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“Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism.” – Christopher Hitchens on Noam Chomsky. May 10th, 2011 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The film Alexander is playing on my TV at the moment – the Oliver Stone version – and despite some of the sillier aspects, the battle scenes are pretty good. Question: why do so many Hollywood films seem to insist that many of the actors talk with a sort of suppressed Irish accent? We have Alexander talking like Dave Allen. WTF? And of course recently there was Russell Crowe talking in the same manner in the Robin Hood film. I am not complaining too hard, though. For as has been noted, Russell Crowe had to deliver a speech that was pure “Tea Party”. May 9th, 2011 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
This has nothing really much to do with some sort of grand political idea or anything, but sport is part of life – however much that upsets anti-sports folk or the plain uninterested – and this man, more than most, enhanced the life of anyone who follows the maddening and beguiling game of golf. May 8th, 2011 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard – H. L. Mencken I read this article by Matthew d’Ancona and had to laugh out loud.
Hahahaha… political rivals, sure… but ‘ideological’ rivals? Oh give me a break. Tories, LibDems, Labour, oh and SNP… ie. all of Britain’s main parties are utterly committed to the regulatory welfare state and their ‘idealogical rivalry’ amounts to arguing over the length of their minister’s ties. The ‘co-pilot’ is staring straight ahead as the aircraft in on ‘finals’ for a CFIT. I particularly loved this…
It is not that the LibDems are ‘adolescent’ but rather that the entire political establishment appear to be intellectually ‘senile’ as the disconnect between objective reality and acceptable political reality grows apace (and largely unremarked by that essential priesthood of media truthsayers). It hardly matters which of these lumps are in office. All the policies being bandied about are akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and not only does *no* major political party have the will to implement a radical reduction in state expenditure and a massive reduction in the red tape that limit the scope for new market entrants in industry after industry, they all lack the will to even seriously discuss such notions. When someone suggests a budget that has the state appropriating 20% less of the national wealth overall next financial year and the same the year after that, and allowing banks to simply go bust if they screw the pooch on an epic scale, well then and only then are they are getting serious… but until that happens, let the various party loyalists blather on about Dave and Nick as if it actually matters. The Ponzi scheme has reached the ‘end game’ phase and the antics of the clowns in Westminster and their supporters are as important as a tinker’s damn. Britain and much of the western world have got the leaders they voted for and the ones they deserve. Drink wine, watch films, play games, meet friends, but only pay attention to politics for the entertainment value. It is not like politics is actually going to have much impact on where the economy is heading. May 8th, 2011 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
May 6th, 2011 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
“At the moment, I am very pessimistic about the prospects for the United States solving its fiscal problems without a crisis. Given that we have divided government, a reasonable long-term budget will require a compromise. But the two sides seem to live in alternate universes. The Republicans’ alternate universe is based on the belief that government spending ought not to exceed its historical average of about 20 percent of GDP. You can’t get future spending down to that level, however, without really major cuts in future spending on Social Security and Medicare. Much as I would like to see those programs phased out completely, neither I or nor anybody else can claim to have won an election on that platform. The Democrats’ alternate universe is based on (a) the belief that the rich are not paying their share of taxes and (b) with Obamacare passed, the rise in health care spending as a share of GDP is as good as arrested. So they see no need to change the status quo on entitlements.” I think a crisis is coming. And maybe, in a spirit of schadenfreude, we can finally prove the truth of Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine”, but not in a way she approves of. May 6th, 2011 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
In light of the recent killing of OBL and the use by the military of drones and other surveillance gizmos to track down where the villain was hiding out, it is worth noting that these pilot-less aircraft are not just in the hands of military people. You can get some pretty sophisticated ones via the regular commercial market, a fact that is both beguiling for aviation enthusiasts and modellists, and presumably, a bit of a concern for the military who want to keep the airspace all to itself. Chris Anderson, head honcho at Wired, the techno magazine, has his own website devoted to the whole business of building and using the things. Anderson, of course, is also author of The Long Tail, one of those books that I need to read again. On a related theme regarding drones, robots and high-tech in war and defence, here is another reference to a book by PW Singer, that I blogged about the other day in a piece about sea piracy. May 6th, 2011 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Philip Goff is the founder of Art Uncut, an organisation which, in conjunction with UK Uncut, stages nights of music, comedy and short talks in opposition to government spending cuts. Mr Goff is a research fellow with the Phenomenal Qualities project at the University of Hertfordshire. I think you should give his argument the consideration it deserves. Here it is.
To entice you further, there is hostile mention of Robert Nozick in the main article and, in the comments, an artistic creation of genius, Clarence the Anti-Cuts Octopus. May 5th, 2011 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
May 5th, 2011 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is magnificent:
(Via Division of Labour.) As the DoL blogger says, it reminds me of the old Milton Friedman saying that people tend to be a lot less prudent if they are spending other people’s money. On a flippant note, the point about capes reminds me of that hilarious, Ayn Rand-style character (the designer with the bobbed black hair and East European accent) from The Incredibles, who insisted that for any true superhero, capes were a no-no. They get trapped into the air intakes of jet engines, etc. It pays to be careful. May 4th, 2011 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Like two drowning sailors hanging onto one another in order to postpone the inevitable, overstretched banks thus accumulate the debt of insolvent governments to keep the façade of solvency up. May 4th, 2011 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was naturally delighted to hear the news that Osama Bin Laden came to a sticky end at the hands of US SpecOps and the importance of that far outweighed my wish that someone other than the dismal Barack Obama was in the White House to take the credit. But the extraordinarily inept manner in which the post-hit PR has been handled is just adding to the joy of the moment for me… the weird and unseemly hasty ‘burial at sea’, almost as if they are actively trying to incite the legions of conspiracy theories out there, followed by contradictory accounts of what happened and what the mission’s brief actually was… …he was killed because he resisted arrest… no, he was killed because that was the mission objective… he was armed… no he wasn’t… he used his wife as a human shield… no he didn’t… well yes but it wasn’t his wife… or not… this son was killed… no, some other son was killed… and so on and so on… We could be looking at the best possible outcome here: Osama dead and Obama and his team snatching PR defeat from the jaws of victory. This just keeps getting better and better! May 3rd, 2011 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
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