Political philosopher H. L. Mencken said “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins.” However, politicians do not want people to get so alarmed that they panic, stop going to work, riot or try [...]
Others have said this before, but it’s worth repeating. The purpose of the healthcare system is to keep people from getting sick in the first place, and, if they do get sick, to make them better as quickly and inexpensively as possible. The purpose of business is to make money.
The law has, long ago, ceased to apply to the powerful. That is why a poor person who murders someone gets the chair, whereas a CEO who murders someone through the actions of his corporation gets a bonus (see, for example, TASER). That is also why Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have not been prosecuted despite [...]
Does this also describe your life?
If you’ve gone to grad school, particularly for a PhD, this may ring true for you. The strange thing is, grad schools seem to be constructed around the assumption that grad students are desperately inept and have no idea what they want to do for their thesis or beyond. This premise has so profoundly affected [...]
Well it looks like Canada and the United States of Torture are not the only countries with embarrassingly incompetent judges. Tomas Norström, the Swedish judge that recently found the Pirate Bay founders guilty of copyright infringement, is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association and the Swedish Association for Industrial Legal Protection. So let me [...]
In the latest display of misplaced enviro-consciousness in Canada, a university, a school board and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities are pushing for bans on bottled water. I know what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to get people to stop drinking bottled water because it’s horribly inefficient compared to tap or filtered water. The [...]
War on Bullshit Thought of the Day: Prostitution may be the oldest profession, but men made war before money was invented to pay prostitutes.