Order and chaos

First, a good article on chaos- [P]rinting money can go only so far without creating inflation. Government statistics are about the last place one should look to find inflation, as they are designed to not show much. Over the last 35 years the government has changed the way it calculates inflation several times. According to [...]

Persuasion

Found a great quote in a piece that wgreen linked to. I couldn’t access it due to technical reasons, so here’s the original piece from Skousen’s website- This one small excerpt in a 300-page book changed my entire political philosophy. Here’s what it says: “The creation of the world — said Plato — is the [...]

Points of view

Pakistan has gone crazy after the cartoon “event” and is supposedly censoring anything and everything. Two comments on a BBC news article, one very sane, the other not so much- No. It is a wrong decision. Ban does not do anything. Are you going to ban eveything on the internet that inflames someone’s sensibilities? Stupid! [...]

Intelligence

“It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of [...]

Spunkman speaketh

In the wake of the pesticide-in-soft-drinks controversy a few years back, I heard Sunita Narain of CSE on tv, ranting about Indian regulators not having sufficient “spunk” to take action against the cola giant in question (I forget which one). So, villagers and road-side tea vendors serving tea containing contaminated water is okay, municipal corporations [...]