noun. A cartoon/comic related weblog, either pertaining to cartoons/comics or featuring graphics of that nature.
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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)
So Saddam is trying to show he cares. The amnesty was the most important gesture of a campaign aimed at presenting a softer face to his people and rallying them for war. Iraqis are being regaled with propaganda showing him as a caring and conciliatory leader. He certainly has the means to do that – satellite television is banned, foreign radio stations are jammed and the internet is tightly controlled, with many websites blocked. Iraqis have no choice but to be overwhelmed by Saddam’s immensely powerful propaganda machine as the great majority encounter nothing but the state media’s relentless diet of indoctrination. As part of the propaganda drive a mass wedding was held in Baghdad yesterday, paid for by the regime. More than 150 couples gathered at the headquarters of the Youth Wing of the ruling Ba’ath party to tie the knot, benefiting from the benign patronage of their leader.
Isn’t that just wonderful? The problem is that I have heard of this kind of grotesque and absurd propaganda stunts. They are usually perpetrated by dictators who have completely lost touch with reality and live in the world of their own. It is a result of an evolutionary process based on survival instinct – the leader spends first few years shooting everyone who disagrees with him and voilà, all is well as everybody agrees with him! Remember Nicolae Ceausescu? I suspect that we only hear about a small fraction of Saddam’s escapades. I hope that after Iraq is freed and the full horror of his regime revealed, it will become one of the examples of justified use of force. October 22nd, 2002 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
The EU Commission would appear to be a law unto itself. Confirming his remark last week that the Euro Stability Pact is stupid, he added yesterday:
At least he is honest. He want to power to do what he thinks is best for all of Europe and to hell with any inconvenient agreements that get in the way. Fair enough because I think EU law is also completely illegitimate nonsense too, but then I’m not the head of the European Commission.  October 22nd, 2002 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
October 22nd, 2002 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
On the recommendation of a friend, this afternoon I went to see the IMAX 3D movie Space Station. I expected to enjoy it but I did not think I would be astounded by it. 3D filming sure has come a long way! The experience was made even better by the entirely suitable venue of the IMAX cinema, which is the superb Science Museum in Kensington. After seeing the show, I wandered around and looked at the exhibits. If you want to see the glory of what Islamic culture can produce, go visit the Alhambra in Spain. But if you want to see and understand the glory of what secular western culture can produce, go to the Science Museum and see the making of the modern world. This place is more than just a museum, it is a temple to the western mind and what makes us what we are. It is gallery after gallery of astonishing achievements, dead ends and curiosities. If you would know what you are then understand where you came from. 
This is your heritage. October 22nd, 2002 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Alice Bachini is now taking terrorism seriously. (The blogspotting link refuses to work. Scroll to Monday Oct 22: “Taking Terrorism Seriously”, if you aren’t already there.) So I will now pick up the torch of triviality (importance of) and ask: Madonna, crap actress or what? I’m going to argue for the or what position. At some length, I’m afraid, but what the hell? It’s been a rather slow Samizdata day so far. BBC 1 showed a Madonna movie last Sunday evening. My Radio Times makes no mention of it, but does mention the movie Black Sunday, which they didn’t show. This is the one where Bruce Dern hijacks the Goodyear Blimp in order to zap a Superbowl crowd with knitting needles, and presumably they cancelled it so as not to give those Arab terrorists any clever ideas, or maybe because, what with the bad guys in this movie actually being Arab terrorists, they didn’t want to show a work of fiction that had now become insufficiently fictional. It’s odd that, isn’t it? – although I’m not disagreeing. Odd also that I settle down to blog about triviality (importance of) and profundity has immediately barged its way back in. That’s terrorism for you. Anyway, Madonna. The movie BBC1 did show was Body of Evidence. The plot concerns a woman who picks on rich old guys with heart conditions and then shags them (very kinkily and dominatingly) to death, after first ensuring that the will gets changed in her favour. → Continue reading: Madonna: too scary to be a star October 22nd, 2002 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Another bombing tonight in Northern Israel. Another bus rammed by a car packed with explosives. At least 15 dead and 30 maimed. As I have indicated previously, this is not going to stop. October 21st, 2002 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
‘Gunboat Diplomacy’ has a bad name these days: the idea was that if a gang of killers murdered a British subject in a far-flung country, a gun-boat would be sent out. If the local potentates were considered to be accomplices of the killers, the gunboat would bombard the government palace until the potentates agreed to hand over the killers or execute them locally. Otherwise a joint-punitive expedition would be organised with local involvement. To the extent that the US supported by the UK, carried out such an operation in Afghanistan last year, I approve. My reasoning is that there was a very clear chain of events which anyone, regardless of which side they support, could understand. As regards Iraq however, no such clarity of purpose exists. The real justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein is that he is
Therefore Saddam’s overthrow would demoralise Islamic fundamentalists. But the US government won’t put it this way because it looks too much like an imperialist anti-Arab position. Instead an arbitrary objection to the Iraqi regime’s attempt to build nuclear weapons is invoked, creating an opportunity for the campaign to be side-tracked by the weapons’ inspectors issue. There is no mileage for the British government to get involved in this. First, never start a war which you would be unable to finish if your allies pulled out: the sad truth is that the UK would lose a war against Iraq, unless Mr Blair launched weapons of mass destruction on Iraq. Second, war against nuclear proliferation cannot be won. There is first the hypocrisy of letting Russia, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea develop nuclear technology, whilst threatening war on a dictator who is no worse than some of the leaders of all the other nuclear powers (all of them anti-American at various times too). Then there is the fact that this is sixty year old technology. We might as well try to prevent cross-bows or hard-encryption from spreading. Third, unless the British government gets serious about its own internal terrorist threat: Islamic, eco-terrorist and of course the IRA, what is the point of sending British troops to traipse around the Middle East? Finally, the equipment is so poor, the fighting capability so stretched, the politics so unrealistic, that sooner or later the British Army is going have another Majuba Hill. October 21st, 2002 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
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