I can feel that great things are in store for me. But at this point, I’m sitting here with 80 marks and without a new source of income and I ask you, Where is my man for this emergency? Times are horrible. Nobody has any money and there is an immoral spirit in the air – just as you’re getting ready to hit on someone for some cash, they’re already hitting on you!”
– Doris
THE HISTORY OF SOAP: Now that we’re all washing our hands repeatedly throughout the day, check out The History Guy’s account of how we got soap. Did you know archeologists discovered a recipe for soap in the ruins of ancient Babylon, circa 2200 BC? BTW, is The History Guy Tucker Carlson’s older brother?
NEWS YOU CAN USE, IF YOU’RE EVER ALLOWED TO WORK AGAIN: You can’t get fired for having the coronavirus, but your boss can take your temperature — how the COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping workplace laws.
– Captain Mbali Kaleni.
If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are
You write not after you’ve thought things though; you write to think things through.
The other day a friend forwarded to me these very short stories that were sent to him by his cousin in Lithuania. While not exactly the sort that Lydia Davis writes, they are, nevertheless, fun to read. If I had to choose a favorite, I'd say number 6
1 Once all villagers decided to pray for rain. On the day of prayer all the people gathered, but only one boy came with an umbrella.
That's FAITH.
2 When you throw babies in the air, they laugh because they know you will catch them.
That's TRUST
3 Every night we go to bed without any assurance of being alive the next morning, but still we set the alarms to wake up.
That's HOPE.
4 We plan big things for tomorrow in spite of zero knowledge of the future.
That's CONFIDENCE.
5 We see the world suffering, but still we get married and have children.
That's LOVE.
6 On an old man's shirt was written a sentence 'I am not 80 years old; I am sweet 16 with 64 years of experience.'
That's ATTITUDE.
In what I like to describe as anarcho-capitalism in action, the pseudonymousJim Browning is investigating, reverse-hacking, harassing and disrupting people engaging in tech-support fraud. His work is made possible by YouTube advertising revenues and Patreon donations.
Just a few days ago, with help from YouTuber Karl Rock who makes videos about life in India, he was able to shut down a call centre that was robo-dialling people and convincing them to pay for non-existent security software. Typically, they then call back a few months later and perform a refund scam, which involves offering a refund, pretending to refund too much money, and fooling people into returning the difference.
In his softly-spoken way Browning is also performing the service of educating people about how these scams operate so that they might better avoid falling foul of them.
It is not just him: there has emerged a network of people who are working in various ways to disrupt this sort of crime. BobRTC is a way for people to phone up the fraudsters and waste their time. Scammerblaster is a group of people who take reports of phone numbers being used for fraud and use a network of servers to bombard them with enough calls to render the number inoperative.
All this can be more effective than state policing. Indian authorities can be slow to act on reports of crimes where the only victims are in foreign countries. Jim Browning speaks of one occasion where he was listening in to a call where the American victim had been sent to buy gift cards so he called the local police who were not interested in taking action because the crime had not yet taken place.
Nonetheless state authorities do sometimes take action when they are sufficiently embarrassed, as in the case of a call centre raided after it was featured in a Canadian TV programme.
“I came here to die with you. Or live with you. Dying ain’t so hard for men like you and me. It’s living that’s hard when all you’ve ever cared about has been butchered or raped. Governments don’t live together–people live together. With governments, you don’t always get a fair word or a fair fight. Well, I’ve come here to give you either one or get either one from you. I came here like this so you’ll know my word of death is true, and my word of life is then true. The bear lives here, the wolf, the antelope, the Comanche. And so will we. Now we’ll only hunt what we need to live on, same as the Comanche does. And every spring, when the grass turns green, and the Comanche moves north, you can rest here in peace, butcher some of our cattle, and jerk beef for the journey. The sign of the Comanche, that will be on our lodge. That’s my word of life.”
Josey Wales, played by Clint Eastwood in the movie, The Outlaw Josey Wales. Context: the film is based in the aftermath of the Civil War, and Wales is on the run and took refuge in Indian territory. I rather like the libertarian sentiments in part of this quote (such as his line about governments), and Clint Eastwood, by the way, has always struck me as one of the more intelligent men to have worked in Hollywood. His movies are famously delivered on time, and on budget.
The Outlaw Josey Wales is, in my view, his best Western. Terrific supporting performance from Chief Dan George.
It’s one of the most bizarre guided tours I’ve ever been on. I’m driving around Berlin with Egon Krenz – the last communist leader of East Germany.
I have always been interested in the What If? question that consists of asking how the world would have been different had the Berlin Wall not fallen and had the USSR just blundered onwards indefinitely, still being the USSR.
That’s a question that has long intrigued me, ever since the Wall in question actually did fall. As you can tell from how I phrase the question, I am damn near certain that the world would have been a far grimmer place than it now is, had that horrible structure not been trashed or turned into souvenir fragments. But, beyond noting with approval the way that various eastern European former Soviet possessions have become much freer and less poor, I have never taken the time to think through the details of this feeling. How might western public opinion have developed, had the Wall remained? How would the world as a whole have been different?
So, I was very interested to learn yesterday about an IEA event, which I have already signed up to attend, to be held at the end of this month:
This month sees the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, ushering in dramatic change across East and West Germany. But even now, East Germany still lags behind the West and the legacy of socialism has been hard to overcome.So what would have happened if the wall hadn’t come down?On Thursday 28th November, the IEA is delighted to host an intriguing discussion on that very premise. Professor Syed Kamall will chair the conversation with our own Head of Political Economy Dr. Kristian Niemietz, and historians Roger Moorhouse and Giles Udy.
Rather than just bang on with more guess-answers, I will keep this posting brief and await comments from others.
In particular, are there any ways in which the fall of the Berlin Wall has made the world worse? I’m not talking about how it has embarrassed Communists and (a tribe I particularly despise) anti-anti-Communists … like that’s a bad thing. Those are just two of many features. I’m talking about how life for regular people around the world, and perhaps also in Russia itself, may actually, in some weird knock-on effect ways, have been made worse. I can’t think of any obvious ways that anything like that has happened, but maybe someone else can