Political Philosophy

Killing Cities: Indiana versus Texas

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As I mentioned in my last post, my son and I watch “Life After People” on The History Channel. In the last episode, “Outbreak,” the show used the  abandoned buildings  of the downtown of a major American city as real-world examples of how quickly abandoned buildings fall into decay.  

No, the abandoned buildings were not in Detroit, they were in downtown Gary, Indiana.  

How many of these abandoned areas are there in the Great Lakes region? Most people point the finger at the auto industry to explain the fall of  Detroit,  but what explains the fall of Gary?  

Steel. Gary was founded in 1907 by U.S. Steel as a company town. U.S. Steel built Gary because it was a great place to make steel in 1907. Gary grew because for the next 60 years it was a great place to make steel. Then suddenly Gary stopped being a  competitive  place to make steel. Why?

More importantly, why don’t all regions that lose a major industry suffer the same decay?

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“Life After People”: Environmentalist Porn

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My son and I like to watch “Life After People” on The History Channel. The show is a thought experiment that examines what would happen to man-made structures and nature if humans suddenly  disappeared while leaving everything otherwise intact.  

I like the show but one thing about watching it creeps me out.  

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Extremely Disturbing

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Obama has nominated Cass Sunstein, who he knows from the University of Chicago, to be “regulatory czar.” Apparently, Sunstein has proposed that web sites be required to link to opposing opinions. He has argued that the Internet is anti-democratic because users can choose to view only those opinions that they want to see, and has gone so far as to say:

A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government,” he wrote. “Democratic efforts to reduce the resulting problems ought not be rejected in freedom’s name.

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Why Snake-Oil Ideas Spread

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Via Ars Technica comes a link to a paper which seeks to explain with game theory why people continue to use unscientifically proven and usually useless medical treatments such as folk  remedies  or “alternative” medicine.  

The researchers created a  model to explain this behavior based on humans’ genetically programmed behavior to  imitate. This  surprisingly  simple model shows that quack cures spread simply because their ineffectiveness means that people must use them more often and for longer times. This in turn means that more people see the use of quack cures than they see the use of effective cures, which creates more  opportunities  for imitation. In short, every person who uses a particular cure becomes an advertiser for that cure. The longer the cure takes and the more elaborate the cure, the more people accidentally advertise it.  

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When even the police are starving, you realize that the country has serious problems.

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A  truly  sad story about conditions in  Zimbabwe. There is something particularly sad about people forced to eat their own protected wildlife. Of course, no one can blame them. No one could blame them if they ate all the  elephants.  

Remember when  Mugabe  was the darling of the Left? Remember how they all supported his redistribution of land as post-colonial justice?

I think I’ll go find a random leftist and punch him.