In an astonishing EU ruling, Apple is being told the pay the Irish state €13 billion(!!!) in retrospective taxation that the Irish state never asked for. And the reply from Apple is very well crafted. It is clear they are not going to take this shakedown by the European Commission lying down.
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August 31st, 2016 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ross Clark, having fun at the expense of Barack Obama, whose comment earlier this year that the UK would be at the “back of the queue” in trade deals with Washington if it had the temerity to quit the European Union has, along with so many others, backfired. We are often told that President Obama was going to bring us an era of smart diplomacy, unlike that that moron Bush, etc, etc. The gap between the promise, and the reality, is wider than ever. August 31st, 2016 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
I found this quite interesting:
And my reaction was to marvel… can it be true ‘Communist’ China is the only state to finally figure out the absurdity of modern mainstream thinking regarding interest rates? Every time Bank of England Governor Mark Carney opens his mouth, I am reminded of Albert Einstein’s purported definition of insanity. Is China really the only place the August 30th, 2016 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
But the idea that the human rights we have today represent the culmination of centuries of popular struggle is nonsense. The international system of human-rights law we have today has little in common with the freedoms that were fought for by the radicals of the past. In the 17th and 18th centuries, radicals sought to assert the rights of the citizen against the power of the state. Today’s human-rights courts, by contrast, embolden unelected judges to determine the scope of our liberty. August 29th, 2016 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
And the idea that is the bedrock of all economics is the understanding that complex economic order emerges spontaneously, without central design or guidance, when private property is secure and markets are at least reasonably free – when, in short, there reigns what Adam Smith called the “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty.” Too many economists today, busy mastering mathematical technique or striving to make their work relevant for current holders of political power, lamentably never learn – much less master – these and other foundational ideas. But no amount of mastery of the idea of the likes of Nash equilibrium or of the Stolper-Samuelson theorem is worth a damn without a mastery of these older, less sexy, yet foundational ideas. August 28th, 2016 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have proof! Here she is saying exactly those words on video! Do you think that might possibly be unfair? Do you think that quotation might possibly have been taken out of context by some malicious person? It is fair by Hillary Clinton’s own standards. Here is another video of Hillary Clinton talking about Nigel Farage yesterday. At 0:25 seconds, she says that he has
What Farage actually said can be seen on this video from Sky News. He said,
Insofar as what Farage said does include the words “women”, “worth” and “less”, Clinton’s quote is accurate. Because I aspire to higher standards than Ms Clinton, here are her “white supremacy” remarks in context. The relevant part starts at 0:30 seconds. She is arguing against school vouchers and in the course of that imagines a situation where a parent comes and says, “I want to send my child to the school of the church of the white supremacy” (or possibly “supremacists”). While on the subject of words in context, take a look at this report from the Guardian that gives a reasonably full account of what Mr Farage actually said that became Mrs Clinton’s
The Guardian is disapproving but makes clear that the proposed bar was temporary and excluded emergency medical care:
I might have saved myself all this sniping and simply said that Hillary Clinton was under fire for lying again. August 26th, 2016 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
Such were the last words attributed to doomed American labor activist Joe Hill. The British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn decided to refresh his message for the new century. Rather than refraining from mourning and going into organization it refrained from organizing and went into mourning.
August 25th, 2016 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
“History,” wrote Edward Gibbon “is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” One can well believe that his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire contains many lamentable tales wherein, for instance, after a barbarian attack the citizenry would take some random woman of the same tribe and humiliate her in a misdirected act of revenge.
France, like the rest of the liberal West, gets this exactly and lethally wrong. First we forbid individuals their natural right to set the rules within their own property, to exclude and admit who they choose, to demand the burkini or to ban it. Then we set the law on people for the crime of wearing too much cloth on the public beach. A photograph is reproduced worldwide showing three armed male policemen standing over a Muslim woman and making her remove the clothes she considers necessary for modesty. Whatever your opinion of Islam and its clothing taboos, does anyone in the world believe that this makes the next jihadist attack less likely? To call it “security theatre” would be a compliment. The popular entertainment it calls to mind is that of the mob stripping and parading une femme tondue. August 24th, 2016 | 66 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Guardian, 16th August:
The Guardian, 23rd August:
Guido Fawkes’ blog, 23rd August:
August 23rd, 2016 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Chinese People’s Daily features an article called “The miracle called Communist Party of China”. With uncensored comments. August 22nd, 2016 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Whenever dismal scientists agree so passionately about the impact of a complex, one-off and multi-faceted event, alarm bells deserve to go off August 21st, 2016 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of the fun parts of growing up is the realisation that Doctor Who serials that you watched as a child are in fact analogies of contemporary political situations. Frontier in Space is about the Cold War. The Sea Devils is about Northern Ireland. The Planet of the Daleks is about Vietnam. The Mutants is about Rhodesia. Curse of Peladon is about joining the EU and Monster of Peladon is about what happens when you do. But what of Power of the Daleks? I am sure it’s about something but I just can’t figure it out. Here’s a synopsis: The colonists come across a small group of migrants who appear to have fled from some great disaster. The colonists shelter them and provide nourishment. The migrants start doing small jobs around the colony. Sadly far from being grateful to the colonists for getting them back on the their feet – or skirts as it is in this case – the migrants turn out to be wedded to an ideology that regards themselves as superior and all other forms of life as candidates for either slavery or extermination. The colonists for their part are divided between the revolutionaries and non-revolutionaries. The revolutionaries reckon that they can use the migrants to gain power. While the two factions are busy fighting amongst themselves, the migrants are busy multiplying and becoming ever stronger. Eventually, they are in a position to embark on a campaign of conquest and extermination. All six episodes of Power of the Daleks are “missing” from the BBC archives (see here for some of the details). Somehow, I suspect the BBC is not too bothered about that.  An enterprising migrant August 20th, 2016 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
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