Get in here, niggers.

An interesting piece from the Financial Times. While the protection of fundamental liberties should be a centrepiece of any government, it does seem more and more that knee-jerk reactions are coming mainly from liberals who decry things like the Snooper's Charter and secret courts without considering the deeper justifications for them:

The novelist Martin Amis wrote that modern terrorism, with its uninhibited bloodlust, is better characterised as “horrorism”. Its object is less the paralysing fear that, say, the IRA aimed to stoke, than hideous violence itself. His neologism certainly fits the killing of Lee Rigby, a British soldier, in London last week.

The murder has not terrorised the British, who have summoned their usual restraint. When David Cameron counselled against “knee-jerk responses”, the prime minister was heeded. Although “questions will be asked” about the need for new security measures, he said, the mightiest response to these attacks is to “go about our normal lives”. Britons are doing that.

But the oldest quandary in politics – between liberty and security – cannot be finessed away like this, as he is finding out. His Conservative home secretary, Theresa May, long ago drafted a bill to give the security services more power to monitor emails, telephone calls and internet use. It failed to withstand opposition from Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister who derides the “snooper’s charter”, but it is stirring again. It has advocates in the Labour opposition, including the former home secretary Alan Johnson, who says Ms May should make it a resignation issue. The Liberal Democrat Lord Carlile, who served as the independent reviewer of anti-terror laws under three prime ministers, is another supporter.

Reviving the legislation because of last week’s attack alone would be rash. It remains unclear if the powers under discussion would have averted it. And whether we give it the name terror or horror, the dark truth is that no law can ever equip the state to eradicate such violence.

But it is not necessary to approve of the bill to sense that some of the opposition to it is overdone. And it does not take a hawk to worry that, over the past decade, the civil liberties lobby has become dogmatic and sensationalist.

Liberals who show more fervour than rigour can be found in parliament, the judiciary and pressure groups such as Liberty, an outfit that proves you can get away with any claim, however silly, if you belong to the “third sector” of campaign organisations and charities. Civil libertarians grew in voice during Tony Blair’s premiership – sometimes thwarting anti-terror laws that commanded public support, such as 90-day detention without charge – and can now claim to represent the received opinion of the British elites. It therefore matters that many of their certainties are wrong.

One example is the idea that anti-terror laws betray exactly the freedoms we are trying to defend from terrorists. This assumes that what al-Qaeda hates about Britain are the habeas corpus and online privacy. What actually defines western democracy, and riles its enemies, are its basic rights – to vote, to live freely, to worship as one chooses or not at all. Protecting these by compromising other liberties does not make the UK a despotism or reward murderers.

The notion that all freedom is indivisible is a lovely thought but there are fundamental freedoms and slightly less fundamental freedoms. Pragmatic societies weaken the latter to secure the former when under threat, as they did during the second world war. If anything, the UK does it less than comparable nations such as France, a country that nobody confuses for Iran or North Korea.

Libertarians who concede this point then bring up the “slippery slope”. Some liberties may be secondary, they say, but losing them is the first insidious step to outright authoritarianism. Erosions of freedom are never reversed, and only ever expand with time. This is ahistorical. Britain has tightened security laws at many moments without becoming an unfree country. And policy does not move in one direction: wartime restrictions were lifted when peace arrived and the Diplock courts of Northern Ireland, which comprised a single judge and no jury, were abandoned when the Troubles eased.

There are other libertarian inanities, such as the habit of invoking the ancientness of certain freedoms as though menaces to public safety have not changed in character or scope since the Magna Carta was signed. But the worst argument of all is the pretence that restrictions on freedom do not even enhance security. This is merely a way of not having to do any hard thinking. Mr Blair’s plan to introduce identity cards was, on balance, a costly and bureaucratic scheme that deservedly came to nothing. But only a churl or ideologue could suggest that it would not have improved security at all. And yet many did.

Intellectually honest liberals should argue that counterterror laws can work, but at an unconscionable cost to personal freedom. They should also acknowledge that, if western security services have made it much harder in recent years for terrorists to launch large attacks, they did not achieve this by asking nicely. Their work has been helped by new powers, many of which were controversial at the time.

Mr Cameron was impressively restrained in his response to the killing of Mr Rigby. But the real knee-jerks in the immemorial struggle between liberty and security now come from the liberal side.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown over at the Independent

Just ignore your political alliances and persuasions for the moment, and just focus on the sanctimonious, moralising tone and attitude of this completely vacuous piece of writing. Underlined bits are, what I found to be, especially egregious.

Five years. Five years of Tory hubris and callous, divisive policies. After this government is done, Thatcherism will seem compassionate and benevolent. We social democrats are left with deep grief and psychic wounds. Labour’s internecine quarrels and stagger to the right makes the desolation worse. Alan Johnson, poor boy made good, mainly by selling his poor-boy-made-good story, now says his party failed to win over “aspirational” people. Peter Benjamin Mandelson, aka Baron Mandelson, Privy Councillor, reiterates the message, as do other Blairites. Does the word describe the lone, Labour-voting mum who wants better for her kids? Or is it the pushy Tiger Mum from the middle classes who wants to maintain generational status and privileges?

The Conservatives gained 36.9 per cent of the vote. But since the turnout on 7 May was only 66 per cent, that 36.9 per cent represents just 24 per cent of the total electorate: in other words, only 24 per cent of all those who could have voted put the Tories into power. Yet the main opposition party offers not a positive alternative (as Nicola Sturgeon did), but shoddy, unprincipled, derivative politics, striving to please that 24 per cent and disregarding the millions who have either given up or who voted against a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.

George Osborne, the Chancellor, never even pretends to care about the bonds of society, or equity and mutuality. He is cold, instrumental, powerful and on course to serve his class (and those above it), wasting the hopes and lives of those who, he considers, do not matter. Iain Duncan Smith appears to enjoy humiliating and punishing citizens who depend on the state. John Whittingdale (who voted against same-sex marriage and equal pay laws), now in charge of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, seems determined to bring the BBC to its knees. Oh, and to remove cumbersome regulations on gambling. It is truly scary.

We could give up altogether, those of us who want a fair, equal, just society. Or we can become less tribal and try to listen to and support ameliorating influences within the Tory party. No I am not turning right, like many do as they get older. I am going the other way. But sulking or sniping for five years would be self-indulgent and worse than useless. Not all Tories are bastards. There are MPs in the winning party who don’t want benefits cut further, and others who believe in the European Union and are staunch defenders of the Human Rights Act.

David Davis and Dominic Grieve will fight hard against plans to replace the Human Rights Act with a more tepid British Bill of Rights; Ken Clarke will do the same to stay in the EU. I can’t say I like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, now the Justice Secretary, but that hardly matters. What does matter is that both are calling for a proper living wage and other measures to shift perceptions of the Tories as distant toffs. I know two women who run small businesses who could not bring themselves to vote Tory this time. One of them told me: “Of course, they are good for me. Who, in business, doesn’t want a free hand and low taxes? But I didn’t like the way they were attacking people on benefits. I had to ask for housing benefit when my husband died and left behind big debts. I was lucky. Many people are not. They don’t understand that.”

I suggest that David Cameron himself is aware of, and possibly slightly troubled by, the discordance between his fine postures – the Green warrior, the caring Conservative, jogging metro-man, modern husband and dad – and the brutish, iniquitous laws that his hardline cabinet is set to pass. That must be why his post-election speech seemed conciliatory and righteous: “We must bring our country together. We will govern as a party of one nation, one United Kingdom … it means giving everyone in the country a chance … no matter where you are from, you will have the opportunity to make the most of your life.” Did that come out of guilt and shame or was it slick PR? Don’t know.

But, hark, here comes one of his most trusted friends and “blue sky” gurus, Steve Hilton, who has written a book, More Human, which, in parts, is bolder, more unabashedly moral than any by Labour insiders. Hilton went off to the US in 2012 when his wife got a top job at Google. Until then, he had advocated savage cuts to the civil service and welfare budgets. Now he sees the path to enlightenment and repudiates his own previous self. I confess I was both startled and then seduced by his words and ideas. My husband, in turn, was startled by my enthusiastic yelps as I read. He remains cynical and probably thinks post-election blues have weakened my political resolve, making me susceptible to smart Tory talk.

Here is what Hilton has to say: “… our democracies are increasingly captured by a ruling class that seeks to perpetuate its privileges…. At least in America, economic, cultural and political power is dispersed. In the UK, centralisation is a gift to the vested interests. When the corporate bosses, the MPs, the journalists – and authors of books such as mine – all go to the same dinner parties and social events, all live near one another, all send their children to the same schools (from which they themselves came), an insular ruling class develops…. It is a democracy in name only, operating on behalf of a tiny elite no matter the electoral outcome. I know because I was part of it.”

He goes on to argue for decent wages, for people to be protected from ugly human impulses such as “avarice, malice and intolerance”. This globally respected thinker may just move and affect the right-wing cabinet and PM. He will, for sure, inspire younger, idealistic Tories. Labour movers and shakers, at present muddled and craven, should support fair-minded Tories and welcome Hilton’s intervention. They should learn from him and admit that real progressive thinking can sometimes come from the enemy. Will they? Some hope.

What the fuck has journalism become? Whatever your stripe I think you can agree with is a completely sanctimonious piece of writing, with absolutely nothing factual or interesting to say on the matter. It's entirely unsurprising that the writer was the same woman who called for the government to regulate the amount of air-time given to UKIP. . .

Just childish.

NY Post

A second secret email address used by Hillary Rodham Clinton while she was secretary of state was revealed Monday.

The email address, published by The New York Times, was used in exchanges between Clinton and longtime adviser Sydney Blumenthal, and is from the same private email server that was uncovered earlier this year.

“Fyi. The idea of using private security experts to arm the opposition should be considered,” Clinton wrote Blumenthal from the email address HRod17@clintonemail.com.

The two were discussing strategies to help the opposition rebels oust Moammar Khadafy in Libya as that country descended into chaos in 2011.

Clinton’s office insisted just two months ago that the only private email address used by the former secretary of state during her tenure was hdr22@clintonemail.com.

In a 2015 letter to Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), Clinton’s lawyer acknowledged that the HRod17 email address existed, but stated explicitly that it was “not an address that existed during Secretary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.”

The time stamps and content of the messages make clear that this statement was inaccurate, according to the Times report.

The first private email use was seen as a breach of protocol. Clinton’s advisers handed over 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department so they could comply with an investigation. But, according to Vice News, those emails will not be made public until 2016.

Clinton admitted to deleting thousands of others, claiming they were personal.

The revelation of a second email address raises questions about Clinton’s transparency and her relationship with Blumenthal.

The longtime Clinton confidant was not working at the State Department at the time, but advising American contractors that sought to do business in war-torn Libya.

In another email after Blumenthal suggested the new Libyan leader, Mohamed Magariaf, would “seek a discrete relationship with Israel,” Clinton wrote to her deputy Jake Sullivan, “If true, this is encouraging. Should consider passing to Israelis,” according to the Times.

Blumenthal’s coordination with Clinton raises the likelihood of additional scrutiny as she runs for the White House.

While he was not given a job in the State Department by the Obama administration, Blumenthal was employed by Bill and Hillary Clinton’s philanthropic organization, the Clinton Foundation, to help with research and “message guidance,” according to the Times.

At the same time, the Times reported, Blumenthal also was helping to craft Hillary’s 2016 presidential campaign message by working as a consultant to Media Matters and American Bridge.

>people will still vote for her

For not making this cake:

"The judge said the bakery was a business, not a religious organisation, and therefore had no legal basis to reject an order based on a customer's sexual orientation or beliefs."

Fuck's sake.

Got one stuck at the back of my throat. Couldn't even get a glass of water because I was coughing and throwing up so much.

Fucking sugar, man, it is bad for you.

The renationalisation of British railways seems to be the new public fetish; we have a short collective memory it would seem.



First and foremost, the system we have today isn't a proper market in railways. It's a system known as "franchising", where operating companies bid for use of the railways. This, essentially, creates concentrated monopolies which, when coupled with the bidding mechanism, raises prices and then the government makes everybody bear part of the cost with fare subsidies.

But what does the graph tell us? Even a bad system of privatisation is better than nationalisation. During the initial development of the railways from around 1830 to 1913, the system was properly privatised and construction was done mainly with private capital. The government took effectual control during the First World War, and then in 1923 David Lloyd George was dissatisfied with the high competition and low profits of the private railways, and so consolidated them into regional monopolies known as the Big Four.

They performed very poorly, and then following world war two the entire system was nationalised under British Rail. In 1995, the Major government introduced the current system and by 2010 it had made up the lost ground of the previous 80 years.

https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Categories

They've axed the Flood as an official forum.

Bungie is well and truly dead now; the final nail in the coffin. The Great Schism is over, and the Betrayal has been finalised.

I think I'm opposed to it. And by "oppose", I mean I would probably vote for its repeal were I given the chance. For the most part, it's a non-issue to me which I rarely think about; I don't know as much as I should about it, so I'm open to persuading.

But, it seems to me, that most of the people who support the ban on hunting foxes with dogs don't actually live in the countryside and don't deal with fox incursions. I wouldn't say I agree with the hunts with a lot of pomp, which go on for furlongs and furlongs but government regulation of the issue seems to be somewhat out of hand.

People don't seem to realise that dogs kill quickly; much faster, and much less painfully than a misplaced rifle bullet fired in the dead of night. Not to mention, shooting appears to be more indiscriminate; foxes who go after chickens are usually old and incapable of feeding themselves in safer ways and I'd imagine they're going to be the ones caught by the dogs as the younger and more agile foxes make their escape.

It seems as if urban people are just looking in, seeing fancy clothes and blood and denouncing it as aristocratic barbarism without much further thought.

y0lo

NASA

NASA scientists studying the origin of life have reproduced uracil, cytosine, and thymine, three key components of our hereditary material, in the laboratory.  They discovered that an ice sample containing pyrimidine exposed to ultraviolet radiation under space-like conditions produces these essential ingredients of life.

Pyrimidine is a ring-shaped molecule made up of carbon and nitrogen and is the central structure for uracil, cytosine, and thymine, which are all three part of a genetic code found in ribonucleic (RNA) and deoxyribonucleic acids (DNA). RNA and DNA are central to protein synthesis, but also have many other roles.

"We have demonstrated for the first time that we can make uracil, cytosine, and thymine, all three components of RNA and DNA, non-biologically in a laboratory under conditions found in space," said Michel Nuevo, research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California.  "We are showing that these laboratory processes, which simulate conditions in outer space, can make several fundamental building blocks used by living organisms on Earth."

An ice sample is deposited on a cold (approximately –440 degrees Fahrenheit) substrate in a chamber, where it is irradiated with high-energy ultraviolet (UV) photons from a hydrogen lamp.  The bombarding photons break chemical bonds in the ices and break down the ice's molecules into fragments that then recombine to form new compounds, such as uracil, cytosine, and thymine.

NASA Ames scientists have been simulating the environments found in interstellar space and the outer Solar System for years.  During this time, they have studied a class of carbon-rich compounds, called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), that have been identified in meteorites, and which are the most common carbon-rich compound observed in the universe.  PAHs typically are structures based on several six-carbon rings that resemble fused hexagons, or a piece of chicken wire.

The molecule pyrimidine is found in meteorites, although scientists still do not know its origin.  It may be similar to the carbon-rich PAHs, in that it may be produced in the final outbursts of dying, giant red stars, or formed in dense clouds of interstellar gas and dust.

"Molecules like pyrimidine have nitrogen atoms in their ring structures, which makes them somewhat wimpy.  As a less stable molecule, it is more susceptible to destruction by radiation, compared to its counterparts that don't have nitrogen," said Scott Sandford, a space science researcher at Ames.  "We wanted to test whether pyrimidine can survive in space, and whether it can undergo reactions that turn it into more complicated organic species, such as the nucleobases uracil, cytosine, and thymine."

In theory, the researchers thought that if molecules of pyrimidine could survive long enough to migrate into interstellar dust clouds, they might be able to shield themselves from destructive radiation.  Once in the clouds, most molecules freeze onto dust grains (much like moisture in your breath condenses on a cold window during winter).

These clouds are dense enough to screen out much of the surrounding outside radiation of space, thereby providing some protection to the molecules inside the clouds.

Scientists tested their hypotheses in the Ames Astrochemistry Laboratory.  During their experiment, they exposed the ice sample containing pyrimidine to ultraviolet radiation under space-like conditions, including a very high vacuum, extremely low temperatures (–440 degrees Fahrenheit), and harsh radiation.

They found that when pyrimidine is frozen in ice mostly consisting of water, but also ammonia, methanol, or methane, it is much less vulnerable to destruction by radiation than it would be if it were in the gas phase in open space.  Instead of being destroyed, many of the molecules took on new forms, such as the RNA/DNA components uracil, cytosine, and thymine, which are found in the genetic make-up of all living organisms on Earth.

"We are trying to address the mechanisms in space that are forming these molecules.  Considering what we produced in the laboratory, the chemistry of ice exposed to ultraviolet radiation may be an important linking step between what goes on in space and what fell to Earth early in its development," said Christopher Materese, another researcher at NASA Ames who has been working on these experiments.

"Nobody really understands how life got started on Earth. Our experiments suggest that once the Earth formed, many of the building blocks of life were likely present from the beginning.  Since we are simulating universal astrophysical conditions, the same is likely wherever planets are formed," says Sandford.

Additional team members who helped perform some of the research are Jason Dworkin, Jamie Elsila, and Stefanie Milam, three NASA scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The research was funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) and the NASA Origins of Solar Systems Program.  The NAI is a virtual, distributed organization of competitively-selected teams that integrates and funds astrobiology research and training programs in concert with the national and international science communities.

Meet the Feminist Initiative, a hard-left radical feminist party that now has a seat in the European Parliament and 47 municipal council seats, despite the fact that they want men to go on 'retraining' courses to change their consumption patterns.

We challenge the image of Sweden and Europe as the paradise of gender equality. This is a false image that diminishes the existing problems and stands in the way of genuine change. It is an image that is used by nationalists wanting to portray women’s oppression as a foreign problem that originates in other parts of the world. Women’s rights are thus hijacked in racist rhetoric that aims to close borders.

Look at this narcissistic bollocks! Everything has to originate with them; it all emanates from their personal plight.

Men’s violence against women is restricting women’s freedom of action in the home as well as in the public sphere. In order to eliminate violence we need a feminist analysis of all policy areas coupled with powerful measures within the EU. Women have lower salaries and are more likely to be in insecure employment. The labor market needs to be made safe and free from discrimination.

What the fuck? What the Jesus tittyfucker is "feminist analysis"? It saddens me to see how far the intelligentsia and academia have fallen. No consideration to the choices women make, just parity, parity, parity.

Men’s violence against women is Europe’s greatest security problem.

Duisenberg School of Finance

We exploit the introduction of free banking laws in US states during the 1837-1863 period to examine the impact of removing barriers to bank entry on bank competition and economic growth. As governments were not concerned about systemic stability in this period, we are able to isolate the effects of bank competition from those of state implicit guarantees.

We find that the introduction of free banking laws stimulated the creation of new banks and led to more bank failures. Our empirical evidence indicates that states adopting free banking laws experienced an increase in output per capita compared to the states that retained state bank chartering policies.

We argue that the fiercer bank competition following the introduction of free banking laws might have spurred economic growth by (1) increasing the money stock and the availability of credit; (2) leading to efficiency gains in the banking market. Our findings suggest that the more frequent bank failures occurring in a competitive banking market do not harm long-run economic growth in a system without public safety nets.

I wouldn't go insofar as to say this represents the views of Verbatim, but his somewhat socialist/communist ideas and talk of theory set me off. The following formulation is my own, but it's certainly not original to me; I have seen it espoused in various forms beforehand.

So, why is the market most efficient? As opposed to some sort of central planner (which it looks like Verbatim would prefer) which is omniscient and benevolent.

Socialists tend to argue that a thing's value is derived from its labour, and thus W=APL. Or, that real wages ought to equal the average product of labour. Or, essentially, labour divided equally. It underlies most charges of exploitation under capitalism, and can be seen creeping into criticisms of the supply-demand price mechanism.

However, even if you assume a benevolent social planner with complete information you still end up with:
W=MPL (real wages = marginal product of labour).
R=MPK (real interest rates = marginal product of capital).
MU1/MU2=MC1/MC2 (marginal utility = marginal cost).

A market in Walrasian equilibrium is simply much more efficient, even when you have a social planner involved. Even if you desired a certain level of equality in your society, the social planner would simply tinker with the capital stock and let the market reach Pareto efficiency by itself, not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Most socialists see a divergence between P and MSC (or the price and marginal social cost, implying a negative distortion), however the solution to this is not to do away with the supply-demand price mechanism. The solution is to tweak the price mechanism, probably with a tax, to make sure P=MSC.

Accordingly, you end up with MU1/MU2 = P1/P2 = MC1/MC2, which means the economy has a fully equalising utility-cost ratio as well as the so despised price mechanism.

So yeah, socialism doesn't have theory on its side.