Freedom of Speech in Pakistan and India

I feel the media in India has become quite complacent about the tawdry condition of free speech in India. All too often journalists can be warned off a seamy story by a tiny exercise of power or influence. All too often, the crooks are able to buy the loyalty of a journalist quite easily. There isn’t enough intellectualism going around, among the men and women in the media. Eshwar Sundaresan, writing in Dawn, says that India badly needs more journalists of the character of Pakistan’s Najam Sethi. This is one of many areas where India’s success in the last 20 years is leading to an erosion of the very foundations of that success.

A personal anecdote on why the facts don’t really matter

I wrote three posts on why human reasoning has not evolved to pursue truth. Rather our minds were designed to argue a ‘side’ irrespective of the facts. In a sense, the facts don’t really matter. I came face-to-face with this phenomenon earlier today

Russian Demographics: Something Stirring in the East

By Claus Vistesen One of the reasons that I have always had a problem with Goldman Sachs’ infamous notion of the BRIC economies was not the fact that it excluded other important economies such as e.g Chile or Indonesia, but rather that Brazil, India, Russia and China never belonged in the same group. The reason

More on our innate hypocrisy and confabulatory power

How do we make moral and ethical decisions? It would be nice if our choices were grounded in nothing but the facts, in the details of the issue at hand. Alas, that’s not the way it works. Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has famously argued that our moral judgments are like

U.S. Earthquake Zones

Here is an earthquake risk map of the U.S. from the Daily Mail

Taiwanese Animation: The WikiLeaks – OpenLeaks Cat Fight

The WikiLeaks saga looks to be descending into a personality conflict between its leading founders. Take a look at this animated mock-up for what’s going on

Tiger Mothers and the History of the Chinese Examination System

By Rick Bookstaber In the Ming Dynasty, (1368 – 1644), China established an examination system as a merit-based approach for appointments to government office. There were three levels to the exams, with the final cut then coming through an examination administered by the Emperor himself. The subject matter of the exams was standardized beyond anything

Corporatism masquerading as Liberty

A corporation is a societal construct codified into legal existence to further the mutual interests of individuals. A corporation is “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of the law,” according to Chief Justice Marshall in the Dartmouth College Case of 1819. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, won by Daniel Webster when the state of New Hampshire attempted to turn the college into The University of New Hampshire, was an early American test of eminent domain-type property seizure.

A corporation has no inalienable or natural rights. Nevertheless, it is the fact that corporations represent a group of individuals that allows the ‘corporatist’ to claim that these fictional legal entities should enjoy the same natural and legal liberties and rights with which individuals are born.

Let me be bold here: The ‘Corporatist’ is a kleptocrat masquerading as a believer in liberty. He uses terminology based in liberty to construct an ideology solely as a means of furthering the gains of a specific strata of society allied with the corporatist and at the expense of other strata, by coercion if necessary.

Marshall Auerback on Market Implications of Civil Unrest in Egypt

Marshall Auerback spoke to BNN’s Squeeze Play about the civil unrest in Egypt and what the unrest means for financial markets and the global economy. The most obvious global implications regard the potential for civil unrest elsewhere and the impact of unrest on oil prices. Click on image below for the video.

Ron Paul: The American People Have Been Too Submissive

This one is on the new TSA security pat-downs which are designed to intimidate travellers into the full-body scans. This Act may be cited as the `American Traveller Dignity Act of 2010′. No law of the United States shall be construed to confer any immunity for a Federal employee or agency or any individual or

Sense and Sensitivities

by David Galland With the news cycle lasting only a few days in this Internet era, the hue and cry over the latest airport security measures will be old news to most of you. However, as I don’t have cable and don’t watch television (except, I must confess, Survivor – I just can’t help myself),

Affordable Schooling

Much ink, real and virtual, has been spilled over the last few days on the macro and micro of the election, QE2, global central banking activities, competitive currency strategies and asset-price targeting. We’re going to give that a rest for today (although we reserve the right to spill some more of that ink ourselves in