Sub-prime explained

Zimbabwe's starving millions face halving of rations as UN cash dries up

from the Guardian

Liberty groups unite to defend UK rights

Yesterday's gathering was by far the largest civil liberties convention ever held in Britain and it was held a day after a leading UN human rights investigator attacked Britain for "undermining" the rights of its citizens. In an advance copy of a report to the UN Human Rights Council, Martin Scheinin said so-called 'data mining' blurred the boundary between the targeted observation of suspects and mass surveillance.

Scheinin, the UN's independent investigator on human rights in the fight against terrorism, also questioned the use of spy software that analyses people's internet postings to create profiles of terrorists.

from the Guardian

Royal Bank of Scotland - GIVE US OUR MONEY BACK!

Workfare has arrived in Britain, smuggled in with slippery rhetoric

The intriguing thing is whether the recession could lead to a sea change in attitudes to poverty. As a million people lose their jobs through no fault of their own, will we learn again to value the concept of social security? Might people begin to see that beyond the tabloid panics about benefit scroungers, there are plenty of people tangled up in the benefits system who hit hard times through illness, disability or redundancy? With the recession, a whole new section of society will discover the bewildering, petty world of welfare, where benefit levels are set at punitively low levels, well below the government's absolute poverty measure. You can't manage on benefit levels - you are not supposed to; they are designed to force people back into work. But the big question is what happens when there isn't the work? How do you justify that kind of poverty?

from the guardian

Israeli Election - We all lost

Shareholders are called to assemblies to elect a new CEO. The shareholders of Israel settled for choosing the directors, who agree on nothing, let alone on a CEO. A business without a CEO won't get far, let alone a complex business like the State of Israel.
Any structure other than a unity government will require six different parties, each one capable of bringing that government down. Therefore, each will be infinitely able to extort money for its own causes. The government will be unstable, spendthrift and irresolute.

from Haaretz.com

Israeli Big Brother

"I'd be talking to people like you only if I'm armed with a baton."

from Haaretz.com

Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity

It takes an extraordinarily heartless conman to swindle a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Nobel Peace Prize winner out of all his charitable funds.

from timesonline

In times of crisis, never forget the value of gold

People buy gold when they are nervous about the economy, and they are right to do so because gold is a unique commodity. It has to a high degree two qualities that are seldom found together: liquidity and reality. It has strong liquidity; it can almost always be bought, sold or exchanged. There are other liquid assets, of which the US dollar is probably supreme, but they lack gold's quality of real value.

Dollars do not constitute a real asset, such as property or “real estate”. The dollar is simply a piece of paper. Gold has been a much better store of value than the dollar.

from TimesOnline

Organic Conservatism, Administrative Realism, and the Imperialist Ethos in the 'Indian Career' of John Stuart Mill

It is not only Mill but his biographers, and many scholars as well, who have been loathe to recognize that Mill's 35-year tenure at the India Office may have something to say about his life and work, his views on political liberty and subjection, the idea of representative government, British imperialism (with particular reference to India), and many of the large number of other subjects on which he penned his thoughts. The standard biography of Mill makes no mention of his time at the India Office, and Bruce Mazlish, in his James and John Stuart Mill, an intellectual psychobiography of father and son, is constrained to admit that "India represents a curious lacunae in John Stuart Mill's intellectual life". The scholarship on Mill, which is very considerable, is predicated largely on the supposition that Mill's work at the India Office was merely a diversion, and that it could not have had any bearing on his work as a well-known public philosopher and political economist; and so a recent assessment maintains the distinction between Mill's career at the India House and his "theoretical priorities in economics and social organisation". Most pointedly, Eric Stokes, in his authoritative study on utilitarianism as an aspect of Britain's policy in India, justified the omission of a serious consideration of John Stuart Mill's role in the creation of Indian policy with the argument that the younger Mill had "neither his father's opportunities nor his bent for the practical realization of the Utilitarian theories".

from Manas

Nutmeg for New York

In 1667, the Dutch traded Manhattan for the island of Run, described by David Quammen as "the world’s most inconspicuous yet eloquent symbol of changing commodity values and myopic diplomacy." Run, a British colonial foothold in the Spice Islands, provided a competitive alternative to the Dutch monopoly on nutmeg.

from Food and Economics blog

The Realist: A Talk with Gianni Amelio

Amelio has tried to do moral cinema, a difficult task anywhere. He's done it for four decades with actors like Lo Verso and Volonté (and plenty of non-professionals) who always have a way of showing, not just what they're doing, but what's being done to them. Isn't this the way that most of life is lived?

Amelio has the eye of an aesthete, but he's is not seduced by the bella figura of language or formal official behavior. Buildings that look elegant are shown to be out of scale. Beauty can easily be a veil for cunning. It can also be shattered by pain. Petty crimes can be conceived and committed in august universities or sacred chapels.

by David D'Arcy for GreenCine