Thank God Stalin antedated Photoshop.
– Alex Kroll Jr in a comment on this posting last Sunday.
|
|||||
|
October 24th, 2002 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
 A commendably good analysis from James C. Bennett on the strategic decisions facing Australia following the Bali massacre:
He also examines the potentially catastrophic consequences for the Balinese. James has an audacious talent for getting to the heart of the matter without cant or hyperbole and by my reckoning he has hit a multitude of nails squarely on the head yet again. October 24th, 2002 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
I was prompted by Perry’s post below to refer to a London newspaper story I saw yesterday. The fig-leaf justification provided for establishing a panopticon state is that we all be a lot safer as a result. Pity it didn’t work in the case of this gut-wrenching story of a man who was set upon by a gang outside an underground station in North London and beaten to death for no other reason than he had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Where was all the security state apparatus? What about all those CCTV cameras? Do you think this man’s family might want to ask themselves why they’re being sold a pup? Police States are all about security; not our security, mind. October 23rd, 2002 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Across London, these posters can be seen telling us all that we are ‘Secure beneath The Watchful Eyes’ of the Metropolitan Police. I cannot tell you how much better that makes me feel. The imagery is pure 1930’s/1940’s and conjurors up the ‘Golden Age of Totalitarianism’. Britain is already a Police State in so far as the means for total repression are already well and truly in place. As the poster indicates all too well, Britain is the nation most under surveillance on Earth, Echelon monitors our domestic communications, our Internet usage is logged for years due to the Draconian RIP Act, our locations detected via our mobile phones and logged, all for the apparatus of state to access on very low level authority. Civilians are not just deprived of any firearms, in reality we are forbidden to defend ourselves and our property with so much as a broom stick. Our right to trial by Jury faces abridgement, even our ancient protection of Habeas Corpus is now a dead letter under European extradition laws. Yes, we still have a fairly free press, in so far as the media are strong enough to prevent restrictions against their actions… yet do not dare to make an allegedly ‘racist’ remark or pour scorn on someone’s religion or make a joke about Wales: if you do then expect to find yourself up in front of the Beak justifying yourself under threat of fine or gaol, and forget saying “I was just exercising my right to freedom of speech”. Is it any surprise that the powers that be feel they can dare put posters announcing that you are ‘Secure beneath The Watchful Eyes’. Secure? From what? Surveillance increases daily at the same times as crime soars out of control, so if we are not ‘secure’ from crime, then what exactly is being secured? We face many threats in the modern world but the biggest comes from the people who would watch our every action so that the State may choose to judge us when it sees fit.
How long before we start seeing this poster? Update: See follow up articles to this one on Samizdata.net here and here October 23rd, 2002 | 263 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you still haven’t had enough of my postings on Iraq, here is one that describes just how the news we hear about Iraq is obtained, restricted and processed. Having read Salam Pax blog and other ‘inside Iraq’ articles, I am now convinced of what has so far been a conjecture based on my experience of communism. Nightmares do not fade that easily and I recognise this is as the same stuff of which ‘the Evil Empire’ was made and 1984 written about. In its pervasiveness and destructiveness it is often beyond understanding of a free individual. October 23rd, 2002 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tim Evans of the Centre for the New Europe has just emailed me to tell me about the blog which the CNE have been quietly running for the last few weeks, or at any rate quietly enough for me not to notice it until now. It’s called The Pulse, and looks well worth a regular read. And hello, what is this? Goodness me, a fulsomely admiring link to this. Coincidences will never cease. Of course what that actually shows is that Tim Evans is a man who knows how to get a blog noticed. Rather more seriously, I think that The Pulse is part of the answer to that question we all ask from time to time: How Can I Get Paid To Blog? Because I get the definite feeling that The Pulse’s regulars, Tim himself, Helen Govett, Stephen Pollard, Helen Disney, Johan Hjertqvist (the last two being new names to me), are not exactly starving as a result of their association with this blog. The CNE is a real-world olde-world, meat-space institution – with secretaries, carpets, conferences, a website with swank pictures of the honchos shaking hands with swank politicians – in short with money, money that it is presumably willing to dole out in noticeable amounts to the right blogicians. Interesting too that The Pulse follows the Samizdata example of having a team of bloggers, to make sure that it keeps fresh and keeps coming. (PS: While checking the link to Stephen Pollard’s blog, I found myself reading his piece yesterday (Oct 22) on the impact of the Bali bomb on the thinking of the “Bali generation”, originally for the Wall Street Journal of Europe. I can’t make any sense of Stephen’s targetted links and I’m sure that’s just me, but this piece is most interesting.) October 23rd, 2002 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
There’s a little flurry of debate going on about oil, and what it’s used for. Alex Knapp of Heretical Ideas (Tuesday Oct 22 – the direct link doesn’t work) has just one word to say to us: plastics. His point is a good one: oil is not just for making cars and lorries go. Our entire economies now depend on it. And here’s another point about oil. It is said by some of its opponents that the war that GWB2 wants to start Real Soon Now is really only about oil, only about keeping western economies well supplied, only about economics. And it is agreed by almost everyone that the President is being so delicate with the Saudis, again only because of the vast amounts of oil that they dispose of. Only? War is a matter of life and death, but so is economics. I’m not saying that this war is/will be only an oil war. (I don’t think this at all as it happens, but that’s not my argument here.) Nor am I saying that all oil wars are good wars. Nor am I saying that the Saudis should be allowed to get away with absolutely anything, and with paying for absolutely anything, for ever, because giving them a seeing to would be too costly, in oil. I’m merely saying this: that when economies flounder people die. They go out of business, get divorced, get stressed and die of heart attacks, commit suicide. They torment one another, beat their kids, the kids leave home, the kids rob people, the kids kill people, the kids die, … How many gallons of oil are worth the life, by which I mean the death, of one young soldier? It’s not a stupid or merely a rhetorical question. The serious answer cannot be that no amount of oil could possibly be worth any blood. No amount? Any? Just think about that. All those studies proving that poverty is bad for you and can even kill you are true. They’re wrong only when they say that the way to reduce poverty is to nationalise it. October 23rd, 2002 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
noun. A cartoon/comic related weblog, either pertaining to cartoons/comics or featuring graphics of that nature. October 23rd, 2002 | Comments are closed
Please do as Lynn of Poet and Peasant, who posted this link, says: This deserves maximum exposure. Read it. Link to it. Forward it to your congressman. Print it out and give it to people who think they can get all the news they need from TV. In the article, Farideh Tehrani, a 27-year old woman in Tehran, implores: Please tune out the biased and shallow works of journalists who use their pens to editorialize rather than report news. To us as Iranians, that is unfathomable. Don’t you realize that when we read your work, we ask what good is free press if it does not report the truth? October 23rd, 2002 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
“…..in order to restore international peace and security” October 23rd, 2002 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you are anything like me, then you missed out on the annual Socially Responsible Investors in the Rockies Conference, which commenced this past weekend. Luckily, Reuters told us all about it. Socially Responsible Investing, as we will see shortly, has become a big business in and of itself. But what to make of this concept? You might expect me to ridicule the whole movement, but I am not going to. Libertarians believe that the “responsibilities” of a corporation boil down to maximizing shareholder value while complying with the law, but I can find a lot of common ground with the SRI crowd. The problem is that an investor who tries to incoporate SRI principles into his portfolio will be led down any number of blind alleys. In theory, I think that SRI is a great idea. If progressive types feel the need to bathe themselves in self-congratulatory rhetoric before participating in the capitalist system, that is fine with me. We would all be better off if environmentalists and consumer advocates used their own actual money to try to make things better, rather than pester the rest of us with their demands for more burdensome regulatory restrictions. Under the right conditions, even the most avowed socialists are willing to play — as his financial disclosure for the 2000 presidential race makes clear, Ralph Nader invests heavily in corporate equities (PDF file, requires Adobe Acrobat Reader or similar). (Heh heh, OpenSecrets.org strikes again!) Unfortunately, determining which companies are “socially responsible” quickly degenerates into a Sisyphean task. What will be the next “politically incorrect” technology or product? Fast food? Cell phones? Tanning salons? Big Chocolate? What will be the next country to face a Chomsky-approved “divestment campaign” a la Israel? I have some very recent finance textbooks that celebrate the exemplary corporate citizenship of… Enron. → Continue reading: Socially Indifferent Investing October 23rd, 2002 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
We all know what caused the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, right. We all know because we have been told (ad nauseum) by this lot among others that the root causes lie with America’s wrong-headed foreign policy, its empire-building and its constant meddling in other people’s business. If one accepts that argument then the solution presents itself: America should mind its own business, stop arming foreigners, bring troops home and quietly get on with the business of building a peaceful, free, non-interventionist country. Then the worlds bad guys and bullies will simply leave America alone and go off to look for someone else to haunt. In other words, America should be more like Switzerland. After all, nobody ever attacks Switzerland. Why should they? There’s no reason to. Switzerland is neutral and peaceful and prosperous and…under attack:
Nothing to do with Swiss foreign policy then. Nothing to do with Swiss meddling in other people’s conflicts. No, it’s everything to do with the exceedingly domestic policy of banking secrecy which means that Switzerland is a living, breathing bolt-hole for those desperate Euro-serfs who want to hang on to whatever precious capital they have left and shield it from the endless predations of Brussels. → Continue reading: Root causes revisited October 23rd, 2002 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
Recent Comments