CapitalistImperialistPig

Approximately half of the people on Earth speak an Indo-European language. Some of the expansion of this language has taken place in historic times through European conquests, but most of it occurred before the dawn of history. Most of Europe and much of Asia were speaking IE languages before historic times. J.P. Mallory, in his book In Search of the Indo-Europeans , begins his chapter on the search for the Indo-European homeland by quoting three separate declarations by a single authority, spaced over 47 years, confidently assigning that homeland to Asia, Europe, and Asia Minor respectively. Nonetheless, Mallory remains confident that the IE homeland has already been identified, mainly because essentially every semi-plausible (and many an utterly absurd) potential location has already been claimed by somebody. In the absurd crowd, I would count the North Pole and Iceland. One complicating factor is nationalism and racism. Mallory also devotes a chapter to the Aryan Myth, which ...

It is a nearly unmentionable scandal of civilized life, or, more generally agricultural life, that it produces more people than the world has room for. It's no secret, of course, since the Rev Malthus prominently discussed it 217 years ago. That influential essay, which inspired Darwin and gave economics its grim nickname - The Dismal Science - hasn't exactly been forgotten, but its hardly mentioned in modern economics. It's fashionable to pretend that progress and capitalism "refuted" Malthus. The truth is that something like the opposite has occurred. Modern technology has permitted birth control, and where it has been aggressively pursued, economic progress has nearly always followed. China is the poster boy. The vast decline in the World's extreme poverty that we have seen in the last thirty years is mostly due to the rapid economic progress of China, and that progress followed the one child policy. What I really want to talk about, though, is the me...

Susanna Martinez, our governor and formerly a local prosecutor, was pretty angry when the police showed up in the early morning to break up a loud and drunken party she was attending at a hotel in the Capital. Martinez came to the front desk after three police officers showed up at the hotel. A slurry-sounding Martinez can be heard on the second recording repeatedly pestering Garcia to tell her who had complained -- or at least say what room they were in. “Oh you can tell the police, but they won’t tell you -- you won’t tell me?” Martinez said. “I’ll get it from the cops.” Martinez then gets on the phone with the police dispatcher, who also refuses to identify the people who complained. The third, and funniest recording, has Martinez speaking to an officer on the phone, incredulous that cops had been sent to the hotel. It's unclear at that point whether she is back in her room. “So we’re sitting in there, I’m the governor of the state of New Mexico, and we’re in there with my ...

OK, I could only stand an hour or so of it, but it looked like Cuba was winning. One of the more disturbing parts was some buffoon promising to "punch Putin in the nose." At least two morons wanted to unilaterally establish a no-fly zone and shoot down any Russian planes that violated it. Rand Paul pointed out that this was likely to start WW III, but Christie, Trump and other buffoons were unimpressed. Obviously, these morons have no idea how the First World War started. I have no insight into the peculiar psychosis that constitutes a Republican primary voter, but it seemed to me that the audience kinda liked Rubio and Cruz -- maybe not Trump so much.

GISS (NASA) global temperatures are up. October and November of this year are by far the warmest in the instrumental records, in terms of anomaly from the 1950-1980 base. October, formerly the champion with a 1.04 C anomaly, remains the champ with a revision to 1.06 C. November is just behind at 1.05 C. Each is about 1.3 C warmer than the 1880-1900 average. Is that a lot? In the geological record each 1 C temperature increase corresponds to something like a 5-8 m rise in sea level. Kiss more than a few cities goodbye.

One of the more bizarre aspects of the Paris agreement was the decision to commit to a maximum 1.5 C temperature increase. I strongly suspect that 1.5 C is already baked in the cake - even if emissions went to zero tomorrow. We passed 1.04 C last month. 2 C doesn't seem likely under realistic scenarios.