It's business that really rules us now | George Monbiot It's the reason for the collapse of democratic choice. It's the source of our growing disillusionment with politics. It's the great unmentionable. Corporate power. The political role of business corporations is generally interpreted as that of lobbyists, seeking to influence government policy. Most of the scandals that leave people in despair about politics arise from this source. On the same day we learned that a government minister, Nick Boles, has privately assured the gambling company Ladbrokes that it needn't worry about attempts by local authorities to stop the spread of betting shops. Last week we discovered that G4S's contract to run immigration removal centres will be expanded, even though all further business with the state was supposed to be frozen while allegations of fraud were investigated. The monitoring which was meant to keep these companies honest is haphazard, the penalties almost nonexistent, the rewards can be stupendous, dizzying, corrupting.
Defending rational expectations Whenever I post anything which suggests that the idea of rational expectations was a useful innovation in macroeconomics, Lars Syll writes something to the effect that I am (and therefore most mainstream macroeconomists are) “so wrong, so wrong”. Now why does this bother me? Well, to be honest, it does not bother me very much. But it does bother me a bit. If I really wanted to focus in detail on how expectations were formed and adjusted, I would look to the large mainstream literature on learning, to which Professor Syll does not refer. However most of the time macroeconomists want to focus on something else, and so we need a simpler framework. Suppose we have an equation determining wage or price inflation (a Phillips curve), where inflation expectations appear on the right hand side of the equation. Perhaps you think the alternative is equally unbelievable. This is an empirical claim. So I just do not get this obsession that some heterodox economists have with rational expectations.
Reality Denial: Steven Pinker’s Apologetics for Western-Imperial Violence | Public Intellectuals Project By Edward S. Herman and David Peterson Whereas in Pinker’s view there has been a “Long Peace” since the end of the Second World War,[7] in the real world there has been a series of long and devastating U.S. wars: in the Koreas (1950-1953), Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (1954-1975), Iraq (1990-), Afghanistan (2001- or, arguably, 1979-), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1996-), with the heavy direct involvement of U.S. clients from Rwanda (Paul Kagame) and Uganda (Yoweri Museveni) in large-scale Congo killings; and Israel’s outbursts in Lebanon (1982 and 2006), to name a few. In the same time frame as Pinker’s “New Peace,” alleged to have begun with the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, the Warsaw Pact, and of the Soviet Union itself (1989-1991), we have also witnessed the relentless expansion of the U.S. “Among respectable countries,” Pinker writes, “conquest is no longer a thinkable option. Pinker’s “Cold War” Consider this example: Vietnam and the Antiwar Protests
Helping Economists Escape Economics There are plenty of economists who will happily admit the limits of their discipline, and be nominally open to the idea of other theories. However, I find that when pushed on this, they reveal that they simply cannot think any other way than roughly along the lines of neoclassical economics. My hypothesis is that this is because economist’s approach has a ‘neat and tidy’ feel to it: people are ‘well-behaved’; markets tend to clear, people are, on average, right about things, and so forth. Therefore, economist’s immediate reaction to criticisms is “if not our approach, then what? One such example of this argument is Chris Dillow, in his discussion of rationality in economics: Now, economists have conventionally assumed rational behaviour. However, as I and others have pointed out, people do not have two mindsets: ‘rational’, where they maximise utility, and ‘irrational’, where they go completely insane and chuck cats at people. So what are the implications of this?
Surveillaince, and the construction of a terror state Capitalism is God's Will and the Cat Drank all the Milk: How our Language Creates our Biggest Problems and Why We Can't do Anything about It Felipe Del Valle (CC BY 2.0) I have a confession to make, one that a good number of readers will find disgusting and emetic and prevent many of them from reading further. Others, however, might relate or find it interesting regardless, and so those people will continue to read, which, I suppose, is good enough for me. You see, when I was a child, from a very early age, probably as early as I can remember, I felt all around me the “Presence of God.” It was and is, in all actuality, an impossible feeling to properly describe, but I suppose to some extent that I could say that I felt some sort of “immanent-transcendent energy” “flowing” through me and through my surroundings. Anyhow, as I got old enough and more finely initiated enough in our lovely American culture, the language I would eventually come to use was, “I can feel God’s presence.” As I got older, the traditional definitions and descriptions of Gahd continued to make less and less sense, based on my own experiences.
Statement by Julian Assange after One Year in Ecuadorian Embassy (on 2013-06-22) It has now been a year since I entered this embassy and sought refuge from persecution. As a result of that decision, I have been able to work in relative safety from a US espionage investigation. But today, Edward Snowden’s ordeal is just beginning. Two dangerous runaway processes have taken root in the last decade, with fatal consequences for democracy. Government secrecy has been expanding on a terrific scale. Simultaneously, human privacy has been secretly eradicated. A few weeks ago, Edward Snowden blew the whistle on an ongoing program - involving the Obama administration, the intelligence community and the internet services giants - to spy on everyone in the world. As if by clockwork, he has been charged with espionage by the Obama administration. The US government is spying on each and every one of us, but it is Edward Snowden who is charged with espionage for tipping us off. Edward Snowden is the eighth leaker to be charged with espionage under this president. Print
The FBI maintains an 83-page glossary of Internet slang. And it is hilariously, frighteningly out of touch. The FBI headquarters IRL. That’s “in real life,” to you. (Jeffrey MacMillan/Capital Business) The Internet is full of strange and bewildering neologisms, which anyone but a text-addled teen would struggle to understand. So the fine, taxpayer-funded people of the FBI — apparently not content to trawl Urban Dictionary, like the rest of us — compiled a glossary of Internet slang. An 83-page glossary. The glossary was recently made public through a Freedom of Information request by the group MuckRock, which posted the PDF, called “Twitter shorthand,” online. All of these minor gaffes could be forgiven, however, if the glossary itself was actually good. ALOTBSOL has, for the record, been tweeted fewer than 500 times in the entire eight-year history of Twitter. Among the other head-scratching terms the FBI considers can’t-miss Internet slang: AYFKMWTS (“are you f—— kidding me with this s—?”) Caitlin Dewey runs The Intersect blog, writing about digital and Internet culture.
On Liberty: Edward Snowden and top writers on what freedom means to them Shami Chakrabarti Writers have always been a big part of Liberty. Since our very beginnings, as the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) in 1934, they've played a key role in our battle to protect civil liberties and promote human rights in Britain. HG Wells, Vera Brittain, EM Forster, AA Milne, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley are just a few of the authors who supported Liberty in the early years – and perhaps it's not surprising that those who write feel a special affinity with Liberty's values and ideals. Now on Monday we will celebrate 80 years of "the fight that is never done". Orwell's observations on the power of language "to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable" is something that Liberty has witnessed throughout its history – "extraordinary rendition" wasn't sweet singing, but a chilling euphemism for kidnap and torture during the "war on terror". Shami Chakrabarti is director of Liberty. Edward Snowden Edward Snowden is a former NSA contractor and whistleblower.
“Why Neighborhoods Must Secede” by Karl Hess | Left Liberty The Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini warned us not to “imagine that you can free yourselves from unjust social conditions before winning a country of your own. Do not be seduced by the idea of improving your material conditions without first solving the national questions.” The Irish revolutionary James Connolly translated that into the independence of his people. Since all of the others are either retired from revolution or dead, Huey Newton is the most vital. To survive, the people in neighborhoods are going to have to secede. In every large city the problems of crime, of welfare, of health care, of education, have outpaced every ability of metropolitan planners and bureaucrats. Resources? In one of the poorest welfare sections of Washington, D.C., the survey showed that the residents shell out at least $40 million in taxes, licenses, etc., to all levels of government. Civility? Many who oppose decentralization are haunted by a specter of resurgent plantationism in the South.