monopolizing access to land, allowing an even smaller but powerful elite to live off the taxes extracted from a larger, and more miserable, population. The Habsburg dynasties of Europe, and the Han of China, tended toward this solution.

The Scientific management of the economy was a breakthrough, new way of organizing a country, in which a rational allocation of resources would lead to economic growth. Public education rapidly spread this method, and by the early twentieth centuries the bureaucratic power needed to fix this solution had become ingrained in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Russia, and (through educated and westernized bureaucratic elites) most countries in the world. New Deal Liberalism, Socialism, Fascism, Aryanism, and Communism were all modern ideologies that assumed a scientific approach toward growth.

The last significant attempt to turn back this tide began in 1966, during Mao’s launch of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR),  in which he purposefully destroyed the Party and State apparati which gave him scientific control over his country, and tried to turn back the hands of history.

The part of the CR that puzzled me when I called it “insane” was that nearly all obvious political objectives were achieved immediately. The President, the head of the military, the Party Chairman, the Mayor and Vice-Mayor of Beijing — the entire faction that had attempted to minimize Mao’s influence as a result of the Great Leap Forward were kicked out of power within a year.

If Mao had taken notes of Stalin’s purges, if he had instituted a scientific approach to terror, the history of the Cultural Revolution would have been radically better. Stalin went about rationally eliminating political groups he posed a threat to him — the Old Bolsheviks, the Trotskites, the Kulaks, the Generals, etc. By comparison, among Mao’s enemies were medicine, engineering, and Chinese characters.

While in Russian history Soviet Gigantism is a soulless epoch of architecture, in Chinese history it is a rare moment of sane civil planning. Gigantic public works assume that one is able to rationally control forces of nature through the application of mathematics.

The question is not one of power-maximization v. polity service. Indeed, I doubt Mao and Chiang Kaishek (CKS) would disagree with Louis XIV that “l’etat cest moi,” and see the dichotomy as an artificial one. Rather, Mao and CKS rejected rational planning, the strategic offense, the engaged executive, and other universal aspects of western management as foreign.

Mao and CKS only had exposure to Stalin as a source of funding, organizational support, and/or adversary. From 1921 to about 1945, the USSR was consistently more pro-KMT than the United States. It was the next generation of leadership — and in particular the Returned Students such as Deng Xiaoping and Chiang Chingkuo (CCK) — that actually were educated in a Stalinist system. Deng and CCK would exhibit a degree of rational inhumanity that was completely beyond Mao and CKS’s reach. A good example is political prisoners:

1. Upon his accession to supreme power, Deng began a general amnesty that freed a variety of “class enemies,” including surviving officials of the pro-Japanese Collaborationist Government, KMT officials, East Turkestani officials, and Tibetan franc tirerus, but not supporters of Lin Biao. Thus, actual, unreformed enemies of the state were granted freedom, though heroes of the revolution whose only crime was to stop Mao at a time that Deng himself was in internal exile were kept in prison.
2. Following (1), CCK denied applications for political asylum but active KMT members who were released from Custody by Deng, and censored an ailing CKS’s mails to prevent him from receiving petitions. However, CCK’s own protege Lee Tenghui had been a member of the Chinese Communist Party and had joined out of a “hatred of the KMT.” Thus, while the KMT hierarchy was composed of former Communist cell members, KMT political prisoners were forced to live either in China or in Hong Kong (if they could evade Crown border security).

I am not aware of CKS or Mao acting in such a Stalinist manner. Both men were stylized as Emperors — both were hailed with “Ten Thousand Years!” a public display of personal immortality that makes Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich seem humble by comparison. Stalin, Hitler, and for that matter Deng and CCK, shared an essentially mechanical and modern view of history. They are recognizably 20th century figures, and would be profoundly out of place in the 12 century. Mao and CKS both would have been happier in that world.

A last comment on purges: Mao’s purges differed greatly from Stalin’s in that (a) they were completed almost immediately, (b) outside the judicial system, (c) without blood. Removing any official was easy — Mao would ’suggest’ they issue a self-criticism outlining their ‘mistakes’ (not crimes, mistakes), at which time the party would issue a censor, either a temporary reassignment or (at an extreme) stripping of party membership. Stalin’s victims would have greatly preferred this treatment!

The “craziness,” — that is the rational anti-modernism — of the CR was the targeted destruction on modern tools of state power. The Communist Party and People’s Republic were abolished as administrative entities, and the resulting ad hoc Red Guard committees were themselves banished to the countryside. One cannot imagine Hitler simultaneously destroying both the Reich and the Nazi Party, as we would expect him to somehow be acting in a modernist fashion, executing a rational plan with the expectation that his power would be greater at the end. Mao did not believe in western notions of planning or control, and attempted to eradicate the means of doing either. This is not unique to him — the Empress Dowager launched an almost identical campaign against her government that was known to the world as the Boxer Rebellion.

Taiwan, in contrast, benefited from the filial piety of the Chiang family. It was expected that CCK would be loyal to his father, and that CKS would transfer his power to his son as part of his inheritance. Thus, as conditions changed between generations, CCK was able to harness elements of power that CKS would not have had patience for (that is, planning and control).

An almost identical transition occurred between the Kangxi Emperor and his father, the Shunzhi Emperor, in the 17th century. In that case, filial piety allowed the Manchus to transition from a kinship-based tribal kingdom to a national-based Imperial elite. Similarly, the Chiang’s filial piety allowed the KMT to transition from a national-level government of warlords to an island-level Leninist state.

Stalinism killed ten million people in the Soviet Union. It may have been marginally worse than Nazi rule of eastern Europe. However, as a scientific ideology, it was infinitely better than the dead and violent end of Mao Zedong Thought.

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