Utopia, you are standing in it!

Which language do you think is the most complex? There are a lot of different answers that people will give to this question. Some people are sure that whatever language they struggled with in high school is the most complex. Others are certain that highly influential cultures must have complex languages, so they choose Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, or Chinese. Language buffs might break out a rare one like Tlingit or Lardil. Many people insist it is their own native language that’s the most complex, though oddly, I’ve found that just as many people seem willing to say their own language is terribly simple.

But ask a linguist, and you get a really wet blanket answer: no language is any more complex than any other. Or, put another way, all languages are equally complex. That answer tends to stop conversation dead in the tracks and no one is really satisfied by it, so I’m going to…

In recent days visitors to the BBC News website’s ‘Middle East’ page have found three reports relating to the US president’s announcement of the intention to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

One of those reports was written by the BBC’s State Department correspondent Barbara Plett Usher and the other two included inserts of her analysis. All three promoted specific messaging on the topic of international law.

1) Trump: Time to recognise Golan Heights as Israeli territoryMarch 21^st:

“Richard Haass, a former senior US state department official who is now president of the Council on Foreign Relations think-tank, said he “strongly disagreed” with Mr Trump. He said such recognising Israeli sovereignty would violate a UN Security Council resolution, “which rules out acquiring territory by war”. […]

So critics have concluded this was a blatant attempt to give Mr Netanyahu a boost in a hotly-contested election.

If…

In 2012 at the legal blog Popehat, Ken White, a criminal defense lawyer and free-speech maven, deconstructed the famous phrase uttered by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in an opinion about “free speech” in wartime. In 1919 there was a series of three Supreme Court decisions against men (socialists, foreigners, and anarchists) who spoke and published pamphlets against America’s participation in World War I—as well as against conscription (the draft). In all three cases, Holmes and the Court upheld the convictions, and each person was sentenced to ten years in prison for producing what today would be considered free speech.

Although White’s post, “Three generations of a hackneyed apologia for censorship are enough“, is a bit long, it’s well worth reading, for it shows how increasing tolerance for speech has evolved, as well as how Holmes’s famous statement has been misused to advocate continuing censorship…

[This essay was published by Bertrand Russell in 1937 in The Nation, 144. It was republished in Russell’s Unpopular Essays (1950). An online transcript of it is also here.]

The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed
by Bertrand Russell, 1937

ONE of the persistent delusions of mankind is that some sections of the human race are morally better or worse than others. This belief has many different forms, none of which has any rational basis. It is natural to think well of ourselves, and thence, if our mental processes are simple, of our sex, our class, our nation, and our age. But among writers, especially moralists, a less direct expression of self-esteem is common. They tend to think ill of their neighbors and acquaintances, and therefore to think well of the Sections of mankind to which they themselves do not belong. Lao-tse admired the “pure men of old,” who…

Amnesty International blasted the electric vehicle industry on Tuesday for not being as environmentally-friendly as it claims, calling attention to little-discussed aspects of its supply chain.

The human rights group said in a release that the industry, which touts itself as green, produces many of its lithium-ion batteries using polluting power sources. In addition, human rights violations are linked to the extraction of the minerals used in the batteries, particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“Electric
vehicles are key to shifting the motor industry away from fossil fuels, but
they are currently not as ethical as some retailers would like us to believe,”
the report reads.

The human rights
violations are atrocious and electric vehicle companies should immediately take
steps to make sure they are only using ethically sourced materials in their
batteries. It will be a complex process, but the only way to stop the human
rights…

During the early part of the century, the rallying cry for environmentalists carried by the mainstream media was Reduce, Recycle, Reuse! After almost twenty years and millions of dollars spent, America is finally coming to the realization that recycling is garbage.

Almost ten years ago, Discover magazine vindicated what John Tierney wrote about in 1996 and what critics of recycling had been saying for many years. Approximately a year later, a Columbia University research manuscript revealed that about 17 percent of all plastic items collected by New York City sanitation workers were recyclable and its authors admitting that nearly half of the plastics collected being landfilled.

Since the Columbia University study, it has been all downhill for recycling. Last weekend, The New York Timespublished a story describing how multiple cities across the United States are dumping (pun intended) recycling programs. The Grey Lady states:

Philadelphia is now…

75 years ago this month, Fredrick Hayek, the Austrian Economist recruited by the London School of Economics, published his manifesto for a free and liberal society: The Road to Serfdom.

The book – or some might say the clarion call to the perils of socialism – was written in the evenings between 1940 and 1943, while Hayek was acting as a war-time Cambridge fire warden.

Hayek and his publishers anticipated modest sales. Indeed, war-time paper rationing allowed it to be printed only in small runs. But the publication soon turned into a popular phenomenon.

On this podcast, the Institute for Economic Affairs’s Associate Director Kate Andrews discusses why The Road to Serfdom became such a huge success, and remains relevant to this day. Ms. Andrews is joined by the IEA’s Research Fellow Professor Philip Booth and the Director of the Adam Smith Institute, Dr Eamonn Butler.

About seven years ago…

ESPNcricnfo.com has been running a series of 10 best world cup matches. Here they go:

It’s rare for a politician in New Zealand to be mugged while out walking, broadcaster Barry Soper observed after Green Party co-leader James was assaulted in Wellington last week, although many had got into “skirmishes” when out doing their job.

The attack on Shaw prompted the PM to say New Zealanders should be proud of the access New Zealanders have to their politicians, whose job is to serve the people, but this assault showed they can’t take that for granted.

Soper recalled National’s Lockwood Smith once being forced to take a back door out of a university rather than face angry students as Education Minister.

But the last time a politician had been “supposedly attacked” while out walking was Keith Allen, a Minister in the Muldoon Government in 1983.