Obviously you can recognize a couple of good talking heads…but it sounds like some of the others might actually contradict them. I’ll be interested to see this one and find out if it’s actually worth sharing…
According to an official statement released by Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry on Wednesday this week, the move has been taken on the grounds of defending national sovereignty and “to protect the right of the Venezuelan people to decide the strategic orientation of the social and economic life of the nation”.
Peter van Uhm is the Netherlands’ chief of defense, but that does not mean he is pro-war. At TEDxAmsterdam he explains how his career is one shaped by a love of peace, not a desire for bloodshed – and why we need armies if we want peace.
Peace and stability do not come free of charge. It takes… good equipment and well-trained, dedicated soldiers. […] I hope you will support the efforts of our armed forces to train soldiers like this young captain and provide her with a good gun, instead of the bad gun my father was given.
“Ron Paul’s racist politics and affiliations are already well known, being viciously anti-immigrant, anti-abortion and against gay marriage” (emphasis added)
Against gay marriage huh? That’s interesting…you know, considering there were robo-calls made to let everyone know Ron Paul wanted to destroy marriage by letting the gays get hitched…
This is dangerous nonsense. Resources being used up doean’t mean they eventually have to run out. “Resources” is different stuff over time. Resources have been “running out” for a long time, yet still reserves are growing.
Secondly, humanity escaped the malthusian trap some two hundred years ago. The notion that population just grows at some exponential constant, which resource production has to keep up with, has been discredited a long time ago. People have kids because they can afford it, and we can afford it because we have more people producing resources. Population growth is not a danger to material abundance, but a prerequisite for it.
I’m not surprised that the UN would be urging this, environmentalism is a fast track to international statism. We shouldn’t trust the UN on this issue at all. I mean, they were the leading entity behind the global warming scam. Even if their forecasts were accurate, their solution is counter-productive. Have people learned nothing from the history of the soviet union? The market is vastly better than (inter)national socialism at providing anything. State planning isn’t actually better at getting shit done! If resources actually were running out, we should quickly liberalize resource production instead of nationalizing it.
People have kids because they can afford it, and we can afford it because we have more people producing resources.
Actually, this isn’t absolute. Plenty of people mess up, get pregnant, and decide to keep the child when they can barely take care of themselves. I know of plenty of people in exactly these scenario’s, and what they think is the right or moral decision, but they’ll realize how much they f’d up when they decided to not get an abortion for whatever reason (religion, “morals”, or something else).
I agree with the view that our planet is overpopulated and using up more resources than we should (as well as not taking care of anything).
Old news, but I believe this counters the belief of the pro-IP crowd, that if it’s free and openly available to everyone, you can’t make a return on it.
The much-hype album was offered as a free download on the NIN website and was initially and intentionally leaked to BitTorrent sites such as the Pirate Bay in advance of the album’s physical release.
But that didn’t stop NIN fans from scoop up legally-purchased, paid versions of the album in record numbers. Estimates put Reznor’s early sales of Ghosts I-IV at $750,000 — but that figure shot up to $1.6 million, in only its first week of release.
A while back it seems that Jeffrey Tucker posted an article (or on the Mises blog thingy) a 20 or so minute video about NIN/Reznor’s marketing techniques; like leaving flash drives in the bathrooms at his concerts with his albums and other fan based material as well as free downloads, and to some people’s surprise it worked in promoting his music and sales.
I’m sure it’s not all of them (the book indeed lists others who are against this), but the more I read, the more I see how special interests played a role in the Progressive movement.
