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People in Shaoshan in China, the birthplace of Chairman Mao, are making good money selling keepsakes of history’s most prolific mass murderer. I find it odd that the BBC reporter doing a little video on that somehow neglected to ask “why are you selling souvenirs of a man responsible for murdering tens of millions of your fellow Chinese people?” Actually I think we all know why that question never got asked. Clearly Braunau am Inn in Austria is missing a trick. December 23rd, 2013 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
 My personal point of view is that if you hire a backwoods redneck fundamentalist Christian to star in your reality show, you should expect him to say the sort of things a backwoods redneck fundamentalist Christian might say – about gays, ducks, and other subjects. Likewise, nobody should expect Snooki to start talking like she’s been possessed by Kate Middleton. December 23rd, 2013 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
I think people come to Chomsky and essentially worship him for precisely that reason. He allows them to feel justified in their refusal to think. They never have to ask themselves any difficult questions or provide any difficult answers. It’s a form of intellectual cowardice essentially, but I’m sure you can see its appeal. This may be one of the reasons for Chomsky’s hostility to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis may be many things, but it is certainly a method of gaining self-knowledge, of asking difficult questions about one’s self and others. And that is precisely what he, and his followers, want to avoid. – Benjamin Kerstein speaking with Michael Totten December 21st, 2013 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Today, if you carry a cell phone in Sao Paolo, the NSA can and does keep track of your location: they do this 5 billion times a day to people around the world. When someone in Florianopolis visits a website, the NSA keeps a record of when it happened and what you did there. If a mother in Porto Alegre calls her son to wish him luck on his university exam, NSA can keep that call log for five years or more. They even keep track of who is having an affair or looking at pornography, in case they need to damage their target’s reputation. American Senators tell us that Brazil should not worry, because this is not ‘surveillance,’ it’s ‘data collection.’ They say it is done to keep you safe. They’re wrong. There is a huge difference between legal programs, legitimate spying, legitimate law enforcement – where individuals are targeted based on a reasonable, individualized suspicion — and these programs of dragnet mass surveillance that put entire populations under an all-seeing eye and save copies forever. These programs were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power. December 17th, 2013 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
A US Federal Court has found against the NSA’s ‘Orwellian’ mass surveillance on the grounds it is probably unconstitutional… yeah no kidding. So… even if the NSA’s programme of indiscriminate data mining is shut down (yeah right), will a large number of people… hell… will anyone actually go to jail for this blatantly illegal project? Will anyone even lose their jobs? I would not hold my breath on that score if I were you. In the meantime, Snowden remains an indicted fugitive for revealing what a court has now ruled unconstitutional. December 16th, 2013 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)
Huh? Fears of instability? What. The. Fuck. Here, oh most vile and dismal of BBC copywriters, let me fix that for you…
Sorted. December 13th, 2013 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it – Frédéric Bastiat, Economic sophisms, 2nd series (1848) December 2nd, 2013 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
The governments of the world love to use crimes that produce an understandable emotional revulsion as justification for measure of vastly wider reach. Child abuse is perhaps the most common of these. The current moves to make unacceptable sites simply not show up on search engines is actually about getting the infrastructure in place to make whatever is deemed ‘unacceptable’ invisible with the flick of a switch. I do not believe for a moment that the people pushing for this do not have as their ultimate goal giving the state the ability to control everything you can see online. And if you think the state, any state, can be trusted with that kind of power, then you are either a fool or a totalitarian. November 18th, 2013 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
The setting is North End Road in Fulham, London, near a large street side food and fresh produce market. There is a stand with a whole roasting hog covered in fennel, described as ‘Italian Roast Pig’ by a large sign. It is in fact run by a couple Bulgarian guys who I know. The food tastes… exquisite. I eat there every Friday. A man walked up to them, obviously a Muslim. He peers at the roasting pig, sniffs and look at the man inside the stand. (Muslim bloke, pointing a large bowl of sauce. Good english with an East London accent) “Hmmm… what’s that?” (Bulgarian proprietor. Good english with a South London accent) “Apple sauce. We make it ourselves from English apples.” (Muslim bloke, pointing at the roasting pig) “Is that halal?” (Bulgarian proprietor, looking perplexed) “Er… not really.” (Muslim bloke, winking) “Oh, right. I’ll have mine with the apple sauce then.” November 17th, 2013 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ivory is valuable and this leads to poaching (which is another way of saying ‘seeking more supplies of rare ivory’). So… The US government had decided to reduce the global supply of ivory by destroying six tonnes of the stuff.
And when supply is reduced, what happens to prices and therefore the motivation to secure new supplies? Anyone? Surely if they wanted to reduce the incentive to poach ivory, rather than crushing their stockpile, they should have flooded the market with it. But of course Dan Ashe and his ilk work for governments and thus know nothing of this ‘economics’ malarkey. November 15th, 2013 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Australia will be represented by a diplomat rather than a senior minister at international climate talks in Poland next week aimed at securing an agreement to cut global carbon emissions. Environment Minister Greg Hunt won’t attend annual United Nations climate change talks in Warsaw, saying he’ll be busy repealing the carbon tax in the first fortnight of parliament. Mr Hunt said through a spokesman that he would be “fully engaged in repealing the carbon tax” while the conference was under way. November 7th, 2013 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
Back in the early 1980s at Auburn University, Roger Garrison (now retired from teaching there) had to give an undergraduate student an “A” grade for an answer to a test question about minimum-wage legislation. The student endorsed the legislation precisely because the legislation prices many blacks out of the labour market – and that southern-boy student believed that consequence to be just dandy. The kid, like Unz, has values that I (and Roger Garrison) abhor. But that kid, like Unz, got the economics right. November 4th, 2013 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
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