Romney and Obama are like night and day, isn't it Obvious?

Channel4truth2012 has put up a great video on YouTube comparing side by side the words and political stances of Republican and Democratic presidential candidates Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama. Includes topics like universal health care, gun rights, energy, NDAA, the Patriot Act, Iran, sanctions, economic stimulus. bank and auto bailouts, civil rights, TARP, the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, campaign donations, and more. 

Dear American readers, please watch before voting, there is still a choice. Do not WASTE your vote.

Meet Gary Johnson!

28-minute Interview with Robert Prechter

Robert Prechter joins Talk Radio One host Steven Spierer to discuss the effect of social mood on economics, the way the free market would have worked if the governments had not created a controlled economy in the US and deflation (of course).

The 28-minute interview is available on Elliott Wave.

Whole Foods CEO on the Moral Case for Capitalism

Great interview of John Mackey by Reason.TV about capitalism, and the left-wing socialist climate in the US (and the rest of the world). The 6 min video footage is available on YouTube.

 

Honduras — Soon a Real Free and Libertarian Market?

Back in December, I wrote about Honduras where two start-ups are allowed to try out libertarian ideas in the country’s new special regions.

Today, the NYTimes is catching up, and has a nice report giving a bit of background and explaining this amazing thing that is happening in Honduras. Here are the most important parts — I don't agree with Romer's ideas, they are not libertarian, and not my cup of tea. What I deeply respect, is his idea of trying these new special cities, and his ability to convince the Honduras government to implement them.

How could Honduras, the original banana republic, reform a political and economic system that kept nearly two-thirds of its people in grim poverty?      
[...]
Honduras’s economy is dominated by a handful of wealthy families; two American conglomerates, Dole and Chiquita, have controlled its agricultural exports; and desperately poor farmers barely eke out subsistence wages. Then a friend showed him a video lecture of the economist Paul Romer, which got Sánchez thinking of a ridiculously big idea: What if Honduras just started all over again?
[...]
Romer, who is expected to be chairman, is hoping to build a city that can accommodate 10 million people, which is 2 million more than the current population of Honduras. His charter city will have extremely open immigration policies to attract foreign workers from all over. It will also tactically dissuade some from coming. Singapore, Romer said, provides a good (if sometimes overzealous) model. Its strict penalties for things like not flushing a public toilet may make for late-night jokes, but they signal to potential immigrants that it is a great place if you want to work hard and play by the rules.
There will be many rules in Romer’s charter city too. Even though he expects most initial opportunities will be fairly low-paying basic industrial jobs, the local government will mandate policies that ensure retirement savings, health care and education. According to Romer’s plan, the immigrants who arrive will not get rich, but their children will eventually be ready to climb the economic-development ladder.
[...]
It’s easy to criticize experimenting with the livelihoods of the poor, but having spent time in the chaotic slums of Honduras, Haiti, Jordan and Indonesia, I’ve found that the poor are already conducting daily experiments in how to make life better outside the formal economy. By and large, it isn’t working. We have to try some new things, probably many new things. And we have to accept that some of them won’t work.

There's an official "propaganda" uploaded by the Gov of Honduras on YouTube explaining how it all works. It's not as great as I hoped, but it's quite an evolution already:

Honduras shrugged — Two start-ups to try out libertarian ideas in the country’s new special regions

Interesting report on this week's Economist. Unfortunately, and as usually, it's an extremely shallow one, but it's a good starting point for me to dig deeper as soon as I get some time.

Free cities — Honduras shrugged 

Two start-ups want to try out libertarian ideas in the country’s new special development regions 

Dec 10th 2011 

DISGUSTED by an increasingly invasive state, America’s most capable entrepreneurs retreat to Galt’s Gulch, a libertarian commune. That was the theme of Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, “Atlas Shrugged”, a sacred text for libertarians ever since it was published in 1957. Actually creating such an enclave has been the dream of many fans of small government (or of none at all). [...] 

Now, for the first time, libertarians have a real chance to implement their ideas. In addition to a big special development region, the Honduran government intends to approve two smaller zones. And two libertarian-leaning start-ups have already signed a preliminary memorandum of understanding with the Honduran government to develop them.

So what? Next destination, Honduras?

China starts keyword based censorship of phone conversations — Google spends $1 million to develop tools to detect Internet throttling, government censorship

You thought that the tension between China and Google couldn't be higher? Think again. Google is still fighting for freedom and transparency, while China is doing the exact opposite:

(Ars Technica) — Google has awarded $1 million to Georgia Tech researchers so that they can develop simple tools to detect Internet throttling, government censorship, and other "transparency" problems.

That money will cover two years of work at Georgia Tech, with an additional $500,000 extension possible if Google wants an extra year of development. At the end of the project, the Georgia Tech team hopes to provide "a suite of Web-based, Internet-scale measurement tools that any user around the world could access for free. With the help of these tools, users could determine whether their ISPs are providing the kind of service customers are paying for, and whether the data they send and receive over their network connections is being tampered with by governments and/or ISPs."

(NYT) — If anyone wonders whether the Chinese government has tightened its grip on electronic communications since protests began engulfing the Arab world, Shakespeare may prove instructive.

A Beijing entrepreneur, discussing restaurant choices with his fiancée over their cellphones last week, quoted Queen Gertrude’s response to Hamlet: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” The second time he said the word “protest,” her phone cut off.

He spoke English, but another caller, repeating the same phrase on Monday in Chinese over a different phone, was also cut off in midsentence.

A host of evidence over the past several weeks shows that Chinese authorities are more determined than ever to police cellphone calls, electronic messages, e-mail and access to the Internet in order to smother any hint of antigovernment sentiment. In the cat-and-mouse game that characterizes electronic communications here, analysts suggest that the cat is getting bigger, especially since revolts began to ricochet through the Middle East and North Africa, and homegrown efforts to organize protests in China began to circulate on the Internet about a month ago.

There's a lot more in the NYT report.

WikiLeaks nominated for 2011 Nobel peace prize

Another encouraging news today is that WikiLeaks might finally gets the glory it deserves, and might be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Compare the role in defending our liberties and freedoms and fighting against governments that WikeLeaks is playing, and the previous Nobel Peace laureate: Obama, a warmongering, ignorant, and incompetent US president.

The New Age reports:

Whistle-blower site WikiLeaks has been nominated for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize by a Norwegian politician who cited its role in freedom of speech, news agency NTB reported Wednesday.

"WikiLeaks is one of this century's most important contributors to freedom of speech and transparency," parliamentarian Snorre Valen said in his nomination.

Valen cited WikiLeaks role in disclosing the assests of Tunisia's former president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and his nearest family, contributing to the protests that forced them into exile.

The member of parliament for the Socialist Left Party, part of Norway's ruling red-green coalition, also noted WikiLeaks publication of documents relating to corruption by authorities, governments and corporations as well as "illegal surveillance, war crimes and torture committed by a number of states."

The five-member Nobel Committee advises those making nominations not to reveal their proposals in advance.

However, there are no formal rules against doing so, allowing for plenty of speculation before the winner is announced, normally in early October.

The 2010 prize was awarded to imprisoned Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo, who was unable to collect his award.

Parliamentarians, academics, former peace prize laureates as well as current and former members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee are among those who have the right to nominate candidates for the coveted award.

The Peace Prize is one of several prizes endowed by the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite Alfred Nobel

Patriot Act up for renewal and no one notices

Just quoting the report published on the Examiner:

On January 5th, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) introduced a bill to add yet another year to the soon to be expiring Patriot Act. This would extend it until February of 2012, and passage is likely to happen with little debate or contention. If passed, this would be the second time the Obama administration has punted on campaign promises to roll back excessive surveillance measures allowed under the act passed in the wake of 9/11.

When the Patriot Act was first signed in 2001, it was billed as a temporary measure required because of the extreme circumstances created by the terrorist threat. The fear from its opponents was that executive power, once given, is seldom relinquished. In retrospect, that fear appears well founded. Not only has Obama not given the power back, but he has continued to abuse it to spy on citizens without due process.

In 2007, candidate Obama said during his Presidency there would be "no more National Security Letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime" because "that is not who we are, and it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists." The hope that he'll make good on that statement is seeming pretty audacious.

Continue reading on Examiner.com: Patriot Act up for renewal and no one notices

EU Asks Whether Google Alters Search Results

A friend of mine sent me a link to The Figaro article mentioned in this Bloomberg report:

European Union regulators asked Google Inc. rivals and customers whether the company’s search engine alters search results, Le Figaro reported, citing a questionnaire regulators distributed as part of a probe.

The European Commission also asked companies whether Google signaled that increased advertising spending might improve a search ranking and asked them to comment on increases in advertising rates over the last six years, Le Figaro said in a report yesterday.

I would like to comment here because I will probably say the opposite of what most people expect to hear.

Setting aside the fact that this is an evil act or not, given Google's commitment to "do no Evil", I would like to point out how stupid the EU behaviour is, and also what a free world could mean, if such a thing existed:

First, let's talk about private property:
As far as I know, Google.com belongs to Google Inc. So when you browse to their domain, you are on their private property. Moreover, their algorithm that searches for results also belongs to them, it's their intellectual property. They are allowed to do whatever they like with it. This would also mean that they are allowed to not show the competitors results, if they do not want to do so.

It wouldn't be fair play, it wouldn't be the best possible result set, but it doesn't matter here.

Then again, if we speak about freedom:
When you send a search to Google.com you do so willingly. Nobody forces you to do it, and you are free to just walk out to somebody else property, or web site for what does matter here. So Google could be free to show you results that you do not like, and if they do so, you are free to walk out.

The same way as if a restaurant serves food that doesn't satisfy their customers, customers would walk to competition and the restaurant would either have to change the chef or fill for bankruptcy, Google will have to change their search algorithm or lose customers to competition.

As long as the Google customers are happy with the results, why would we need the EU? Easy, the competitors are probably lobbying (read: paying) the EU commission for that. So in a statist economy, when you can't compete product wise, you will compete in courts, using the corrupt government as your ally.

Questions:

1. Supposing I create a search engine, and my algorithm is poor, so it doesn't show good results at all (any one remembers Lycos? AltaVista? Yahoo Search???) would the EU come after me and ask me why I'm not showing such and such result?
2. Google is now doing such a great job at finding the relevant information that when something doesn't show up, you think it's purposefully. That's an amazing achievement. Nonetheless, could it simply be that their algorithm is not 100% accurate?

Bloomberg Sues ECB to Force Disclosure of Greece Swaps

After having sued the Fed a couple of years ago in order to obtain the details about the bailout money and the trillions of dollars the Fed printed, Bloomberg is now suing the ECB to force them to disclose the swaps arrangements relative to Greece.

Bloomberg is one of the rare freedom fighters, along with WikiLeaks. What is interesting with this case though, is that it shows how a for-profit corporation in a capitalistic system, end up actually fighting against the government (and the government entities, such as the Fed and the ECB) for business reasons (in order to sell the information regarding the Greece Swaps) ; and by doing so, Bloomberg becomes a freedom fighter. So in pure capitalistic system, corporations, driven by competition, will fight for their freedom, the freedom of information and the freedom of their (potential) customers.

For the sake of clarification, remember that the ECB is the central planner for the interest rates across all the Eurozone, and having a non-free, monopolistic fiat currency. It is born not from a capitalist but socialist system.

Dec. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Bloomberg News filed a lawsuit against the European Central Bank, seeking to make it disclose documents showing how Greece used derivatives to hide its fiscal deficit and helped trigger the region’s sovereign debt crisis.

The lawsuit asks the European Union’s General Court in Luxembourg to overturn a decision by the ECB not to disclose two internal documents drafted for the central bank’s six-member executive board in Frankfurt this year. The notes show how Greece used swaps to hide its borrowings, according to a March 3 cover page attached to the papers obtained by Bloomberg News.

ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet withheld the documents after the European Union and International Monetary Fund led a 110 billion-euro bailout ($144 billion) for Greece. The dossier should be disclosed to stop governments from using the derivatives in that way again and show how EU authorities acted on information they had on the swaps, according to the suit, filed by Bloomberg Finance LP, the parent of Bloomberg News.

The EU is dependent “on member states taking an open and transparent approach in relation to their levels of debt,” Bloomberg said in its suit. “If Greece has failed to take such an approach in the past, there is a compelling public interest in relevant information being disclosed.”

An ECB spokeswoman declined to comment on the lawsuit.

The ECB case follows a 2008 lawsuit by Bloomberg LP seeking disclosure of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s records on emergency lending under the Freedom of Information Act. A group of banks is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court over lower-court decisions ordering the Fed to identify loan recipients.

The Greek government didn’t originally disclose the swaps, designed to help it comply with the deficit and debt rules it agreed to meet when it joined the euro in 2001.

Eurostat, the EU’s statistic’s agency, said last month the swaps added 5.3 billion euros to the country’s debt, without giving details. Repeated revisions of Greece’s national figures, beginning last year, spurred a surge in borrowing costs that pushed the country to the brink of default and triggered a region-wide debt crisis.

“The information contained in the two documents would undermine the public confidence as regards the effective conduct of economic policy,” Trichet wrote in an Oct. 21 letter, turning down Bloomberg’s request for the documents. Disclosure “bears, in the current very vulnerable market environment, the substantial and acute risk of adding to volatility and instability.”

ECB officials first spotted “a swap operation in unusual terms,” in April 2009, seven months before the Greek crisis erupted, according to the March 3 cover note.

“It is wholly unclear what (if anything) the ECB did at that time to investigate further,” Bloomberg’s suit says.

Greece entered into a “large” number of private, off- market swaps from 2001 through 2007, Luxembourg-based Eurostat said in a report on Nov. 15. The agreements, which led to higher debt, were analyzed “in detail,” Eurostat said. A follow-up report on Greek data including swaps is due in weeks, a spokesman said at the time.

“Disclosure would help prevent these situations repeating themselves,” said Michael Spence, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001 for his research on asymmetric information in markets. “It’s a tough call. Not everything can be disclosed, but markets need to know.”

Ron Paul Defends WikiLeaks On House Floor

I am glad to see that Ron Paul has taken WikiLeaks' side and is defending it on the house floor. Ron Paul's talk is available on YouTube:


The HuffingtonPost mentioned this on the following report:

In the wake of the recent WikiLeaks document dump, Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas), the self-styled libertarian crusader who's spent the past half-decade building up a massive grassroots following, has emerged as a principal voice in support of the transparency that WikiLeaks has provided. In a speech on the House floor yesterday, Paul held forth at length on the controversy.

Others may disagree, but I don't read Paul's remarks as a defense of Julian Assange specifically -- Assange is only mentioned three times during the five minute oration. This was perhaps wise, given the fact that Assange is facing charges unrelated to WikiLeaks abroad, and has become a fractious enough figure within the WikiLeaks organization itself that internecine battles have broken out, with one faction preparing to open their own site, "OpenLeaks." But it's certainly a defense of WikiLeaks in principle, and whistleblowers in general -- Paul spends more time discussing Daniel Ellsberg than he does Assange.

On balance, Paul's speech primarily touches on themes that he's advanced throughout his career: his antipathy to neo-conservative empire-building, the lies that precipitated the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the primacy of individual liberty, and the value of dissent. WikiLeaks simply gives Paul's convictions some urgency.

And a transcript is also availble:
WikiLeaks release of classified information has generated a lot of attention in the past few weeks. The hysterical reaction makes one wonder if this is not an example of killing the messenger for the bad news. Despite what is claimed, the information that has been so far released, though classified, has caused no known harm to any individual, but it has caused plenty of embarrassment to our government. Losing our grip on our empire is not welcomed by the neoconservatives in charge.
There is now more information confirming that Saudi Arabia is a principal supporter and financier of al Qaeda, and that this should set off alarm bells since we guarantee its Sharia-run government. This emphasizes even more the fact that no al Qaeda existed in Iraq before 9/11, and yet we went to war against Iraq based on the lie that it did. It has been charged by experts that Julian Assange, the internet publisher of this information, has committed a heinous crime, deserving prosecution for treason and execution, or even assassination.
But should we not at least ask how the U.S. government should prosecute an Australian citizen for treason for publishing U.S. secret information that he did not steal? And if WikiLeaks is to be prosecuted for publishing classified documents, why shouldn't the Washington Post, the New York Times, and others also published these documents be prosecuted? Actually, some in Congress are threatening this as well.
The New York Times, as a results of a Supreme Court ruling, was not found guilty in 1971 for the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg never served a day in prison for his role in obtaining these secret documents. The Pentagon Papers were also inserted into the Congressional record by Senator Mike Gravel, with no charges of any kind being made of breaking any national security laws. Yet the release of this classified information was considered illegal by many, and those who lied us into the Vietnam war, and argued for its prolongation were outraged. But the truth gained from the Pentagon Papers revealed that lies were told about the Gulf of Tonkin attack. which perpetuated a sad and tragic episode in our history.
Just as with the Vietnam War, the Iraq War was based on lies. We were never threatened by weapons of mass destruction or al Qaeda in Iraq, though the attack on Iraq was based on this false information. Any information which challenges the official propaganda for the war in the Middle East is unwelcome by the administration and the supporters of these unnecessary wars. Few are interested in understanding the relationship of our foreign policy and our presence in the Middle East to the threat of terrorism. Revealing the real nature and goal of our presence in so many Muslim countries is a threat to our empire, and any revelation of this truth is highly resented by those in charge.
Questions to consider:
Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?
Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?
Number 3: Why is the hostility mostly directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?
Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?
Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?
Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?
Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?
Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?
Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?
Thomas Jefferson had it right when he advised 'Let the eyes of vigilance never be closed.' I yield back the balance of my time.

We're once again living historical times — Expressing my support to WikeLeaks

Once again, we are living historical times. Thanks the Internet and WikiLeaks, we can know learn a lot about the "diplomacy" that the US has been conducting during the past many years and also understand what kind of hidden agenda our governments have been pursuing. I believe it's the first time in modern history that confidential documents such as these are released to the public — who have the right to know what their country has been doing with their life, tax money, and future:

On Sunday 28th Novembre 2010, Wikileaks began publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. The documents will give people around the world an unprecedented insight into the US Government's foreign activities.

The cables, which date from 1966 to the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret.

To access the Cable gate, go to http://cablegate.wikileaks.org

Please donate to WikiLeaks to defend this information.

Of course, our leaders will do their best to discredit WikiLeaks, and will try to create false claims against both the documents and the people who work against them at WikiLeaks. But when you manage to make the US, Europe, China, Iran and Israel agree on one thing or idea, it really means what it means: that the opposite must be true and must be sought.

These guys couldn't even agree when it came to saving the planet of the pollution and the false climate change claims. Now, they can agree that WikiLeaks is dangerous? Give me a break. The individuals in the governments are just worried about their future as politicians and as traitors to their nations.

Obviously, they will do their best to put an end to these leaks and to stop Julian Assange. Isn't the correlation between the leaks from Monday, and this claim of rape a bit too obvious for anyone?

Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Interpol, the world’s biggest international police organization, added WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to its wanted list after a request from Sweden where he’s sought on charges of rape and sexual molestation.

Assange, 39, originally from Townsville, Australia, is being sought under the Lyon-based organization’s Red Notice, authorizing local police forces in member states to arrest him and hold him for extradition, according to Interpol’s website.

The request for his arrest comes as WikiLeaks continues to release diplomatic cables, including some secret correspondence, on its website. The planned release of 251,287 documents, of which 291 are currently available, has been condemned by several world leaders, with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calling it “an attack on the international community.”

Isn't it ironic that Hillary Clinton is mentioned in this very report, while Bill Clinton was probably staged with the same kind of attacks with Monica Lewinsky... It's not an attack on the international community. It's an attack against our corrupt leaders, and their hidden agendas, by exposing their lies and revealing the truth.

Assange is accused of rape and sexual molestation after two women complained in August when he was in Sweden giving lectures on WikiLeaks’ publishing of classified U.S. military documents related to the war in Afghanistan. He has denied the charges.

His lawyer in the U.K., Mark Stephens, has said that Assange had consensual sex with the women. Stephens didn’t immediately respond to an e-mailed request for comment today.

Australian Federal Police, which works with Interpol, referred requests for comment to the country’s attorney general. The attorney general’s office asked that queries be e-mailed and hasn’t responded to the e-mail. Interpol officials also didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail for comment.

Assange has appealed the Nov. 24 decision of a Swedish court that upheld an arrest warrant on rape charges, Expressen newspaper reported yesterday, citing court officials.

WikiLeaks.org receives confidential material that governments and businesses want to keep secret and posts the information on the Internet “so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth,” the organization says on its website.

Assange’s application for a Swedish residence and work permit, which would have allowed him to establish WikiLeaks as a Swedish publication protected by the constitution, was turned down by the Migration Board.

Interestingly, every time WikiLeaks comes with a major leak of information, a clame of rape by Julian Assange is also filled. How pathetic are our corrupt leaders, really?

I just can't wait until their next major publication — which seems to be Bank of America secret information — and hopefully find out what really happened when Ken Lewis acquired Merrill Lynch:

Nov. 30 (Bloomberg) -- WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who told Forbes magazine that he’ll release documents from a U.S. bank next year, said in 2009 that his group had a hard drive from a Bank of America Corp. executive.

“We are sitting on 5GB from Bank of America, one of the executive’s hard drives,” Assange said in the Oct. 9, 2009, interview with Computerworld magazine, referring to five gigabytes of data. “To have impact it needs to be easy for people to dive in and search and get something out of it.”

WikiLeaks plans to release “either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it,” Assange said in a Nov. 11 interview with Forbes, declining to identify the bank from which the documents came. He said the release would occur early next year and would include “some flagrant violations, unethical practices.”

Please, support and donate to WikiLeaks by following this link.

[Update: Here's a link to Mish's take on WikiLeaks]

Iran's brain drain

I came across Wikipedia's entry about Iran's brain drain, and I thought I would share it with you, dear reader:

According to the International Monetary Fund, the Islamic Republic of Iran ranks first in "brain drain" among 61 "developing" and "less developed" countries it measured. More than 150,000 Iranians leave the Islamic Republic every year, and an estimated 25% of all Iranians with post-secondary education now live abroad in "developed" countries of the OECD.
[...]
According to at least one source, Iran had no significant emigration or brain drain to wealthier countries before the Islamic Revolution.
[...]
Such trends are thought to be accelerating what many see as Iran's largest exodus of talented faculty, students, and researches to western Europe, Canada, and the United States. The lengthy list of Iranian chairs and directors of academia in these countries is arguably a sound index of this reality. Iran's Brain Drain has become a focus of the media both domestically and internationally
[...]
A report by The Washington Prism in Jan 2006 claims that the International Monetary Fund considers Iran ranked highest in Brain Drain among "developing" countries, with an estimated 150,000 people exiting Iran per year.[16] IRNA reports the figure to be 200,000. And yet in spite of this situation and Iran's technological and industrial isolation due to political conditions in the past 25 years, Iran continues to maintain high levels of education and research in few major universities, although mostly at undergraduate level. Iranian students continue to win technical tournaments in Robotics, Computer Science, and other fields of engineering and science every year (example), and Iranians continue to increase the number of their publications in technical journals despite their highly limited facilities and resources.
[...]

This is obviously a sad state of affairs for most iranians (those who are not part of this fascist and religious regime). But the flip side is that all these educated people instead of contributing to destroying their country by working for the government, create wealth abroad, are very likely to send some part of their income to their families in Iran.

More importantly, there's a massive number of educated, talented, wealthy iranians abroad, who are probably hoping for the regime to collapse — one catalyst might be the collapse of the price of oil — and would then be ready to go back home, which would be a great opportunity for their country to resurrect. Of course, the sooner this collapse occurs, the better, as once they have settled and started to raise a family, the probabilities for them to migrate one more time becomes a lot smaller.

Socialist France to Subsidize Music

PC Magazine reports what could be real funny joke if it weren't the sad reality back in socialist France were everything is special privileges and taxation:

In March 2010, France proposed a scheme whereby Internet users between the ages of 12 and 25 would be able to purchase a €50 gift card (worth about $70) for €25 (about $35), which could be used to purchase legal music downloads. The French government would pick up the tab for the difference.
The program would last for two years and every Internet user could purchase one card per year. France estimated that it would sell about 1 million cards per year. As part of the deal, Web sites that accept these cards must contribute to the cost by offering reduced prices on their music downloads, an extension on music subscription services, or a contribution towards the cost of advertising the program.
In addition, the program also caps the amount each Web site can earn from the initiative at €5 million ($7 million) so that smaller and niche operators can take advantage of it. "As a result, the scheme will contribute to preserving pluralism and cultural diversity in the online music industry," the commission said.
The European Commission approved the plan on Tuesday, saying it was well-designed to achieve its objective. EU rules allow a country's government to provide financial aid if the project does not unduly distort competition.

So basically it means that France is taxing some people (hard worker) to give free money to people who don't pay taxes and do not work (youngster between 12 and 25 years) so that they can buy music for half the price.

At the same time, they decide where that money can be spent, and hence create an unfair market for the web sites which sell online music.

So as usual with government intervention, we could wonder:

• Why the 12-25 year olds?
• Where does the number come from?
• Why not online movies as well?
• Why not online sausages? or any other products?

Sad sad sad...

Enemy Public Number One: The Government

Enemy Public Number One: The Government, The People and The Militia Today is a great 25min video published by LibertyInOurTime on YouTube.

You will understand why founding fathers wanted people to be armed, and learn more about the unfortunate US Constitution's commerce clause that led all the abuses of the 20th century.

The video is a bit old (1994) but history hasn't changed, right?

The commerce clause is discussed a lot by Tom E. Woods, unfortunately, I do not have links at hand, though jumping on the Mises.org web site would probably be a good start if you're interested to learn more about it.

Tom Woods at the Mises "The Delusion of Good Government" Circle

Tom Woods' presentation Our Wise Overlords Are Just Here to Serve Us is now available on YouTube.

Any libertarian should watch this presentation and spread it as much as they can.

Note to feed subscribers: the embedded video doesn't show in the feed, so you can either come on the blog, or follow the YouTube link above.

What you should know about passports

Many months ago, I spent some time digging about the issues of passports and visas, which are just a way for the government to enslave their people. Unfortunately, having a passport, requiring it for travel, and worse, requiring a visa, have now become the norm, and nobody wonders why they have to produce such a paper to be allowed to move around... Worse, people support the idea of passports now. Government is the shepherd, and people are the lambs...

I would like to take the opportunity to quote Alexis de Toqueville before going any further:

"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."

Alexis de Tocqueville, Book 1, Chapter VI - What sort of despotism democratic nations have to fear, Democracy in America

So here's a short history of the passport which really has been only used since the WWII and which tremendously reduced the freedom of people to move and work and contributed to a big enslavement of many. While reading the quotations, please remember Milton Friedman: "Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program."

Official Canada Passport web site:

One of the earliest references to passports was made in about 450 B.C. Nehemiah, an official serving King Artaxerxes of ancient Persia, asked permission to travel to Judah. The King agreed and gave Nehemiah a letter "to the governors of the province beyond the river" requesting safe passage for him as he travelled through their lands.


Today's Canadian passports still carry such a letter of request. Inside the front cover is a letter issued in the name of Her Majesty the Queen. Like Nehemiah's letter, it also requests safe passage and protection for the bearer.


Not until the reign of King Louis XIV of France did these "letters of request" become popular. The King granted personally signed documents to his court favourites. The letter was dubbed "passe port", literally meaning "to pass through a port", because most international travel was by sailing ships. Hence the term "passport".


Within 100 years of Louis XIV's reign, almost every country in Europe had set up a system to issue passports. Besides needing passports from their own countries, travellers also had to have visas issued by the countries they wanted to visit, much as we have travel visas today.


The rising popularity of rail travel in the mid-19th century led to an explosion of tourism throughout Europe and caused a complete breakdown in the European passport and visa system. In answer to the crisis, France abolished passports and visas in 1861. Other European countries followed suit, and by 1914, passport requirements had been eliminated practically everywhere in Europe. However, World War I brought renewed concerns for international security, and passports and visas were again required, as a "temporary" measure.
[…]
A series of international passport conferences (1920, 1926 and 1947) resulted in a number of changes to the Canadian passport. The 1920 conference recommended that all countries adopt a booklet-type passport, which Canada began issuing in 1921. Another recommendation of 1920, that all passports were to be written in at least two languages, one of which was to be French, led to the first bilingual Canadian passport in 1926. The 1920 conference also recommended that passports should be valid for at least two years and preferably for five. It is interesting to note that, since 1919, Canadian peacetime passports were already valid for five years, with the possibility of a five-year extension.


The year 1930 saw more changes in Canadian passport regulations, reflecting Canada's growth and international status. Canadian travellers needing passport services abroad were now directed to the nearest Canadian legation instead of to a British consular office.


When war broke out in 1939, the United States government announced that Canadians would need passports and visas to cross the border. At that time, about half a million Canadians travelled to the States each year without any documentation. Tensions rose at border crossings when American officials began searching Canadian travellers culminating in a riot when a hearse was detained at the border. This led to the issuance of special wartime passports for Canadians travelling to the United States.


Until 1947, two kinds of passports were issued in Canada, one for British-born citizens and one for naturalized citizens. That same year, the Canadian Citizenship Act, which stipulates that only Canadian citizens are eligible for a Canadian passport, came into effect. The familiar blue passport booklet with pale pink pages similar to the booklets with blue pages issued to British subjects appeared at that time. As of July 1948, passports were issued by the Canadian Government only to Canadian citizens.


Between 1947 and 1970, Canadians could only apply for passports by mail to Ottawa. Requirements were very simple, and applicants claiming birth in Canada did not have to provide proof.


However, within a few years, the increased number of lost and stolen passports pointed to the need to tighten requirements. This need was reinforced by the escape of James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr., using a fraudulently-obtained Canadian passport.

Wanderlust Magazine:

The oldest British passport still in existence was signed by Charles I in 1641. Three years later, Charles was dethroned and Oliver Cromwell’s miserablist regime developed an early prototype of the No Fly List by decreeing that no pass be issued to citizens until they promised they would not ‘be aiding, assisting, advising or counselling against the Commonwealth’. The No Sail List lapsed under Charles II who persuaded the secretary of the state to sign these letters so he could cavort with his floozies. Peter the Great, Russia’s ruthless modernising tsar, introduced passports in 1719 and, ingeniously anticipating the multi-tasking 21st-century ID card, used them to control taxes and military service.


England’s letters of safe conduct were first written in Latin and English but, in 1772, the government decided to use the international language of high finance and diplomacy: French. This didn’t change until 1858, which meant that Britain’s passports were issued in French even as the empire fought Napoleon.


In the 19th century, the passport system began to collapse as railways criss-crossed Europe. To the French government, the rigmarole of issuing such documents and checking those of every Tom, Dick and Harriet seemed pointless. In 1861, France abolished passports and many European countries happily followed suit. The passport returned, however, during the First World War in an effort to keep spies at bay.


The British Nationality And Status Aliens Act sounds like the dubious, legal fruit of the war on terror but, passed in 1914, it defined the first recognisably modern British passport as a single page, folded into eight, with a cardboard cover, a photograph of the bearer and a note of such details as shape of face and features.


Peace resumed in 1918 but the passport stayed and the format was internationally standardised in 1920 – the year the British version expanded into a 32-page booklet known as Old Blue – and again in 1947.


Mere passports were soon not enough. Such official pettifoggery as visas proliferated. Fortunately, the British government has largely eschewed such nonsense, even offering – from post offices between 1961 and 1995 – a cheap, simple visitor’s passport with which Britons could enter 25 countries. But since the late 1960s, there has been a remorseless – albeit understandable – emphasis on making passports more secure through watermarked paper (introduced in 1972), laminating photos (1975), overprinting them (1981) and machine-readable burgundy versions (1988), which featured the words ‘European Community’ on the cover.

For some Englishmen of a certain age, Old Blue’s demise was a dastardly concession to ‘polyglot European bureaucracy’, the final blow for those who had never quite recovered from the British Empire’s downfall.


The end of Old Blue, and the increasing reluctance of some countries to waste money on stamps to colour our passport pages, took some of the fun out of travel and was a harbinger of officialdom’s new mood. This trend has culminated in Heathrow’s pseudo-military passport control desks, an ironic counterpoint to the video welcoming travellers to Britain.


New cost of travel
Security isn’t cheap. It is essential – we wouldn’t forgive any government that ignored the risk of further 9/11s – but there is a lingering suspicion that invoking terrorism is a licence for companies and governments to print money. The cost of a UK passport soared five-fold between 1994 and 2008. If the cost of bread had risen like that, a sliced white loaf would cost £2.75. If you choose the new eJumbo 48-page biometric passport, it will cost you £85, but it will get you into America without a visa (if your name’s not Robert Johnson).


The biometric passport stores all the information printed on the passport – and a digital description of the holder’s physical features – in a chip. The chip’s data is encrypted and protected by a key printed inside the passport. But the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) decided the key should consist of, in this order: the passport number; the owner’s date of birth; the passport expiry date. Eager geeks soon cracked this key with a reader you can buy in shops for £174. The Home Office insists this doesn’t matter because, a spokesman says: “Even if you had the information you would still have to counterfeit the new passport – and it has new security features.”


The race between forgers and issuers will continue. And in the biometric age, it will take longer to go through passport control. The Immigration Service Union says it takes eight to ten seconds to process a passenger with a biometric passport. With machine-readable passports, it took four seconds.


My most fretful hour at passport control came at Sheremetyevo airport (former USSR) in the late 1980s. A disturbingly boyish soldier, inspecting my passport and hand luggage, opened my Max Headroom joke book to find a cartoon of a Cossack dancing. He glanced over, inspecting me for subversive tendencies, stared at the cartoon for an age and then went off – I assumed to show this outrage to a superior. As visions of KGB officers and gulags raced through my mind, he returned, handed the book and passport back and, with no word or change in expression, beckoned me through. Later that same year, after dropping my passport on a Virgin Atlantic flight to New York, I managed to enter the US by showing my chequebook.


To me, these experiences symbolised the contrast between the land of the free and a bloated, statist society that was well past its sell-by date. Yet two decades later, the world’s passport controls are increasingly manned by the heirs of the boy in his military uniform.