Some things have always been abundant, and some things have been abundant from time to time. Think about fresh air and water, or grazing land in the early part of white settlement of North America. Economics, however, can be defined … Continue reading
Good proof that the Bush win in 2004 was fixed in Ohio has surfaced here. Should be the biggest story on US news at the moment. I wonder if it is?
Background: Refugees as political advantage. Australia is famously a nation of immigrants, an idea which ignores a bunch of people who have been here for around 45 thousand years. The attitude of the white residents to further migration, however, has … Continue reading
Wired describes how AT&T may be attempting to conceal documents relating to a case EFF is bringing against it for funnelling it’s internet backbone into the NSA for monitoring. Not that it comes as any surprise really that NSA would … Continue reading
An attempt at a universalist approach to Human Rights, which if not culturally neutral, at least imposes an explicit moral underpinning rather than an implicit set of cultural values. Liberals are conflicted people. It’s not a bad thing, it comes … Continue reading
Anonymizer have produced a tool to allow Chinese web surfers to circumvent the national firewall, by encrypting communication and routing it through one of a number of IP addresses. Google.com should be accessible by this means. The current site from … Continue reading
There has been a major but silent shift in US nuclear policy under the current administration. This was first apparent in the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, and became clearer under the Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations. To maximise deterrence of … Continue reading
From Steal this Poem by Claire Fauset: Think about it, I can’t tell you anything new. In all these millenia of human existence there can only be a few new ideas to be thought through. So do we treat them … Continue reading
This is the third part of a series examining the morality of the behaviour of groups, corporations and governments. The first two talk about the Psychology of tribes, and Meme systems and category mistakes. This time I’m really going out … Continue reading
What follows are my notes on a recent talk by Prof. Dr. Michael Bothe, Chairman of the specialized committee for humanitarian international law, German Red Cross, Chairman, German society for international law, Em. Professor Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am … Continue reading
Reporters Without Borders (on 25 January) accused the Internet’s biggest search-engine, Google, of “hypocrisy” for its plan to launch a censured version of its product in China, meaning that the country’s Internet users would only be able to look up … Continue reading
An interview on the radio this morning with an ex bomb disposal expert from Northern Ireland, talking about the effect of the draconian anti-terror laws in that country. He said the immediate effect was that the republican population were transformed … Continue reading
Duncan Kerr gave a quite impassioned talk to the Tasmanian Council for Civil Liberties, in which he argued that fair and reasonable checks were in fact being built in to the proposed anti-terrorism legislation. I’m not at all convinced of … Continue reading
Yahoo and Google are cooperating with Chinese authorities in their clampdown on “dissidents”, and also in their censorship of the internet. For some Microsoft has treated any attempt to create a blog with the words democracy or freedom in its … Continue reading