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Why does the BBC sneer about Britain’s recovery but go crazy if Euroland’s corpse so much as twitches? In fact I suspect the UK’s “recovery” is as bogus as the Euro-zone’s “recovery” but the approach of the BBC is nevertheless… interesting… in a very predictable sense. August 16th, 2013 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Mr Obama laments that the debate over these issues did not follow “an orderly and lawful process”, but the administration often blocked such a course. For nearly five years it appeared comfortable with the secret judicial system that catered to executive demands. It prized the power to spy on Americans, and kept information from Congress. Mr Snowden exposed all of this. His actions may not have been orderly or lawful, but they were crucial to producing the reforms announced by Mr Obama. August 13th, 2013 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. – attributed to James Madison, as quoted here by Rand Paul August 11th, 2013 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
No one has willfully or knowingly disobeyed the law or tried to invade your civil liberties or privacies… There were no mistakes like that at all. This is either delusion of omniscience and infallibility, or psychopathic contempt for truth and for the ‘little people’ who are imagined to believe whatever the great and powerful Oz says. Either way, it makes him a candidate for a straitjacket, not running an uncontrolled global para-state. August 9th, 2013 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Central banks cannot solve the problems they created any more than an arsonist makes a good firefighter. – Steve Baker MP remembers the words of Steve Horwitz, to help him explain why he is not impressed by the latest doings of Bank of England Governor Mark Carney. The IEA is not happy either. August 7th, 2013 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
So here we have a newspaper proprietor that declines to spend company money on non-commercial activity, that is entrepreneurial, likes to legally avoid tax, invests in space, and is accused of being a libertarian. This is, I think, very good news. – Simon Gibbs of Libertarian Home writes about the news that Jeff Bezos has just bought the Washington Post. I hope Simon is right about Bezos. Is he? August 6th, 2013 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security… Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head. – An excerpt from: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer, published by the University of Chicago Press. 1955 August 3rd, 2013 | 64 comments - (Comments are closed)
July 30th, 2013 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
It’s a problem when the people who are supposed to be the curators of your culture fundamentally don’t like it. July 29th, 2013 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
“How did it come to pass that so many teachers and students, in some of the freest and most scientifically accomplished nations in the world, entertained such an illiberal, illogical, and politically repressive account of the relationship between science and society? Part of the answer may be that universities generally, and humanities departments in particular, are more backward than is universally recognised. For most of their history, universities functioned primarily as repositories of tradition. It was professors, not priests, who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope, and who drove genuinely progressive students like Francis Bacon and John Locke to distraction with their endless logic-chopping and parsing of ancient texts. Similarly it was twentieth-century humanities professors who, confronted with the glories of modern science and the triumph of the liberal democracies over totalitarianism, responded by denigrating virtually every political philosophy except totalitarianism.” – The Science of Liberty, by Timothy Ferris, pages 257-8. This is the Timothy Ferris who writes mostly about science, not the Timothy Ferris of the “Four-hour body” and other such works. July 28th, 2013 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a lot of debate as to whether the FSF’s “free software” or the OSI’s “open source” is the better term. But I don’t think either fully describes the idea, or why it’s a good thing in this context. I prefer something like “open development”, because the point isn’t simply that you or I can read the code – I’m not much of a coder, and most people aren’t at all – it’s that as a result, the development of that code takes place in public. (It’s worth emphasizing, because although it appears obvious when put plainly like that, it’s not always immediately apparent to anyone who hasn’t been involved.) Even if the leaders of a particular project were to have closed-doors talks with some governmental agency, the code they produce will be seen and examined by all. Nothing is impossible, but this makes the sort of collusion we’ve seen between Microsoft and the NSA extremely difficult to pull off. Hardware, as Shuttleworth points out, could still be a problem. Open drivers help, but the chips themselves could be doing nasty things that we don’t know about. Open hardware is the next frontier. – Sam Duncan July 27th, 2013 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
“I keep telling you fellows I don’t like to do this sort of thing. I can think of nothing more boring, for the American public, than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens… I don’t think the people want to be listening to a Roosevelt, sounding as if he were one of the Apostles, or the partisan yipping of a Truman.” – Former President Eisenhower, via PowerLine. That whole paragraph is deadly. It is hard to imagine a less narcissistic POTUS than “Ike”. It is often the way with those who have boasted genuine achievements. As for the current occupant of the White House… July 26th, 2013 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
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