Sunday, September 15, 2002

Here's the proposition - running feature on libertarianism - starting point is Jaded by Power and more to come. Scratching the surface here but a well-spent sunday already. 7:36:07 PM

A detailed and thorough introduction to Corporatism in the US from Robert Locke is at http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=3054. I'm not sure I agree with a lot of what he says but there's meat in it and I'll have to reread to digest more. It's pretty scary, however, when I find myself in partial agreement with a writer who is a member of an organisation (CSPC) that is dedicated to ousting leftie academics from US universities. Do these people not have to work for a living? My father was an academic, a mathematician, who would have regarded himself as firmly on the conservative side of the political spectrum. But he argued long and hard for the notion that universities retain their independence from private finance which promised powerful funding for the sciences etc but had no interest in the humanities. His theory was that if you don't educate good teachers in universities then you won't have the teachers to educate future scientists and technologists. Is this conservative or pragmatic? 12:11:39 PM

Is veganism a religion? Not according to a court report from the San Francisco journal at http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/09/14/MN194306.DTL. A 33 year old vegan was offered a job in LA but the offer was withdrawn when he refused to take a mumps vaccine that had been grown from chicken embryos (yeuch). He sued on the ground of religious discrimination, but the court found that veganism isn't really profound enough. Now anybody who has attempted to be a vegan (I did it for 3 months) knows how incredibly profound it is. Your entire life becomes a search for food - take out the meat, the fish, the dairy products, the butter, the cream - nothing much left except tofu (more yeuch). As you wander around the world, starving and uncomfortable in synthetic clothes that are not derived from animal products, you go into a kind of starved self-denial mode that is about as ascetic as a hair-shirt. And that's not religion? 11:50:14 AM

Finally, an explanation of the ridiculous emails I have received over the past few years - http://www.secretservice.gov/alert419.shtml. Have you had one of them: from a Nigerian civil servant who wants to transfer millions of dollars out of the country into your bank account - offers you maybe 30 per cent of the money as a reward. According to the US secret service report, the incidence of this type of fraud is increasing, and a number of americans and foreigners have disappeared in Nigeria in recent years in pursuit of this money. What I can't understand is how anyone would get drawn into such a half-baked scheme anyway. Do they really think the world is full of disaffected civil servants with access to millions who just want to give it to away? More fools they. 11:38:24 AM

Stoning Sentences Surge in Nigeria. I pray for the day when all women of the world unite in banishing men from running the world. Lety's face it, men have been fucking up the world for a long time now. It's about oil and power and money and bullshit. [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] Adam Curry captures my feelings on this. Seems that in Northern Nigeria they have introduced a harsh brand of Islamic law that has sentenced a number of people to death by stoning. The story, that appears on yahoo via Associated Press, focuses on the plight of a 30 year old woman who will be buried up to her neck and then stoned to death. Her crime is adultery - she gave birth to a daughter more than 9 months after her husband divorced her. The sentence, you'll be glad to hear, has been postponed until 2004 so that she can wean her daughter before she dies. How humane! 11:24:51 AM