The world needs more dicks like this

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)

New Zealand just became a dictatorship

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.

Buy your own fucking stop signs

Fuck the South.

Boy racers taking Christchurch earthquake in their stride

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

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

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.”

Apple’s attention to detail

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.

Did income inequality cause the financial crisis?

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.

Did weak copyright laws help Germany outpace the British Empire?

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.

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

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.”

Hero: Inbar Michelzon

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.