It looks obvious

I guess that the best way to describe this is as a case of severe case of I.Q. challenged group:

Tunbridge Wells Borough Council in Kent was accused of taking political correctness to extremes after instructing staff to make the change.

The move came as council chiefs feared the word brainstorming might offend mentally ill people and those with epilepsy.

This recent survey by Gallup is encouraging:

Even the stupidity of state bureaucracy didn’t ruin our wonderful day in the lake. Apparently the girls could not have used their floating devices because they were not approve by the cost gourd! The fact that the allowed swimming area is completely shallow, and that the use of these cheap toys will not make their situation worse than not using them, were not good enough reason to not bother us. But the day was worm, the girls were wonderful and we had great company, so we still had great day.

We, at least some of us, also to the near by shooting range to kill some innocent clay plates (they are actually not from clay anymore - they are from some biodegradable material). It was very appropriate way to celebrate the supreme court decision from earlier this week…:)

more pictures, as always, can be found here and here.

This blog should be very interesting:

Creative Capitalism: A Conversation is a web experiment designed to produce a book - a collection of essays and commentary on capitalism, philanthropy and global development - to be edited by us and published by Simon and Schuster in the fall of 2008. The book takes as its starting point a speech Bill Gates delivered this January at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In it, he said that many of the world’s problems are too big for philanthropy–even on the scale of the Gates Foundation. And he said that the free-market capitalist system itself would have to solve them.

This is the public blog of a private website where a group of invited economists have spent the past couple of weeks criticizing and debating those claims. Over the next couple of months we’ll be posting much of that material here, in the hopes of eliciting public commentary. Some of the public commentary - the comments posted on this blog - will also be used in the book. (Comments to the effect of “capitalism is evil and Bill Gates is a fool” probably won’t be used. But we’re genuinely open to opinions of all stripes, and all of the contributors who do end up in the finished product will be paid on a per-word basis, which should work out to between one and two dollars per word.)

I read this with a lot of joy and very little surprise:

One of the most persistent themes in Noam Chomsky’s work has been class warfare. He has frequently lashed out against the “massive use of tax havens to shift the burden to the general population and away from the rich” and criticized the concentration of wealth in “trusts” by the wealthiest 1 percent. The American tax code is rigged with “complicated devices for ensuring that the poor—like 80 percent of the population—pay off the rich.”

But trusts can’t be all bad. After all, Chomsky, with a net worth north of $2,000,000, decided to create one for himself. A few years back he went to Boston’s venerable white-shoe law firm, Palmer and Dodge, and, with the help of a tax attorney specializing in “income-tax planning,” set up an irrevocable trust to protect his assets from Uncle Sam. He named his tax attorney (every socialist radical needs one!) and a daughter as trustees. To the Diane Chomsky Irrevocable Trust (named for another daughter) he has assigned the copyright of several of his books, including multiple international editions.

[...]

Over the years, Chomsky has been particularly critical of private property rights, which he considers simply a tool of the rich, of no benefit to ordinary people. “When property rights are granted to power and privilege, it can be expected to be harmful to most,” Chomsky wrote on a discussion board for the Washington Post. Intellectual property rights are equally despicable. According to Chomsky, for example, drug companies who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing drugs shouldn’t have ownership rights to patents. Intellectual property rights, he argues, “have to do with protectionism.”

Protectionism is a bad thing—especially when it relates to other people. But when it comes to Chomsky’s own published work, this advocate of open intellectual property suddenly becomes very selfish. It would not be advisable to download the audio from one of his speeches without paying the fee, warns his record company, Alternative Tentacles. (Did Andrei Sakharov have a licensing agreement with a record company?) And when it comes to his articles, you’d better keep your hands off. Go to the official Noam Chomsky website (www.chomsky.info) and the warning is clear: “Material on this site is copyrighted by Noam Chomsky and/or Noam Chomsky and his collaborators. No material on this site may be reprinted or posted on other web sites without written permission.” However, the website does give you the opportunity to “sublicense” the material if you are interested.

So I guess we can add another hypocrite to the list.

This is not new article, I got to it after reading its translation to hebrew here.

Listening to Prof. Munger’s keynote speech in the LP convention made me jealous at the citizens of North Carolina that will have the chance for truly worthwhile Governor this november. Prof. Munger should be how Libertarians want to present themselves - Accomplished, wise, coherent, and very good public speaker. I highly recommend taking the time and listening to Munger’s speech, it is time well spent.

During the 1990’s Israel experienced massive immigration. In a decade a country of approximately five million citizens accepted additional million immigrants from the former USSR. The beginning was not easy, not for the immigrants and not for those who accepted them. People had problem to find jobs, let alone appropriate one. Additionally the locals start complaining that wages are decreasing since the immigrants are willing to accept jobs for lower salaries. It didn’t take long however, practically less than a decade, and the effect of the immigration contributed to amazing change in the Israeli market - new jobs, areas that were under develop before (great example is the new flourish of classical music ) and return to the pre-immigration unemployment rate.

Whenever I hear populist like Lou Dobbs complaining about the immigrant that taking “American Jobs” I only need to remember the amazing blessing of that the immigration wave of the 1990’s had on Israel to know how wrong he is. Furthermore, I simply cannot understand the reasons for government regulations that limit immigrations of highly educated people. Apparently, I’m not the only one:

Modernity means the multiplication of dependencies on things utterly mysterious to those who are dependent — things such as semiconductors, which control the functioning of almost everything from cellphones to computers to cars. “The semiconductor,” says a wit who manufactures them, “is the OPEC of functionality, except it has no cartel power.” Semiconductors are, like oil, indispensable to the functioning of many things that are indispensable. Regarding oil imports, Americans agonize about a dependence they cannot immediately reduce. Yet their nation’s policy is the compulsory expulsion or exclusion of talents crucial to the creativity of the semiconductor industry that powers the thriving portion of our bifurcated economy. While much of the economy sputters, exports are surging, and the semiconductor industry is America’s second-largest exporter, close behind the auto industry in total exports and the civilian aircraft industry in net exports.

The semiconductor industry’s problem is entangled with a subject about which the loquacious presidential candidates are reluctant to talk — immigration, specifically that of highly educated people. Concerning whom, U.S. policy should be: A nation cannot have too many such people, so send us your PhDs yearning to be free.

Instead, U.S. policy is: As soon as U.S. institutions of higher education have awarded you a PhD, equipping you to add vast value to the economy, get out. Go home. Or to Europe, which is responding to America’s folly with “blue cards” to expedite acceptance of the immigrants America is spurning.

I guess it will be only fair to disclose the fact that I am also an Immigrant and, although not a PhD, manage software development projects.

The supreme Court affirmed today the firearm ban was unconstitutional infringement of the second amendment. The court position that the right to bear arms is an individual right, and is not limited to service in the militia, and that using of the weapon in self-defense within the home are very encouraging:

1. The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.

I still think that the government, as the monopoly on the mean of legal coercion, should be able to ban firearms, but it should be done through an amendment to the constitution not by ignoring it.

This is a month old but still worth watching. The people who cannot run a restaurant properly are now threatening to steal entire industry. It is sad to note that while china start understanding the importance of reducing government regulations and opening the market, we are in a fast lane of deterioration. Acknowledging the positive effect of liberal economy (i.e. free market) on establishing liberal-democracy we should consider also the opposite - attempts to centralize the control on the market are going hand in hand with other offenses against individual liberties.

I used to hate it when the Sergeant use to say “That that doesn’t kill you make you tougher”. It wasn’t comforting and didn’t make much sense - because if it does kill you what good is it for you?. I didn’t like it then, and I’m surely don’t like it now.