CapitalistImperialistPig

Lumo offers his usual fair, balanced, and dispassionate analysis of a new plan to turn the EU into the United State of Europe. The German foreign minister previously said that he didn't want a deeper integration anymore. However, the Polish TV TVP, Sputnik, TheNews.PL, The Express, and numerous others have pointed out a remarkable 10-page document penned by the German and French foreign ministers whose goal is to complete the project that Germany didn't quite complete around 1942.

Or at least business. Those darn limeys are hitting my personal portfolio. Who should we bomb? Have we got a drone over Boris Johnson's place?

Was Brexit about immigration? Tyler Cowen comes down on the side of a nuanced yes . As I interpret what happened, ultimately the vote was about preserving the English nation, and yes I use those last two italicized words deliberately; reread Fintan O’Toole. Go back and read English history. For centuries, England has been filled with English people, plus some others from nearby regions. Go visit Norfolk and also stop in Great Yarmouth, once described by Charles Dickens as “…the finest place in the universe,” and which, for whatever decline it may have experienced, still looks and feels like England. London does not. As Zack Beauchamp notes (in a piece which is mostly an example of what I am criticizing): “…the number of foreign-born people living in the UK has gone from 2.3 million in 1993 (when Britain joined the EU) to 8.2 million in 2014.” In terms of distribution and influence, the impact of those numbers is much larger yet. London, the cultural center, business center, an...

Leading arts professors keep saying so. Pinker has a theory why: The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the twentieth century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they’re surprised that people are staying away in droves? Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (p. 416). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. One trouble, he says, is that their art is based on a discredited theory of human perception, based on - you may have already guessed - the idea of the mind as a blank slate, instead of one with lots of built in categories including detectors for pretentious bullshit. OK, he didn't actually say the very last bit, but I think he at least hinted at it.

Thursday was a bad day for those who thought the EU was a good idea, even if it was badly implemented. George Soros thinks that its disintegration is now all but irreversible, and he is hardly alone in that opinion. What would need to be done to fix it? I have no idea, but as usual I won't let that stop me: A simple federal constitution in which citizens rights are outlined and federal governmental powers specified and delimited, with no special privileges. It should be short enough for any citizen to read it twenty minutes. A democratically elected government with real powers - possibly a two chambered parliament modeled after the US. Unified defense, trade, and finance. Does that sound a lot like a United States of Europe? Well, duh, but one could initially make the central state weak enough permit a lot of local autonomy. You want to be able to avoid situations like the Portugal, Ireland, Greece etc. crisis where in effect Germany made decisions for everybody and the h...

I mean aside from the usual idiots: Cameron, Johnson, British geezers..., etc. Kevin Drum takes a look at a long list of suspects. Here he is on Angela Merkel: For all the praise she gets, Angela Merkel has been one of the most disastrous European leaders in my lifetime. She's as responsible for Brexit as anyone I can think of, thanks to two catastrophic decisions she made. The first was her insistence on punishing Greece following its collapse after the Great Recession. There's plenty of blame to go around on all sides for the Greece debacle, but as the continent's economic leader Germany held most of the high cards during negotiations over Greece's fate. Merkel had a choice: (a) punish Greece for running up unsustainable debts and lying about them, or (b) accept that Germany bore much of the blame itself for the crisis and that Greece had no way of rescuing itself thanks to the straitjacket of the common currency. The former was a crowd pleaser. The latter was u...

It started in the Carboniferous. Hair, scales and feathers all have a common ancestor back then or before, according to this NYT story by Nicholas St. Fleur. Reptiles have scales. Birds have feathers. Mammals have hair. How did we get them? For a long time scientists thought the spikes, plumage and fur characteristic of these groups originated independently of each other. But a study published Friday suggests that they all evolved from a common ancestor some 320 million years ago. This ancient reptilian creature — which gave rise to dinosaurs, birds and mammals — is thought to have been covered in scale-like structures. What that creature looked like is not exactly known, but the scales on its skin developed from structures called placodes — tiny bumps of thick tissue found on the surface of developing embryos. Once again we learn that theories of independent evolution fall victims to the facts. It seems that evolution is pretty conservative: when it comes up with a good idea,...