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The folly of pretence | Daniel Dennett | Comment is free | The Guardian
As I explain in the chapter by that title in Breaking the Spell, "belief in belief" is a common phenomenon not restricted to religions. Economists realise that a sound currency depends on people believing that the currency is sound, and scientists recognise that the actual objectivity of scientific studies on global warming is politically impotent unless people believe in that objectivity, so economists and scientists (among others) take steps to foster and protect such beliefs that they think are benign. That's acting on belief in belief.
How many more will die in vain before we withdraw? | Seumas Milne | Comment is free | The Guardian
The attempt to exploit soldiers' deaths to win support for the shameful war in Afghanistan thankfully isn't working
Scared silly over climate change | Björn Lomborg | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
We are frightening children with exaggerations – they believe they don't have a future and that the world is going to end
The rise of British racism may be horribly close | The Spectator
As the June elections draw close, Fraser Nelson goes on the stump with the BNP and is struck by a troubling paradox: the less racist Britain is, the more popular this racist party becomes. As Westminster implodes, far Right politicians are posturing as the tribunes of working people
It’s a recession, Jim, but not as we know it | spiked
If we want to understand the current recession, playing the blame game won’t get us very far. Singling out greedy bankers, for example, tells us little about what is going on. Instead, we need to dig far deeper than that, in order to get to the root of the structural problems in the economy.
The challenges we face in the Western industrialised world today are threefold. There isn’t just a single crisis; there are three substantive crises that we must address. These three crises interact with, and on occasion aggravate, one another.
U.S. Inflation to Approach Zimbabwe Level, Faber Says (Update2) - Bloomberg.com
May 27 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. economy will enter “hyperinflation” approaching the levels in Zimbabwe because the Federal Reserve will be reluctant to raise interest rates, investor Marc Faber said.
Prices may increase at rates “close to” Zimbabwe’s gains, Faber said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Hong Kong. Zimbabwe’s inflation rate reached 231 million percent in July, the last annual rate published by the statistics office.
Next up for France: police keyloggers and Web censorship - Ars Technica
The French government, fresh from passing its controversial "three strikes" law to boot repeat file-sharers off the Internet, is now prepping its next assault on online malfeasance. A new bill would legalize government keyloggers, institute ISP censorship of child porn sites, and set up a massive citizen database called Pericles.
Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliathr
David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.
Simon Jenkins: Any fool can raise a tax. But it takes a gutless one to splurge it on this stuff
The reason why the Stratford Olympics stands proud is that its cost is gigantic and devoid of any purpose beyond chauvinist bombast. Even that could have been won at a fraction of the price. The sum of £9bn is the entire yield of the new 50% marginal tax rate between now and 2012. As they sign their cheques to the Inland Revenue, the rich can reflect that in three years' time every penny taken from them will have vanished in the fireworks. Put another way, the extra revenue from petrol, drink and cigarettes between now and 2012 will barely cover the cost of the games.
My profession needs a better voice than these morons
It makes me cringe to see them arguing so poorly for a pay rise, chanting like yobs on a football terrace to end SATs and presenting themselves like comedy grotesques. Teachers deserve a better voice than the morons in the NUT.
Home schooling - a vision of the future? - Telegraph
As Essex County Council funds home schooling, parents who teach their own children are finally being recognised as pioneers says one father who educated his daughter
Chris Paling on time spent on a ward with alcoholics | Society | The Guardian
He'd heard the debates about the cost of alcohol abuse to the NHS, but only when novelist Chris Paling found himself on a ward with long-term alcoholics did he really grasp the prognosis
BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Abortion row shakes Brazil opinion
The issue of abortion in Brazil has been making headlines not just in South America's biggest country, but around the world.
The controversy began when news emerged from Pernambuco, a poor state in the north-east of Brazil, that a nine-year-old girl who had been raped was pregnant with twins.
The Corporate Blogger Story | I'd Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson
Personal blogging is dead. It has been succeeded by microblogging and lifestreaming on one end and corporate and professional blogging on the other end. … The world has changed, personal blogging is dead and so is this blog.
A caricature of a riot
For the time being, anti-capitalist protest looks very much like a lifestyle affectation. It has an inherently unstable character, which can one day target a rich, high-profile banker and a week later take strong exception to the building of a power station. In many respects, this form of lifestyle protest represents the mirror image of the consumerism that it so despises. Anti-capitalism has become a brand with about as much content as KFC or FCUK. This is about playing at protest.
Informed Comment: Top Ten Ways the US is Turning Afghanistan into Iraq
Top Ten Ways the US is Turning Afghanistan into Iraq
John O'Connor: The police tactic of containing demonstrators in a confined area may be unpopular, but it prevented violence from escalating | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
The police tactic of containing demonstrators in a confined area may be unpopular, but it prevented violence from escalating
Pretending to be civilized in an epidemic of institutional sadism | The Smirking Chimp
But this isn't authority. It's criminal abuse -- of authority, of the child, of human dignity. How do we come to this? Stupid question, considering the accumulating record of a society where ideals of justice and humaneness mix with the basest controls in the name of discipline and order. They're close relatives, those school officials who order a 13 year old strip searched, to those who have children Tasered, or to police officers who now use that instrument of torture as a routine means of subjugation, or to prison guards who do the same with restraining chairs. When the barbaric becomes routine, it's called protocol. What should be denounced and forbidden is accepted and debated.
Geithner's 'Dirty Little Secret': The Entire Global Financial System is at Risk -- Signs of the Times News
The 'dirty little secret' which Geithner is going to great degrees to obscure from the public is very simple. There are only at most perhaps five US banks which are the source of the toxic poison that is causing such dislocation in the world financial system. What Geithner is desperately trying to protect is that reality. The heart of the present problem and the reason ordinary loan losses as in prior bank crises are not the problem, is a variety of exotic financial derivatives, most especially so-called Credit Default Swaps.
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