A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. TOP BILLING: Haiti, Disaster Sociology, Elite Panic, and LootingGary Peterson. Resilience Science. 2010 January 30. This is one of the more compelling defenses of decentralization to be found under 2,000 words. Looking at disaster situations, Mr. Peterson does not find the disorder and chaos of […]
Economic historian Angus Maddison provides us with our first “Intriguing Passage of the Week”: It is interesting to speculate on India’s fate if it had not had two centuries of British rule. There are three major alternatives which can seriously be considered. One would have been the maintenance of indigenous rule with a few foreign […]
Rufus F, of the League of Ordinary Gentleman, has written an interesting post on the Confucian way of politics. Its centerpiece is a lengthy excerpt from a previous discussion in which this author took part. Those interested in a few of my thoughts concerning the Chinese political order circa 450 BC are encouraged to read […]
To the readership: As he is heading to the mainland to visit family for a month or so, this author will be in lost in transit for the next few days. Expect posting to be light over the next week. Likewise, I ask the proprietors of the other sites I frequent (and occasionally start arguments […]
A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. THE REPUBLIC American Murder Mystery Hannah Rosen Atlantic Magazine. July 2008. Over the last decade crime rates in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago have all shrunk. A great American success story? Not quite. While the crime rates of the big cities fell, […]
A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. A lot of good material has been published this week. I am a bit on the busy side, so the usual long winded responses will be replaced in favor of one-sentence summaries. THE REPUBLIC How Trillion Dollar Deficits Were Created New York Times. 9 June […]
War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations, Peter Turchin’s sweeping application of cliodynamics to the rise and fall of great powers, has been making the rounds recently. Both the Committee of Public Safety and Sublime Oblivion have posted responses to the book. As my past posts on cultural cohesion might suggest, […]
A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. THE REPUBLIC America, the Land of Limited Opportunity. We Must Open Our Eyes to the Truth. “Fabius Maximus”. Fabius Maximus. 31 March 2010. Fabius Maximus points to a painful truth: increasing inequality of income and declining social mobility is tearing our America apart at the […]
Author’s Note: A few days ago I finished reading Europe in Crisis, 1598-1648, by Geoffrey Parker. Parker is a renowned scholar of 17th century Europe, and for those unfamiliar with the period’s history I can think of no better introduction than this volume. This reading was the impetus for the following post. You can summarize […]
“Who does not know that wars, the mighty tempests, the pestilence, all the ills, indeed which afflict the human race, do so through the agency of demons?” (Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, p. 83) So wrote the Saxon priest Helmold of Bosau nine centuries ago in his history of Eastern Europe, the Chronica Slavorum. I […]
