This is the best official portrait in history. Ever.
NASA Astronaut Leland Melvin. Pure distilled essence of dude.
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I have enabled ‘nested’ comments for a while as an experiment, thus you will see a ‘reply’ option on each comments that may be used if you seek to reply to that remark specifically, rather than to the article in general. This may or may not become a permanent feature. December 13th, 2016 | 68 comments - (Comments are closed)
 We’re living longer lives these days, we’re working for fewer decades of them and thus people are rationally saving for their expected golden years. Thus capital as a percentage of GDP rises – not to produce inheritances, but to produce incomes in retirement. And rises by potentially at least more than 100% of GDP. We can’t see that this is a problem and we most certainly cannot see that this is an argument for greater taxation of capital. Quite the reverse in fact, people saving for their old age should be encouraged, not specifically taxed. December 10th, 2016 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a good article on the Verge laying out the horrendous Investigatory Powers Act. December 4th, 2016 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
…you cannot please everyone no matter what you do, so do not even try: Cambridge Rainbow vegetarian cafe refuses new £5 note I would sign a petition not to remove animal products from the £5 note. Seriously. I am so through with being accommodating in oh so many ways and on oh so many issues. If it was up to me, bank notes would all be printed on slices of bacon 😉 December 3rd, 2016 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
To be honest, if his colourful quotes were intended to alarm me, they actually had quite the opposite effect. “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.” – James Mattis December 2nd, 2016 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Bill’s intention is to create better data sharing gateways. The plans to digitise our birth, death, marriage and civil partnership certificates – which will be stored and shared in bulk – will make the sharing of our personal information as easy as clicking a mouse. There will be no requirement for them to consult you. You won’t be asked in advance, you won’t even be told after the event and you won’t have the chance to opt out. Worried? You should be. Do you remember the ID card furore before the 2010 general election? The scheme was axed at great expense when public support for the plans plummeted after it was revealed that HMRC had lost personal information belonging to 25 million child benefit claimants. Only then did the reality of how insecure our data is sink in. It’s worth noting the lost information still hasn’t been recovered almost 10 years later. Don’t be fooled that things have improved. In 2014/15 government departments experienced almost 9,000 data breaches, according to a recent National Audit Office report. November 28th, 2016 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Nothing however beats the BBC’s coverage. They are reporting Castro’s death more favourably than Thatcher’s. No ‘controversial’. No mention of the thousands summarily executed after the revolution. No mention that he demanded the USSR nuke the USA. No mention of the decades of impoverishment and human rights abuse. No mention of his secret police rounding up homosexuals and putting them in concentration camps. Castro gets a free pass on democratic norms – “his critics accused him of being a dictator”. Does the BBC think that is only an allegation? Particular congratulations to the BBC News Channel, who interviewed “Cuba expert” Richard Gott, without mentioning he was a KGB agent of influence. Slow clap. November 26th, 2016 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
You might not have noticed thanks to world events, but the UK parliament recently approved the government’s so-called Snooper’s Charter and it will soon become law. This nickname for the Investigatory Powers Bill is well earned. It represents a new level and nature of surveillance that goes beyond anything previously set out in law in a democratic society. It is not a modernisation of existing law, but something qualitatively different, something that intrudes upon every UK citizen’s life in a way that would even a decade ago have been inconceivable […] As David Davis said, before being distracted by Brexit, this kind of surveillance will only catch the innocent and the incompetent. The innocent should not be caught and the incompetent can be caught any number of ways. – Paul Bernal. Good article, even if I was a bit bemused by the author’s surprise that a paleo-socialist like Jeremy Corbyn acquiesced. November 26th, 2016 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you are in the UK, please sign the petition to repeal the new surveillance laws (Investigatory Powers Act). We are half way to getting a Parliamentary debate (maybe 🙄 ). Too many see Orwell’s “1984” not as a cautionary tale, but rather a compendium of interesting policy suggestions. November 25th, 2016 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
“A case of organised loot and legalised plunder.” – Manmohan Singh, referring the rapacious and extremely damaging ‘War against Cash’ in India. November 25th, 2016 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is a statement by Geert Wilders about the attempts by the Dutch establishment to silence him for expressing a political opinion: Now whatever you think of Wilders, this has been an astonishing attempt to simply shut down free expression in an western nation. And of course this will not silence him and will probably prove to be a spectacular establishment own-goal. And in the UK, more and more infrastructure to censor internet porn is being put into place. Why is this related? Because once control infrastructure exists, it can and will be re-purposed, in much the same way the Department for Education’s “counter extremism unit“, set up ostensibly to prevent violent Islamic extremist views being taught in UK schools, gets re-purposed to shut down a gay secular journalist who has not called for any violence against anyone. All across the Western World, political verities and assumption are starting to shift, and almost nothing can be accurately predicted any more. We live in times that are a danger and opportunity in equal measure, and people who care about liberty will have to get their hands dirty, making common cause with others who will not pass any purity sniff tests but with whom we share common enemies (however care does need to be taken in such matters for sometimes the enemy of my enemy is my enemy… but sometimes not), however now is the time for engagement and action. November 24th, 2016 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
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