The world needs more dicks like this

Sep 14, ’10 9:25 PM

Paul Karl Lukacs:

Why were you in China?” asked the pass­port con­trol officer, a woman with the appear­ance and dis­pos­i­tion of a prison matron.

“None of your busi­ness,” I said.

Her eyes widened in disbelief.

“Excuse me?” she asked.

“I’m not going to be inter­rog­ated as a pre-condition of re-entering my own coun­try,” I said.

This did not go over well.

Some great stuff in his fol­low up too:

Many of the com­menters took issue with my rude tone toward the CBP officers. This cri­ti­cism is pro­foundly misguided.

To the author­it­arian mind, there are only two responses to a demand: sub­mis­sion or defi­ance, and any­thing less than total sub­mis­sion is defiance.

(via Jonathan Wight)

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New Zealand just became a dictatorship

Sep 14, ’10 3:37 PM

No Right Turn has the low down:

Oh, not in prac­tice, of course. But in form. The Can­ter­bury Earth­quake Response and Recov­ery Bill, passed unan­im­ously less than an hour ago, gives Brown­lee the power to repeal or modify prac­tic­ally any law on our stat­ute book, without even hav­ing to refer to Cab­inet, let alone Parliament.

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Buy your own fucking stop signs

Sep 12, ’10 8:00 PM

Fuck the South.

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Boy racers taking Christchurch earthquake in their stride

Sep 5, ’10 8:34 PM

Photo of boy racers posing over crack in road after Christchurch earthquake

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Hey hey Tony hey, how many kids have you killed today?

Sep 4, ’10 9:51 PM

Tony Blair has penned a six-page intro­duc­tion to the Amer­ican ver­sion of his blood money mem­oirs, in which he had this to say about recent U.S. presidents:

‘Mere mor­tals are still inspired by a cer­tain awe,’ he gushes.

Bill Clin­ton is ‘an extraordin­ary mix­ture of easy­going charm and fero­cious intel­lec­tual capa­city. Prob­ably … he is the most for­mid­able politi­cian I ever met.’ Pres­id­ent Bush ‘has great intu­ition.’ And of Barack Obama, he says: ‘The per­sonal char­ac­ter is clear: this is a man with steel in every part of him.’

Stay classy Blair.

Mean­while he’s been pel­ted with eggs and shoes at a book sign­ing in Ireland:

Skir­mishes broke out between pro­test­ers and police at the first pub­lic sign­ing for Tony Blair’s mem­oirs, with shoes and eggs hurled at the former prime minister.

Pro­test­ers shouted … “Hey hey Tony hey, how many kids have you killed today?”

“It really is shame­ful that some­body can be respons­ible for the death and destruc­tion that he was respons­ible for in Iraq and Afgh­anistan and walk away without any account­ing for that and become a very wealthy man off the back of it.”

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Apple’s attention to detail

Aug 26, ’10 7:13 PM

People often falsely assume I advoc­ate and use Apple products because I think they’re trendy or because I’m some kind of gad­get freak.

The truth is our world is awash with badly designed, badly craf­ted things. Apple is one of the few havens in a sea of people and organ­isa­tions that don’t give a fuck about the details. Atten­tion to detail is why I use Apple products:

In July 2002, Apple filed a pat­ent for a “Breath­ing Status LED Indic­ator” …They described it as a “blink­ing effect of the sleep-mode indic­ator in accord­ance with the present inven­tion mim­ics the rhythm of breath­ing which is psy­cho­lo­gic­ally appealing.”

The other day, I noticed that my friend’s Dell laptop had a sim­ilar fea­ture but with a shorter fade-in-fade-out period. Its rate was around 40 blinks per second, or the aver­age res­pir­at­ory rate for adults dur­ing strenu­ous exer­cise — not very indic­at­ive of some­thing in sleep-mode.

It’s inter­est­ing how a lot of com­pan­ies try to copy Apple but never seem to get it right. This is yet another example of Apple’s obsess­ive atten­tion to detail.

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Did income inequality cause the financial crisis?

Aug 25, ’10 7:46 PM

Income Inequal­ity and Fin­an­cial Crises:

David A. Moss, an eco­nomic and policy his­tor­ian at the Har­vard Busi­ness School, has spent years study­ing income inequal­ity. While he has long believed that the grow­ing dis­par­ity between the rich and poor was harm­ful to the people on the bot­tom, he says he hadn’t seen the risks to the world of fin­ance, where many of the richest earn their great fortunes.

Now, as he stud­ies the fin­an­cial crisis of 2008, Mr. Moss says that even Wall Street may have some­thing ser­i­ous to fear from inequal­ity — namely, another crisis.

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Did weak copyright laws help Germany outpace the British Empire?

Aug 25, ’10 7:41 PM

Did weak copy­right laws help Ger­many out­pace the Brit­ish Empire?:

Höffner con­tends … that the near absence of copy­right law in eight­eenth and nine­teenth cen­tury Ger­many laid the ground­work for the “Gründerzeit” — the enorm­ous wave of eco­nomic growth that Deutsch­land exper­i­enced in the middle and later nine­teenth century.

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Toxic legacy of US assault on Fallujah ‘worse than Hiroshima’

Aug 25, ’10 7:39 PM

Amer­ica, kick­ing ass:

Dra­matic increases in infant mor­tal­ity, can­cer and leuk­aemia in the Iraqi city of Fal­lu­jah, which was bom­barded by US Mar­ines in 2004, exceed those repor­ted by sur­viv­ors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Naga­saki in 1945, accord­ing to a new study.

Dr Busby says that while he can­not identify the type of arma­ments used by the Mar­ines, the extent of genetic dam­age suffered by inhab­it­ants sug­gests the use of uranium in some form. He said: “My guess is that they used a new weapon against build­ings to break through walls and kill those inside.”

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Hero: Inbar Michelzon

Aug 22, ’10 11:45 PM

Inbar Michelzon:

I felt very alone in the army. I couldn’t talk about the things I felt were mis­placed … I didn’t have strong views but I felt uncom­fort­able about the talk, about sol­diers hit­ting Arabs and laugh­ing. I thought every­one else was nor­mal and I was the one who wasn’t. I felt an out­sider to the group experience.

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