Where Did Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Get Her Sweet Potatoes?

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was trying to explain to me that the world is going to melt, we are all doing to die, and probably we shouldn’t be having any more children, but I was distracted by the dinner she was preparing on camera. She was carefully cutting sweet potatoes before putting them in the oven.

She put salt and pepper on them. Salt was once so rare that it was regarded as money. Ever try to go a day with zero salt? Nothing tastes right. That was the history of humanity for about 150,000 years. Then we figured out how to produce and distribute salt to every table in the world. Now we throw around salt like it is nothing, and even complain that everything is too salty. Nice problem.

The liberal project wanted the global world. Maybe they didn't understand what came with it.

Richard Fernandez

The liberal project wanted the global world. Maybe they didn't understand what came with it.

The problem may be not with liberal compassion but its eschatology: the Great State at the End of History was their paradise on earth. Progressives built a great state at huge expense and sacrifice, yet now as they approach the Throne in final triumph they are dismayed to see it occupied by Trump! "Tis' witchcraft," said some. "Tis' Russian hacking," said still others. But the words 'any government big enough to give you everything you want [can] take everything you have' never came to mind. Perhaps the real reason for the surprise is our old friend complexity. The liberal project really thought they could control the complex world when it's all you can do to control parts of it.

What globalism forgot is that system complexity doesn't just expand linearly; potential interactions can increase exponentially. As they tore down borders and plugged stuff into whatsis and whosis things not only got more complicated than the Masters anticipated they got more complex than they could imagine.

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A global cyberattack leveraging hacking tools widely believed by researchers to have been developed by the U.S. National Security Agency hit international shipper FedEx, disrupted Britain’s health system and infected computers in dozens of other countries on Friday." Everybody was affected. It didn't matter how you voted.

The incident revealed at least ten NHS trusts still relied on the Windows XP. The instrusion allegedly relied on NSA tools stolen during the Obama administration from a contractor. "According to one source, that includes more than 75 percent of the hacking tools belonging to the Tailored Access Operations. TAO is an elite hacking unit that develops and deploys some of the world's most sophisticated software exploits."

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They couldn't even manage a park. How could they control the world? Which brings us back to the subject of civilizational collapse and runaway hacking. What makes the pubic think governments which run Windows XP and lose secrets can manage Climate, which is as complex as a human organism? Perhaps we have to relearn humility and restore loose coupling between objects. Otherwise the reactive effects will ripple through "unexpectedly". But of course no one will listen, just as in the Jurassic Park movies. It'll be full speed ahead and 'hold muh beer'.

Pope’s encyclical on climate change reads like the Unabomber Manifesto

“The idea of promoting a different cultural paradigm and employing technology as a mere instrument is nowadays inconceivable. The technological paradigm has become so dominant that it would be difficult to do without its resources and even more difficult to utilize them without being dominated by their internal logic. It has become countercultural to choose a lifestyle whose goals are even partly independent of technology, of its costs and its power to globalize and make us all the same.”

Pure Kaczynski, yeah? The next sentence could easily be “So that’s why I moved to a cabin in the woods and started mailing bombs to scientists.” Let me give you another: Unabomber or Unapapa?

“The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behaviour that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity. Of course the system does satisfy many human needs, but generally speaking it does this only to the extent that it is to the advantage of the system to do it. It is the needs of the system that are paramount, not those of the human being.”

That one’s Ted - or have I switched them around?

California’s New Feudalism Benefits a Few at the Expense of the Multitude

As late as the 80s, California was democratic in a fundamental sense, a place for outsiders and, increasingly, immigrants—roughly 60 percent of the population was considered middle class. Now, instead of a land of opportunity, California has become increasingly feudal. According to recent census estimates, the state suffers some of the highest levels of inequality in the country. By some estimates, the state’s level of inequality compares with that of such global models as the Dominican Republic, Gambia, and the Republic of the Congo.

At the same time, the Golden State now suffers the highest level of poverty in the country—23.5 percent compared to 16 percent nationally—worse than long-term hard luck cases like Mississippi. It is also now home to roughly one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients, almost three times its proportion of the nation’s population.

Like medieval serfs, increasing numbers of Californians are downwardly mobile, and doing worse than their parents: native born Latinos actually have shorter lifespans than their parents, according to one recent report. Nor are things expected to get better any time soon. According to a recent Hoover Institution survey, most Californians expect their incomes to stagnate in the coming six months, a sense widely shared among the young, whites, Latinos, females, and the less educated.

Some of these trends can be found nationwide, but they have become pronounced and are metastasizing more quickly in the Golden State. As late as the 80s, the state was about as egalitarian as the rest of the country. Now, for the first time in decades, the middle class is a minority, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

The Role of the tech oligarchs.

California produces more new billionaires than any place this side of oligarchic Russia or crony capitalist China. By some estimates the Golden State is home to one out of every nine of the world’s billionaires. In 2011 the state was home to 90 billionaires, 20 more than second place New York and more than twice as many as booming Texas.

Yet even in Silicon Valley, the expansion of prosperity has been extraordinarily limited. Due to enormous losses suffered in the current tech bubble, tech job creation in Silicon Valley has barely reached its 2000 level. In contrast, previous tech booms, such as the one in the 90s, doubled the ranks of the tech community. Some, like UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti, advance the dubious claim that those jobs are more stable than those created in Texas. But even if we concede that point for the moment, the Valley’s growth primarily benefits its denizens but not most Californians. Since the recession, California remains down something like 500,000 jobs, a 3.5 percent loss, while its Lone Star rival has boosted its employment by a remarkable 931,000, a gain of more than 9 percent.

Much of this has to do with the changing nature of California’s increasingly elite—driven economy. Back in the 80s and even the 90s, the state’s tech sector produced industrial jobs that sparked prosperity not only in places like Palo Alto, but also in the more hardscrabble areas in San Jose and even inland cities such as Sacramento. The once huge California aerospace industry, centered in Los Angeles, employed hundreds of thousands, not only engineers but skilled technicians, assemblers, and administrators.

This picture has changed over the past decade. California’s tech manufacturing sector has shrunk, and those employed in Silicon Valley are increasingly well-compensated programmers, engineers and marketers. There has been little growth in good-paying blue collar or even middle management jobs. Since 2001 state production of “middle skill” jobs—those that generally require two years of training after high-school—have grown roughly half as quickly as the national average and one-tenth as fast as similar jobs in arch-rival Texas.

Think of the dot.com billionaires like the Facebook and Google founders as the new Lords and Barons of this land. Their vast estates provide jobs for a relatively few servants while their green politics destroys the ability of those who don't work for them to achieve the middle class.

Luddites at the Virginian Pilot

For those who went to public school a little explanation may be in order. “Luddites” were a movement by people who were afraid of technology. Merriam Webster:

one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest; broadly: one who is opposed to especially technological change.

The Left has become increasingly Luddite, fearful of atomic power (the Virginian Pilot has wasted tons of newsprint on this issue), oil and gas exploration and now it goes into an anti-science rant about the dangers of fracking disguised as preservation.

The Left today is nostalgic for the time when they believed they held the moral upper hand. Today we have their incessant squawk about racism and anti-science when they themselves are practicing racism and protesting technologies that make things better and cheaper. They yearn for yesterday.

Technological revolution - from PCs to tablets

Young people live in the “now.” One of the benefits of getting older is that we have an opportunity to remember the way it was a decade or five ago. So as I was sitting in church last week I noticed again how many people carried a tablet or iPad instead of a Bible. It’s not the first time I noticed that but I was reminded of it when I read the about tablet shipment on the First Trust Market Watch “Factoids” column for the week.

Tablet shipments are expected to outpace the entire PC market (portables and desktops combined) by 2015, according to International Data Corporation (IDC). IDC believes tablet shipments will exceed those of portable PCs in 2013. It sees shipments growing 58.7% (y-o-y) to 229.3 million units this year. The average selling price for a tablet is expected to decline 10.8% to $381 in 2013. The average price of a PC is expected to be $635. One change in the marketplace garnering attention is the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) approach at work. IDC reports that close to 25% of employees in organizations larger than 10 people claim to have purchased the primary PC they use for work. This phenomenon also extends to smartphones and tablets.

I’m sure that a few decades from now, when the teens of today are the elderly of tomorrow, they will remember the good old days of tablets as their data is projected directly to their eyeballs.

Watch the successful firing of the first working plastic gun

At the Command of the State Department, Defense Distributed Pulls Its 3D Printed Gun Blueprints

Good luck with that.

Self-Driving Cars

LightSquared Files Bankruptcy After Network Blocked

The country is a little safer.  Lightsquared had plans to build a system that would have destroyed the effectiveness of GPS systems used in everything from aircraft navigation and landing systems to the Garmin and Tom Tom in your car.  Lightsquared is enmeshed in the Obama election and administration even to the extent of having Obama as an investor.

High tech runs three times faster than normal businesses. And the government runs three times slower than normal businesses. So we have a nine-times gap.

Sometimes stupid is not repairable.  Silicon Valley continues to support the Left, even after it sees the results.

"So we get hauled in front of the Congress for developing a product that's free, that serves a billion people. OK? I mean, I don't know how to say it any clearer," Mr. Schmidt told the Post. "It's not like we raised prices. We could lower prices from free to . . . lower than free? You see what I'm saying?"

A Day Made of Glass

A truly fascinating look into the not-too-distant future.