Category Archives: politics

Are they exploiting the oil, or the Brazilians?

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Brazil had an auction of the right to use up some of their non-renewable resources. The Chinese state-sponsored companies CNPC and CNOOC made a deal with French oil giant Total and Anglo-Dutch Shell to submit a combined bid – instead of bidding against each other, they submitted the lowest possible bid as a consortium.

Reading between the lines, it looks like maybe the Chinese told the other nine companies expressing interest “we can outbid you, or you can work with us” but only Shell and Total were willing to collaborate; everybody else just left, rather than annoy the Chinese by driving the price up.

Magda Chambriard, president of the Brazil’s National Petroleum Agency, said “It is hard to imagine a more successful outcome.”

Higher education’s obesity spiral

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Tim Carmody gives his take at Snarkmarket.

Heather (my only reader) says that it’s unsurprising that University costs are so high; she claims that the accommodations and meals are better than at a hotel, what with the sushi bars and high-speed Internet and whatnot. She’s definitely got a point.

But it seems to me, even so, that we could easily afford give every child in America a complete tax-funded education – all the way to PhD level if they can hack it – for less than we spend on foreign military adventuring. And since we no longer bother to raise taxes to pay for our wars, obviously printing money has not been any barrier to spending in the Obama or Bush administrations. Money’s not really the problem for these people we’ve elected; it’s just a matter of what they want to spend our wealth on – in short, they’ve willingly chosen slaughter over education.

October 14th, 947 A.H.

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On October 14th, 1066, William the Bastard of Normandy got to change his name to William the Conqueror of England.

Jan 6th – Harald Godwinsson crowned the last Saxon King of England, despite a mildly controversial succession from gormless celibate King Edward the Confessor.
Apr 24th – Halley’s Comet shines over England, four times the size of Venus and brighter than the quarter moon. Flying monk Elmer of Malmesbury writes “You’ve come, you source of tears to many mothers, you evil. I hate you! It is long since I saw you; but as I see you now you are much more terrible, for I see you brandishing the downfall of my country.”
Sep 20th – Harald Hardraada, King of Norway, invades Yorkshire with the aid of Tostig Godwinsson, the (brutal, extremely unpopular, exiled) former Earl of Northumbria. Northern Saxon Earls Edwin and Morcar are crushingly defeated at the Battle of Fulford.
Sep 25th – King Harold Godwinson force-marches his huscarls the length of England in four days, catching the invading Norwegians by surprise at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Harold offers his rebel brother Tostig restoration of his Earldom, but for Hardraada he promises only “seven feet of English ground, or as much more as he may be taller than other men”. Tostig refuses and he and Harald are both killed, along with nearly all the Viking force.
Sep 27th – William the Bastard sets sail for England with Church approval and 700 vessels stuffed full of men and horses.
Sep 28th – William arrives at Pevensey Bay, Sussex, after a rough crossing and the loss of several ships.
Oct 14th – Godwinsson arrives at Senlac Hill near the town of Hastings, having once again force-marched his men over 240 miles. William’s relatively fresh Norman-French army attacks the English force, and Harold and his brothers are killed. Harold’s mother offers to buy his body for its weight in gold; William refuses and orders it hurled into the sea.
Dec 25th – After burning down much of the south and west, William the Conqueror is crowned the first Norman King of England.

Tom Paine was a dirty commie!

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Thomas Paine, one of America’s Founding Fathers and much quoted by “patriots”, was in favor of -gasp- socialism!

Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.

In Agrarian Justice Paine systematically lays out financial means of caring for “three classes of wretchedness. The blind, the lame, and the aged poor;” in terms that would make any modern Democratic or Republican politician’s head explode. The numbers aren’t relevant today, but the sentiment – that the Earth is the shared treasury of all who live upon it, and those who enjoy private ownership of any part of it should be taxed to support those who do not – comes through loud and clear. Reminds me of Dick Gaughan’s “World Turned Upside Down” and the readable parts of Marx.

It’s weird to see today’s politicians, nearly mummified in the flags they’ve wrapped about themselves, spouting nonsense that the likes of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Thomas Paine might have lynched them for. Their claims that Social Security and taxation of assets (as opposed to taxation of income) are unamerican are such barefaced lies that you have to wonder about the sanity of these people. And if you look up what the first Americans thought about corporations, you’ll have to assume that one hundred percent of today’s congress would have fought for the British (well, for the East India Company, really) in the American Revolution.

Thanks to Kent for his gift of Common Sense, which I enjoyed, and got me started on reading Paine.

Empirical value of college education in the early 21st century

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If you can’t get a job, what good is a degree; and if you can get a job, why do you need an expensive piece of paper?

Graduates have been complaining for years now (and although the sense of entitlement displayed in their complaints is kind of off-putting, it’s not like they don’t have a point.)

In certain fields a sheepskin still has value, but it seems certain that the value of experience is always higher.

Decreasing availability of work (no sign of that trend stopping – what kind of recovery is a jobless recovery anyway?) means employers can choose to hire only the most experienced and knowledgeable workers on the market, without having to pay especially high wages.

Zero Sanity, Zero Tolerance in Michigan

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The ACLU’s got a petition to end zero tolerance in Michigan up, go sign it. I’ll wait.

By all accounts Kyle Thompson is a normal 14-year old kid who loves playing football and hanging out with his friends. His principal says he’d love to have an entire school filled with students like Kyle.

And yet, after a misunderstanding with his teacher, Kyle was led from school in handcuffs, was expelled from all state public schools for a year, and is now spending the year under house arrest.

Kyle’s teacher wanted to see a note he had written, and when she playfully tried to take it from him, he tried to hold on to it. Even though all the witness statements said that the teacher was joking around and Kyle didn’t act aggressively, the incident ended with Kyle under arrest. He’s now represented by a criminal defense attorney.

Kyle’s lucky enough to have parents willing and able to spend the big bucks it takes to pry your kid out of the zero tolerance trap. The kids from poorer families, well, they’re gettin a different education – they’re being trained to be the next generation of prison inmates and career criminals.

If you’re above the law, why bother hiding it?

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Eric the Just says “when you play a rigged game, you get sloppy“.

In a well regulated free market, organizations tend to spring up, grow, and eventually fail, just like living organisms. They aren’t maintained in power by corrupt legislators so that they can become a leeching plague upon a nation’s citizenry. Barack Obama lost my vote on July 9, 2008, at 2:47 PM, when he (along with most of the Democratic Party) reneged on the promise that “telecom immunity is off the table”; for me, the infamous TARP bailout and Obama’s continual unfunded war-mongering has been just icing on the cake.

gun safes unsafe

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I’m a strong supporter of people’s right to defend themselves, which is why I’m extra horrified by this video of children two and three years old trivially opening commercial gun safes.

The video is from Marc Weber Tobias, and was posted to Forbes today.

The most interesting part? Tobias investigated these safes due to a real-life incident in which a 3-year-old died; when his law firm contacted the makers of that safe, and Walmart, who sold the safe, the makers and vendors refused to view the evidence. Instead, they stated that the safes meet the standards of various regulatory offices, and therefore would continue to be sold.

i like ike

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“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
–President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1952

Sadly, the power of a few stupid Texas oil millionaires has grown enormously since Ike’s time.

time to play whack-a-mole

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Bev Harris of Black Box Voting has obtained and published source code to the Accenture voting software used in US elections!

Excerpt from Bev’s post:

Note that one of the service items reveals that it was tripling votes for “random” voters in the 2004 primary. Files I have obtained show that it doubled or tripled votes in the 2008 primary, and also in the May 2010 and Aug 2010 primaries in Tennessee. However: It is not random. It only appears to be random when voters are sorted by fields other than precinct/voter ID. In fact, it is doubling and tripling recorded votes in white Republican suburbs.

Everyone with any computer chops who has actually been studying this issue knows that vote-rigging has been on the rise in the US for quite some time. It’s always seemed pretty clear to me that vote fraud is not nationally co-ordinated – it’s happening all over the place, in individual districts, and both parties are involved. Basically, an eminently hackable voting machine with no audit trail is an attractive nuisance.

BBV is (so far) holding up under the load, and (so far) hasn’t been shut down by the authorities. I’m hoping for a repeat of the DeCSS whack-a-mole comedy. Download it and pass it on!

evan roth is speaking directly to the goon squad

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Evan Roth is speaking up. check him out..

A long time ago, I went to vote, and due to my habit of voting for my mom as a write-in whenever the candidates all seem incompetent to me (my mom could TOTALLY do any job in state government) I kept crashing the voting machine.

I should add a caveat here; sometimes I just haven’t had the time to study the issues and really get to know the candidates for some particular job, like trash commissioner or protonothary. If I don’t know anything about any of the candidates, I don’t vote in that race at all – in Delaware, you can leave all the spaces blank and still push the big VOTE button, it essentially counts as “none of the above”. I only vote for my mom when all the candidates are dirtbags, idiots or tools, which happens surprisingly often.

Anyway, the voting machine I was using was broken, so that any time you tried to do a write-in it crashed. The third time I crashed it, I asked to use a different machine. The voting officials had interesting reactions; the middle aged white man wrung his hands and tried his ineffectual best to help, calling various authorities and begging for guidance, which they did not provide, but the elderly black lady informed me in no uncertain terms that I would not be allowed to touch any more of “her” voting machines, because I would likely break them too, and as far as she was concerned I had voted (even though the machine dumped core every time I pressed “VOTE”). She was quite ready to physically take me on, despite being twice my age and half my size. Elderly black ladies are the backbone of the local election system, really; even though she was wrong, I have to admire the fact that she really cared. It wasn’t just a paycheck to her, and she’d decided I was a threat to Democracy.

I appealed to the people standing in line, waiting to vote. A few of them had the guts to tell me to go to hell, and get out of their way, but most looked away and refused to get involved when I pointed out that I was being deprived of my constitutional right to vote because the machine was broken. They just wanted to get on with their lives, and I was an annoying distraction.

Not with a bang, but a whimper. Rock on, Evan Roth.

obama spending binge never happened

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If you’re wondering why the much-vaunted “Stimulus” didn’t get your kid off the dole, you might want to look at this article over at marketwatch.

Reagan and Bush remain the greatest spendthrifts in US history, of course, putting the lie to Republican claims of conservatism. To be conservative, you really ought to believe in conservation and fiscal responsibility. Stephen Bloch has done an interesting analysis that shows some of the complexities of measuring this stuff.

Kucinich slams NATO

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Dennis Kucinich is one of the few US politicians I can stand to listen to. I’ve often thought that we’d be a better country today if the 2004 election had been between Kucinich and Ron Paul, instead of the two schmucks that actually ran. What if the American people were offered a choice between meaningfully different views of domestic policy, instead of two different flavors of corporate toadying wrapped in smugly self-serving patriotism? I like the fiery populism of Kucinich, even though he’s more conventionally left-wing than I’ll ever be.

Anyway, Kucinich released a statement about NATO in which he pointed out that they were created to unify Western Europe and the USA against the Soviet bloc, which no longer exists. Kucinich says NATO primarily functions today as an expensive mechanism for war-mongering, and that the war in Afghanistan is not ending, despite claims to the contrary from the Obama administration.

The Strategic Partnership Agreement between the U.S. and Afghanistan commits us to the country for at least another decade, despite public support for the war being at an all time low. The United States will pay for half of the estimated $4.1 billion per year cost of supporting 352,000 Afghan army and police officers. Afghanistan’s contribution will be $500,000. The rest will be financed by our ‘NATO partners.’