Tag Morality

Entries 29 Total

Cheney: an evil person for evil times

Aug 14, ’09 7:19 AM

The Guard­ian: ‘Mem­oirs to reveal Dick Cheney thought Bush had gone soft on war on terror.’

Who knows what dark place we’d all be in if this man had become U.S. President.

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Remind me never to buy a Kindle

Jul 18, ’09 10:48 AM

Amazon has remotely wiped a book that people had already pur­chased for the Kindle (an ebook reader).

As John Gruber notes:

It’s one thing to stop selling them. It’s some­thing else entirely to remove them from the Kindles of those who already bought them. That this happened with1984, of all the books that have ever been writ­ten, is simply incredible.

(Point of com­par­ison: when apps get yanked from the App Store, they don’t get deleted from the iPhones of people who already bought them.)

I don’t care what reason Amazon has for this. If the book shouldn’t have been sold they should have stopped it in the first place.

This is a very dif­fer­ent world to that of the free and open inter­net; this is the world of “inter­net appli­ances,” where the com­pan­ies that sell these products have remote con­trol over them. I feel cagey enough about own­ing an iPhone, which is also an inter­net appli­ance, but there’s no way I’m going near the Kindle after this episode.

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You gotta love the Norwegians

May 20, ’09 8:28 AM

Landon Thomas Jr. in the New York Times:

Nor­way is … a major oil exporter [and] Even though prices have sharply declined, the gov­ern­ment is not par­tic­u­larly wor­ried. That is because Nor­way avoided the usual trap that plagues many energy-rich countries.

Instead of spend­ing its riches lav­ishly, it passed legis­la­tion ensur­ing that oil rev­enue went straight into its sov­er­eign wealth fund, state money that is used to make invest­ments around the world. Now its sov­er­eign wealth fund is close to being the largest in the world …

Norway’s rel­at­ive frugal­ity stands in stark con­trast to Bri­tain, which spent most of its North Sea oil rev­enue — and more — dur­ing the boom years. Gov­ern­ment spend­ing rose to 47 per­cent of G.D.P., from 42 per­cent in 2003. By com­par­ison, pub­lic spend­ing in Nor­way fell to 40 per­cent from 48 per­cent of G.D.P.

“The U.S. and the U.K. have no sense of guilt,” said Anders Aslund, an expert on Scand­inavia at the Peterson Insti­tute for Inter­na­tional Eco­nom­ics in Washington.

Eirik Wekre, an eco­nom­ist … describes Nor­we­gi­ans’ feel­ings about debt this way: “We can­not spend this money now; it would be steal­ing from future generations.”

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The evil legacy of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and New Labour

May 9, ’09 10:51 AM

Two things stand out as New Labour’s leg­acy: war of aggres­sion (the “supreme” war crime) and the worst inequal­ity of incomes since records began (another supreme crime con­sid­er­ing the dam­age it inflicts on every­body).

Tony Blair, Gor­don Brown and their con­spir­at­ors are little more than wolves in sheep’s cloth­ing and they’ve had much of the Labour Party and its sup­port­ers hood­winked for all these years.

Polly Toyn­bee — one of the hood­winked—may stamp her feet now but all she ends up doing is lay­ing bare how dys­func­tional Britain’s quasi-democracy is.

Because the UK is still stuck in the dark ages of plur­al­ity vot­ing (and New Labour broke its mani­festo pledge of elect­oral reform) con­trol of Bri­tain will simply pass from one wolf to another.

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Nobody does money like New Labour

Apr 25, ’09 4:01 PM

Mar­ina Hyde on New Labour’s rela­tion­ship with money:

It is dif­fi­cult to think of a more per­fect test­a­ment to New Labour’s intel­lec­tual shal­lows. On the eve of the most deadly ser­i­ous budget in dec­ades, Gor­don Brown posts a You­Tube video in which he announces he has sched­uled some inquiry — pre-empting debate about MPs’ ­expenses. It might as well have been cap­tioned “I can haz bathplug?”.

MPs’ expenses are a cross-party blight, of course. But when his­tor­i­ans come to assess this edi­fy­ing period for our demo­cracy, they may well remark upon what a pity it was that cer­tain mem­bers who were so fas­ti­di­ous about their per­sonal out­go­ings were so prof­lig­ate and laissez-faire with the pub­lic purse. Olympic over­spends, a couple of wars – they waved through the lot while per­us­ing the John Lewis elec­tric­als catalogue.

New Labour just looked like … well, small-time crooks is the expres­sion … And in the end, it’s the small­ness of these people that you can’t get away from.

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Bill to make companies publish difference between their best and worst paid

Apr 24, ’09 8:34 PM

This Bill was to have its second read­ing in the UK’s House of Lords today. The Bill would make pubic com­pan­ies pub­lish the dif­fer­ence between top dir­ect­ors’ pay and the aver­age wages earned by the low­est paid 10% of their workers.

While a small step it’s laud­able when you con­sider the amount of dam­age income inequal­ity does to soci­ety and its people. It will be use­ful to know which com­pan­ies are doing the most dam­age and which aren’t. And, while it’s a small step, it’s an inter­est­ing Bill in that it makes any­one who opposes it look like a right prat, espe­cially in this eco­nomic climate.

Dick Tav­erne and Miles Tem­pleton dis­cussed the Bill on BBC Radio’s Today pro­gramme this morn­ing. You can listen to it here. Good to hear a House of Lords mem­ber pro­mot­ing income equality.

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Detox quackery

Mar 16, ’09 9:07 AM

Prince Charles detox ‘quack­ery’, BBC

“Noth­ing would, of course, be easier than to demon­strate that detox products work. All one needed to do is to take a few blood samples from volun­teers and test whether this or that toxin is elim­in­ated from the body faster than nor­mal,” [Pro­fessor Ernst] said.

“But where are the stud­ies that demon­strate effic­acy? They do not exist, and the reason is simple: these products have no real detox­i­fic­a­tion effects.”

Earlier this year the char­it­able trust Sense About Sci­ence pro­duced a report seek­ing to debunk claims made about detox products.
Its research­ers reviewed a series of products, from bottled water to face scrub, and found the detox asser­tions to be over­whelm­ingly meaningless.

“It seems out­rageous for com­pan­ies to be mak­ing money selling mean­ing­less products but for the heir to the throne to be doing so, at £10 a pop, is even more inap­pro­pri­ate,” said Tom Wells, who helped carry out the ori­ginal research.

We must break link between green issues and altern­at­ive medi­cine, The Guard­ian, George Monbiot

Envir­on­ment­al­ism is, or should be, a move­ment led by sci­entific find­ings. I see the role of envir­on­ment­al­ists as being to explore and explain the implic­a­tions of what the sci­ence – whether on cli­mate change, hab­itat loss, biod­iversity, fish­er­ies, pol­lu­tion or resource deple­tion — is say­ing, and how this should trans­late into pub­lic policy.

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UK government covers up torture

Feb 15, ’09 10:05 PM

For­eign Office link to tor­ture cover-up

How do these people sleep at night?

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Must-read from George Monbiot

Feb 11, ’09 9:15 AM

hezel_blearsIf you read noth­ing else about polit­ics today read this:

George Mon­biot: Just what exactly do you stand for, Hazel Blears — except election?

For some con­text in the lead up to this piece check out No Right Turn’s links on the mat­ter.

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Free Gaza makes it into the Gaza Strip again

Oct 29, ’08 10:37 PM

Des­pite the Israeli government’s threat to for­cibly stop them the Free Gaza group made a second suc­cess­ful sail­ing to Gaza Strip today. Their first sail­ing, on 24 August, made them the first people to freely enter Gaza Strip in forty-one years.

Israel has imposed an immoral and illegal1 block­ade on Gaza Strip since June 2007, in an attempt to under­mine Hamas, who won the elec­tions in Janu­ary 2006, and as col­lect­ive pun­ish­ment of Gazans for elect­ing them.

The block­ade means Gazans have been unable to travel in or out of Gaza Strip to see fam­ily mem­bers or go to uni­ver­sit­ies they’ve been accep­ted into, or receive med­ical care. It also means an increas­ing lack of things like spare machinery parts and all the other things that go into run­ning a civ­il­ised world.

This kind of cow­ardly col­lect­ive pun­ish­ment has been car­ried out before in this part of the world and that is estim­ated to have cost the lives of a mil­lion people, half of whom were children.

Let’s hope Free Gaza is just the begin­ning of the break­ing of this siege.

Notes:
  1. Uni­ver­sal Declar­a­tion of Human Rights: Art­icle 13. Every­one has the right to leave any coun­try, includ­ing his own, and to return to his coun­try. [↩]
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