When you wish upon a star..

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Watch me make an options scandal disappear!

Disney's official report is out. The verdict: I'm innocent. No harm, no foul. Were options backdated? Yes. Was I the largest shareholder? Yes. Was I running the company? Yes. Am I to blame? No. Does this make sense? Absolutely.

Another view.

Little big lies

I agree with Hitler that the power of "the big lie" is that the lie is so colossal that no one would believe anyone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."

A couple of elisions that make my eyeballs bleed:

"Climate change is more dangerous than terrorism." Maybe, maybe not. The issue is the materiality of manmade climate change.

"Stem-cell research should be funded by the government." Maybe, maybe not. The issue is the morality of killing foetuses to obtain the cells.

These little big lies have the merit of slipperiness and a kind of lazy deniability. For discriminating minds it's hard to credit the mental sloppiness of the swallowers of these lies, but you can fool a hell of a lot of the people a hell of a lot of the time when you're spinning a web they want to get caught in. Fuhrerprinzip, scapegoatism, feminism, abortionism, hedonism, it-takes-a-village-ism, catastrophism and scientism succeed because they are ego-syntonic, they denote impulses consistent with self-conception.

What then must we do? Well, what we are doing. The World Wide Web allows truth and lies, science and scientism, to parade their beauty side-by-side before the whole human race. Little lies, big lies, little big lies - their facelifts, their cellulite, their sagging bums are mercilessly projected onto a giant screen and contrasted with the fresh good looks of simple truth.

Instance the Manmade Global Warming scam which recently peaked around Oscar time. The UN's decree that the debate was over has provoked a pushback that has publicly destroyed the scam's credentials. Imagine a virtuoso confidence trickster, revelling in his technique as he beguiles his grinning marks, who suddenly realizes the word "liar" has been pinned to his back, his toupee has slipped and his flies are open.The scammers are re-grouping, probing for a re-configuration of the scam that has more stickability, but "Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!"

"Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking, although science will gain some insights into the question if it recognises the socially contingent dimensions of a post-normal science. But to proffer such insights, scientists - and politicians - must trade (normal) truth for influence."

3/10, I'd say, for a delicious recasting of "the" truth as either "normal" truth or "post-normal" truth, but "post-normal" suggests "post-modern" and "post-modern" won't stick these days. Maybe "paranormal" truth or "my" truth, as in "my truth is I'm a gay American".

Anyhoot, my Screwtapian ways with words aren't the real issue. The real issue is this: the spinners of little big lies need to control the World Wide Web itself. Governments must rescue the apparatus from US hegemony so that the minds of starving Africans and of our children and of starving African children cease to be infected with American consumerist trash and theocracy. Unesco would be a suitably democratic Lord Protector of the world's thought channels. The BBC (re-branded as The World Broadcasting Corporation) would be a suitably expert instrument for Philosopher Kings and then a Philosopher Fuhrer to shape information and ideas for the greater good. Then the little big lies can be consolidated into one big big lie - Liberalism, A Convenient Untruth - which is a ripe and rotten host for another big big lie - Islamofascism, An Incovenient Untruth.

Hip,hip,hip,hypocrisy

The dogmatic character of the Church of Manmade Global Warming makes it apt that carbon credits are thought of as ecological indulgences. Flatulent twerps like Al Gore can buy these waivers for their own colossal carbon footprints and incentivise the construction of exceptionally filthy power plant elsewhere which is most cheaply able to supply the carbon offsets. Perverse moralising meets perverse incentives. But what is really needed is hypocrisy credits to induce a vast transfer of wealth from Edwards and Gore to deserving right-wing bloggers.

Inject! Inject! Inject!

I'm waiting to hear from NJ whether one of my children will be exempted from its compulsory vaccination programme. In NJ there is no philosophical exemption, so parents who have rational objections must cite specific supernatural tenets. In order of significance, what's at work here is:

1. The lust of the state to assume the rights of parents.
2. Vaccination is big business and big lobbiness.
3. Medical omniscience.
4. A superstition that mass vaccination improves overall immunity in affluent societies.

Reasoned discrimination is not a force in play. The vaccination lobby resembles the Manmade Global Warming lobby in its religious adherence to dogma, its anathemizing of 'deniers' and its 'greater good' propensity to lie thru its teeth and omit inconvenient truths.

The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports that mass vaccination for chickenpox adversely re-shapes the disease's profile so that it is far more virulent. The answer is either to stop mass inoculation (not considered in the article) or to start mass repetitive boosters thru adulthood with at least one known result - sacks more tax for drugs to be shot into my younger children. My elder children caught measles, mumps, chickenpox etc when they were young and developed hardy immune systems.

The Oil Industry

I prefer wit, brevity, the quick dagger breezily slipped between the ribs of my enemies, but my elegant postures collapse in a heap before David Cameron, leader of the Cameroons and their hangers-on, aka the Conservative Party of Great Britain. This party leads the polls, so Cameron may well be Prime Minister in 2-3 years.

Cameron fuses my circuits, smoke seeps from my eyeballs, I can't speak, I gawp like a fish out of water. This,this,this Old-Etonian, ex PR man, slimy spiv; this oily chancer, this BBC nominee, this faux-conservative, nouveau-man; this,this,this is the successor to Margaret Thatcher. Woe. Is. Me.

There have been have been so many last straws with this, uh, scumbag is the mot juste, but this is the last, last straw. He's re-invented himself as an eco-fascist and invited Al Gore to address the Shadow Cabinet. Listen, friends in Utah, reserve a place for me in your country. I may need to tear up my passport and get one of yours. Just don't elect Gore, Clinton, Obama or McCain.

I have seen the future and it's...

Utah.

Why God made powers of 2

Daniel Tammett is an autistic savant 'whose brain somehow possesses an island of brilliance.' He appears to be unique as 'the first recorded savant to have no easily recognizable autism' and in that he can describe how he performs his feats of memory. Here is a decent video about him, but what will stay with me longer than the clip of Daniel reciting the first 22,514 digits of pi was the short segment titled 'Bullied'.

Media Studies

h/t John Hawkins

The 7th-largest French city

On Tuesday I'll fly back to London after 2 months in suburban New Jersey (and NYC, New Hampshire and the Virgin Islands). The mail will be piled up, I'll hobnob with my beloved elder children (except the one in Nicaragua) and I'll be in one energised city. There's a hum about London these days. The most international city is like a Star Wars bar where the galaxy's exotics mingle. I remember the thrill of my first visit to New York in 1979. Now the thrill's in London and I grew up there. Money's flooding in, energy too.

This breathless article points out :

A decade ago, it would have seemed fanciful that we could usurp New York as the world financial capital, when the smart money was predicting London's eclipse by Frankfurt..

My motto is 'things change'. Paris has potential. The ease of flitting by train between central London and central Paris means that these mythical cities are potentially fungible. Right now Paris is a dubious spot to locate a global business, but Sarkozy could change that. If so, a cost of living and lifestyle arbitrage with London may open. That could finish New York as a global finance centre as NyLon is a tougher commute than PariLon. The language barrier is no more; English jumped it.
I like London, but maybe one day I'll sell up and buy a modest spread in Escalante, Utah. There may be a little change left over. Go west, old man! There's coffee and wi-fi.

Let me not admit impediments..

Right Wing News discusses the correlation between social and fiscal conservatism. Here's my take:

Fiscal conservatism is a subset of social conservatism. Society should constrain the freedom to harm innocents while maximising the freedom to reap the rewards of one's own acts. Then criminalising abortion makes conservative sense as does criminalising drug trafficking if and when it impacts children. I honestly don't know if I'm libertarian about drugs and adults, but, legal or not, taxes should not be used to mitigate the suffering of voluntary adult drug users; charity, sure.

Homosexuals are already free to marry in any spiritually valid sense, but society should not be forced by law to punish, reward or endorse that spiritual contract. I'd go further and remove legal context from all marriage until children are involved. If a husband and wife want to make business arrangements, then use the law of contract. Marriage is properly valued by the unforced admiration of others and one's own self-definition, not by laws.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds..

Charming their pants off

If charm and good looks win elections, then Romney's in good shape, especially against H. Rodham-Clinton. This liberal cites

"former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers’ observation about Bill Clinton: He seduces women, he seduces men, he seduces pets.

Mitt Romney is Bill Clinton with his pants up. And he’ll very likely be cast in 2008 .. against Clinton’s wife, who has all the seductive qualities of John Kerry in a pants suit"

The sleek design of Mitt TV and the ease of linking and copying clips speak well of Romney's competence, a material attribute of a chief executive.

Contrast Hillary TV which has clunky design, blockier type, acres of wasted space, text which droops in my Firefox, and no obvious link and copy mechanism. I wonder what each implementation cost.

As for content, well lordy! If you can bring yourself to watch the Hillary in New Hampshire clip (not recommended and I don't see how to embed it separately)...what a herd of hand-wringing losers! "It's very seldom you get the opportunity to ask a potential President 'how can you change my life?'" Gadzooks! Were I American and the Village Pantsuit became President, then the air of passivity, make-Iraq-go-away-ness and what-can-my-country-do-for-me-ness would make me emigrate to Mexico as the Hollywood liberals slink back from Cantada. Attitudinise, moi ?