O mundo vai continuar

Apocalypse Not: Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Worry About End Times

• By Matt Ridley

This is the question posed by the website 2012apocalypse.net. “super volcanos? pestilence and disease? asteroids? comets? antichrist? global warming? nuclear war?” the site’s authors are impressively open-minded about the cause of the catastrophe that is coming at 11:11 pm on december 21 this year. but they have no doubt it will happen. after all, not only does the Mayan Long Count calendar end that day, but “the sun will be aligned with the center of the Milky Way for the first time in about 26,000 years.”
Case closed: Sell your possessions and live for today.

When the sun rises on December 22, as it surely will, do not expect apologies or even a rethink. No matter how often apocalyptic predictions fail to come true, another one soon arrives. And the prophets of apocalypse always draw a following—from the 100,000 Millerites who took to the hills in 1843, awaiting the end of the world, to the thousands who believed in Harold Camping, the Christian radio broadcaster who forecast the final rapture in both 1994 and 2011.

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Filosofia política moderna

David Gordon sobre
PHILOSOPHY OF THE AUSTRIAN SCHOOL
Raimondo Cubeddu
"... Like Leo Strauss, on whom he has written an earlier work, Cubeddu contends that political theory in the 20th century is "an outcome of positivism, historicism, and irrationalism" (p. 204). Since man has no fixed nature, power, not discovering the good, lies at the essence of modern politics. But unlike Strauss (as commonly interpreted), he does not urge a return to classical political philosophy. He thinks that Austrian economics provides an internal criticism of the modern position. Not philosophy, but economics, now limits political action..."
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Resumo da segunda guerra mundial

Get started

Nosso sistema "Fascismo participativo"

Participatory Fascism

By Robert Higgs | Tuesday October 30, 2012 at 2:11 PM PDT

I continue to encounter many discussions in which the author or speaker bemoans the economic order’s drift toward socialism or, in some cases, its actual existence as such. If this characterization were simply a matter of linguistic imprecision, it might not matter much. But it is much more than a matter of terminology, because one’s understanding of the nature of our current economic order hinges on how we characterize it.
Socialism is a system in which all the major means of production are owned and operated by the state. Except perhaps for small firms or farms, all productive enterprises are state enterprises. All natural resources belong to the state. All resources are allocated and employed as the state dictates, insofar as its dictates can actually be carried out in practice (all such systems display much slack between orders given and actual conduct on the ground, owing to corruption and attempts to “fix” flaws embedded in the state’s overall plan).
Obviously the economic order that prevails in the economically advanced countries is not socialism. Indeed, these systems are commonly called capitalistic or market-oriented, notwithstanding the many types of government intervention that pervade their markets—various taxes, subsidies, direct government production, and regulations galore. Some people refer to these systems as “mixed economies,” which at least helps us to recognize that they are not market economies in any pure sense, not even in an approximate one. But in calling them mixed economies, we gain no insight into their nature or operation.
For thirty years or so, I have used the term “participatory fascism,” which I borrowed from my old friend and former Ph.D. student Charlotte Twight. This is a descriptively precise term in that it recognizes the fascistic organization of resource ownership and control in our system, despite the preservation of nominal private ownership, and the variety of ways in which the state employs political ceremonies, proceedings, and engagements—most important, voting—in which the general public participates. Such participation engenders the sense that somehow the people control the government. Even though this sense of control is for the most part an illusion, rather than a perception well founded in reality, it is important because it causes people to accept government regulations, taxes, and other insults against which they might rebel if they believed that such impositions had simply been forced on them by dictators or other leaders wholly beyond their influence.
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Nosso sistema econômico

"[T]he system under which we live, choked up with attempts at partial planning and restrictionism, is almost as far from any system of capitalism which could be rationally advocated as it is different from any consistent system of planning. It is important to realize in any investigation of the possibilities of planning that it is a fallacy to suppose capitalism as it exists today is the alternative. We are certainly as far from capitalism in its pure form as we are from any system of central planning. The world of today is just interventionist chaos." ("Socialist Calculation I: The Nature of the Problem," reprinted in "Individualism and Economic Order" (1948), p. 136.

Indústria alemã aumenta gastos para inovação

Die Innovationsbudgets der deutschen Industrie wachsen deutlich kräftiger als im globalen Schnitt. Um stolze 14,8 Prozent stockten die Unternehmen ihre Budgets für Forschung und Entwicklung auf. Zum Vergleich: Weltweit stiegen die Ausgaben lediglich um 9,6 Prozent, in europäischen Unternehmen sogar nur um 5,4 Prozent. Das zeigt eine Analyse der 1.000 Unternehmen mit den weltweit höchsten Innovationsausgaben, die dieStrategieberatung Booz & Company durchgeführt hat. Wer Interesse an der Ausarbeitung hat, möge mir eine Mail schicken: steingart@handelsblatt.com 

Erros na medicina

• Hospitals Are Killing Us

  by Joseph Mercola
• Medical errors kill the equivalent of four jumbo jets’ worth of passengers every week, but the death toll is being largely ignored
• It’s estimated that up to 30 percent of all medical procedures, tests and medications may be unnecessary – at a cost of at least $210 billion a year (plus the untold cost of emotional suffering and related complications and even death – which are impossible to put numbers on)
• Urgent reforms are needed to make medical care safer, and simple steps, like installing cameras in hospitals and making hospital performance / error data public, could have a dramatic effect on patient safety
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Indústria de alimentos

Farmer, author, and activist Joel Salatin discusses his new book, "Folks, This Ain't Normal," as well as sustainable farming, food policy, and solutions to America's food woes
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Sobre o livro:
From farmer Joel Salatin's point of view, life in the 21^st century just ain't normal. In FOLKS, THIS AIN'T NORMAL, he discusses how far removed we are from the simple, sustainable joy that comes from living close to the land and the people we love. Salatin has many thoughts on what normal is and shares practical and philosophical ideas for changing our lives in small ways that have big impact.
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Jacques Barzun 1907-2012

Jacques Barzun, 1907–2012

by Brian P. Kelly

The New Criterion mourns the passing of Jacues Marin Barzun, historian, essayist, and intellectual.

Born in a suburb of Paris, Barzun studied at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and moved to the US at a young age. He attened Columbia and graduated as valedictorian in 1927, teaching his first course at the school that same summer. He stayed at the university until he retired in 1975.

Barzun was an expert in too many fields to name, publishing prolifically across topics ranging from baseball to medicine to art. In doing so, he was ardent in his populism, saying that it was “a responsibility of scholars” to write accessibly. He began work on his magnum opus when he was eighty-four. This tome, which surveyed 500 years of Western culture and argued that Western civilization was had started to decline, would become From Dawn to Decadence and would only be published when Barzun was ninety-two.

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Veja também aqui e http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9636970/Jacques-Barzun.htmlaqui

O dever do patrióta

• “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.” Edward Abbey

Escravos suíços

Kinderarbeit-Film "Der Verdingbub" 

Schläge mit dem Gürtel, Schuften bis zum Umfallen: Der Schweizer Film "Der Verdingbub" erzählt vom Schicksal Tausender Kinder, die noch bis 1950 Zwangsarbeit in der Landwirtschaft leisten mussten und wie Sklaven gehalten wurden - wuchtiges und cleveres Heimatkino der anderen Art.
Zwischen 1800 und 1950 wurden alleine in der Schweiz mehr als 100.000 Kinder, zumeist Waisen, an Bauernfamilien verdingt - eine Praxis, die auch in Süddeutschland üblich war. Gegen Kost und Logis leisteten sie Zwangsarbeit und waren häufig Opfer von Gewalt und Missbrauch.
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A tirania esquisita brasileira

O encanto burocrático pelo autoritarismo e a tirania aparentemente ingênua das palavras

Por Alexandre Barros
Desacato a funcionário público (artigo 331 do código penal) é crime. Pena: seis meses a dois anos de detenção ou multa.
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Erros dos médicos

Every doctor makes mistakes. But, says physician Brian Goldman, medicine's culture of denial (and shame) keeps doctors from ever talking about those mistakes, or using them to learn and improve. Telling stories from his own long practice, he calls on doctors to start talking about being wrong.(Filmed at TEDxToronto.)

Brian Goldman is an emergency-room physician in Toronto, and the host of CBC Radio’s "White Coat, Black Art." Full bio »
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O futuro da educação superior estará fora da universidade

The Future of Higher Education: Massive Online Open Disruption

Daniel Honan on October 27, 2012, 12:00 AM

Inventing the Future

What's the Big Idea?
Is college an expensive waste of time?
Peter Thiel and Vivek Wadhwa have debated this question repeatedly -- on 60 Minutes, at an Intelligence Squared debate in Chicago, and most recently at The Nantucket Project, a festival of ideas that was held on Nantucket, Massachusetts earlier this month.
Thiel is a venture capitalist with a vision for jump-starting innovation. To that end, he has invested in transformational technologies and companies. He also encourages young people to start their own businesses instead of pursuing "the anonymous safety of working for others," according to a manifesto on Thiel's Founder's Fund website.
To put his money where his mouth is, Thiel set up a fellowship that pays students $100,000 to drop out of college. Over the course of two years, Thiel Fellows focus on how to make their innovative ideas into reality.
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Racismo na América

Majority of Americans racist – poll

Barack Obama ( Reuters / Kevin Lamarque)

The election of Barack Obama failed to usher in a post-racial US, with a new poll showing that 51 percent of Americans hold explicitly anti-black views. That figure is up from 48 percent in 2008, the year America elected its first black president.
­Those expressing implicit anti-black attitudes also spiked from 49 percent to 56 percent over the same four-year period, the Associated Press found in a poll released Saturday.
Racial prejudice against blacks cut clearly across America’s left-right political divide, despite perceptions to the contrary. While 79 percent of Republicans willingly expressed racial prejudice when answering questions measuring explicit racism (as opposed to 32 percent among Democrats), the implicit racism test showed that a majority of Republicans (64 percent) and Democrats (55 percent) held implicit anti-black feelings.
According to the survey, political independents were the least racist, with 49 percent exhibiting implicit anti-black feelings. The poll also found that a majority of respondents (57 percent) held implicitly negative views about Hispanics, up 51 percent from an AP poll taken last year.
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Quer proteção ambiental?

Manipulação completa da sociedade

Why Are Americans So Easy To Manipulate?

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/14/2012 13:58 -0400

• Kohn

Originally published by Bruce E. Levine at Truth-Out.org,

What a fascinating thing! Total control of a living organism!

— psychologist B.F. Skinner

The corporatization of society requires a population that accepts control by authorities, and so when psychologists and psychiatrists began providing techniques that could control people, the corporatocracy embraced mental health professionals.

In psychologist B.F. Skinner’s best-selling book  Beyond Freedom and Dignity  (1971), he argued that freedom and dignity are illusions that hinder the science of behavior modification, which he claimed could create a better-organized and happier society.

During the height of Skinner’s fame in the 1970s, it was obvious to anti-authoritarians such as Noam Chomsky (“The Case Against B.F. Skinner”) and Lewis Mumord that Skinner’s worldview—a society ruled by benevolent control freaks—was antithetical to democracy. In Skinner’s novel Walden Two (1948), his behaviorist hero states, “We do not take history seriously,” to which Lewis Mumford retorted, “And no wonder: if man knew no history, the Skinners would govern the world, as Skinner himself has modestly proposed in his behaviorist utopia.”

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Aquecimento global - fim da histeria

Já parou faz 15 anos (se existaria)

Global Climate Warming Stopped 15 Years Ago, UK Met Office Admits

Written by Alex Newman

Despite playing a key role in advancing climate change hysteria, the United Kingdom’s National Weather Service, known as the Met Office, quietly released a report last week conceding that so-called “global warming” actually stopped more than 15 years ago. The startling admission shows once again that United Nations theories and climate models are wildly inaccurate at best, experts say, meaning multi-trillion dollar schemes to deal with alleged human-caused “climate change” are at the very least severely misguided.

According to the latest UK Met Office report, first reported by the Daily Mail, there has been no noticeable increase in global temperatures since early 1997. The alleged warming trend supposedly observed from 1980 to 1996 was about as long as the current “plateau” period, the paper reported. Prior to that, climate scientists admit, global temperatures had been stable or dropping for decades, a fact that prompted previous generations of climate alarmists to sound the alarm about the supposed dangers of man-made “global cooling.”
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A tragédia do ensino

A religião do ambientalismo

THE NEW HOLY WARS
Economic Religion vs. Environmental Religion in Contemporary America
By Robert H. Nelson

“Economics and environmentalism are types of modern religions.” So says author Robert H. Nelson in this analysis of the roots of economics and environmentalism and their mutually antagonistic relations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Questions about the proper relationship between human beings and nature have led to the growth of these public theologies, or secular religions, even while both avoid mentioning their derivation from Western Judeo-Christian sources. So while environmentalists regard human actions to warm the climate, expand human populations, and increase economic growth as immoral challenges to the natural order, economists seek to put all of nature to maximum use for the production of more goods and services and other human benefits.

Ciência "exata"

Nem todas as revistas científicas que encontramos em bancas são confiáveis. Criadores de uma ferramenta online chamada Mathgen, que gera automaticamente trabalhos matemáticos cheios de frases aleatórias, queriam descobrir até que ponto as publicações científicas são verídicas.
Eles enviaram um artigo falso criado por computador a revista de estudos matemáticos Advances in Pure Mathematics, e voilà: apenas dez dias depois, a obra foi aceita para publicação.
Os editores da revista pediram apenas alguns pequenos esclarecimentos à autora do artigo, que, por sua vez, não existe. A obra seria de autoria de uma inexistente professora de matemática chamada Marcie Rathke, da também inexistente Universidade do Sul da Dakota do Norte em Hoople.
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A rebelião de Albert Camus

Filosofia da liberdade

Vídeo animado sobre filosofia da liberdade
A filosofia da liberdade esta baseada na propriedade de você mesmo, esta simples mais elegante e contundente animação explicará a você exatamente o que isto significa. Isto é uma magnífica ferramenta que pode ser usada por qualquer pessoa com o proposito de educar crianças e adultos sobre nosso direito à vida, liberdade e a capacidade de creação - e nossa responsabilidade de pensar, falar e atuar.
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Hayek se torna tópico na campanha eleitoral

Na disputa pela Casa Branca, as ideias do economista Friedrich von Hayek entram na agenda

Pela primeira vez, as ideias do economista austríaco, que pregava menos governo em tudo, entram na campanha de um candidato com chance real de chegar ao poder

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Prêmio FEE 2012

2012 Foundation for Economic Education Award Winners for Best Book and Best Article in Austrian Economics

The Society for the Development of Austrian Economics (SDAE) announced the winners of 2012 Foundation for Economic Education awards. In the category Best Book in Austrian economics the award goes to Living Economics: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, author Peter J. Boettke. In the category for Best Article, the award goes to Hayekian Anarchism, authors Edward Peter Stringham and Todd J. Zywicki.
The Foundation for Economic Education is extremely pleased that this year the prestigious awards go to scholars closely related to FEE. Peter J. Boettke is Distinguished Member of FEE’s Board of Scholars and a FEE Trustee, while Edward Stringham and Todd Zywicki are FEE alumni.
The awards, which include a check and plaque, will be presented at the SDAE annual dinner to be held on Saturday, November 17, in Sheraton New Orleans.
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"Europa para todos"

Take a close look at this promotional poster. Notice anything? Alongside the symbols of Christianity, Judaism, Jainism and so on is one of the wickedest emblems humanity has conceived: the hammer and sickle.
For three generations, the badge of the Soviet revolution meant poverty, slavery, torture and death. It adorned the caps of the chekas who came in the night. It opened and closed the propaganda films which hid the famines. It advertised the people's courts where victims of purges and show-trials were condemned. It fluttered over the re-education camps and the gulags. For hundreds of millions of Europeans, it was a symbol of foreign occupation. Hungary, Lithuania and Moldova have banned its use, and various former communist countries want it to be treated in the same way as Nazi insignia.
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Doutorado europeu em direito e economia

The European Doctorate in Law and Economics (EDLE) is currently welcoming applications for the next academic year.
15 scholarships are available, out of which 9 sponsored by the European Commission (providing a net income of about € 2200 pcm).
Application deadline: 10 January 2013 
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Os inimigos da liberdade entre nos

For over a generation, shocking cases of censorship at America’s colleges and universities have taught students the wrong lessons about living in a free society. Drawing on a decade of experience battling for freedom of speech on campus, First Amendment lawyer Greg Lukianoff reveals how higher education fails to teach students to become critical thinkers: by stifling open debate, our campuses are supercharging ideological divisions, promoting groupthink, and encouraging an unscholarly certainty about complex issues.

Lukianoff walks readers through the life of a modern-day college student, from orientation to the end of freshman year. Through this lens, he describes startling violations of free speech rights: a student in Indiana punished for publicly reading a book, a student in Georgia expelled for a pro-environment collage he posted on Facebook, students at Yale banned from putting an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote on a T shirt, and students across the country corralled into tiny “free speech zones” when they wanted to express their views.

But Lukianoff goes further, demonstrating how this culture of censorship is bleeding into the larger society. As he explores public controversies involving Juan Williams, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins, Larry Summers—even Dave Barry and Jon Stewart—Lukianoff paints a stark picture of our ability as a nation to discuss important issues rationally. Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate illuminates how intolerance for dissent and debate on today’s campus threatens the freedom of every citizen and makes us all just a little bit dumber.
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Inimigos da liberdade na academia

Political correctness is one of the primary enemies of freedom of thought in higher education today, undermining our ability to acquire, transmit, and process knowledge. Political correctness limits the variation of ideas by an ideologically driven concern for hue rather than view. This volume is not simply another rant; there are good data here, along with well-crafted, hard-to-ignore logical interpretations and arguments. It is the sort of work that those who adhere to idea-limiting notions of the university will try to trivialize. That alone should make it important reading. (Michael Schwartz, president emeritus, Kent State University and Cleveland State University )    
http://www.amazon.com/The-Politically-Correct-University-Problems/dp/0844743178/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1351130510&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=Richard+Wisniewski%2C+%C2%93The+Averted+Gaze%C2%94Mais        

Escolas onde não se aprende nada fora de banalidades

Tendências/Debates: A escola hoje e os alunos que não aprendem

ROBERTO LEAL LOBO
SILVA FILHO

A educação brasileira está em crise. Além da recorrente violência escolar --a imprensa noticia com frequência casos de alunos armados ou com drogas, além de agressões a professores--, pais e filhos parecem achar que a escola não pode contrariar os alunos ou exigir desempenho.
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Preferência temporal

Behavioral economists have explored the phenomenon of“present bias,” which leads some of us to make decisions that produce short-term rewards but long-term headaches. Of course it makes sense to prefer a dollar today to a dollar tomorrow. But does it make sense to prefer a dollar today to 10 dollars in two months? With respect to health and finances, some people seem to think about their future selves in the same way that they think about complete strangers.
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A corrida entre educação e tecnologia

The Race between Education and Technology [Paperback]

This book provides a careful historical analysis of the co-evolution of educational attainment and the wage structure in the United States through the twentieth century. The authors propose that the twentieth century was not only the American Century but also the Human Capital Century. That is, the American educational system is what made America the richest nation in the world. Its educational system had always been less elite than that of most European nations. By 1900 the U.S. had begun to educate its masses at the secondary level, not just in the primary schools that had remarkable success in the nineteenth century.
The book argues that technological change, education, and inequality have been involved in a kind of race. During the first eight decades of the twentieth century, the increase of educated workers was higher than the demand for them. This had the effect of boosting income for most people and lowering inequality. However, the reverse has been true since about 1980. This educational slow-down was accompanied by rising inequality. The authors discuss the complex reasons for this, and what might be done to ameliorate it.
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Entenda como funciona moeda e finanças

Video documentário que presenta 
"... serious research and verifiable evidence on our economic and financial system. This is the first documentary to tackle this issue from a UK-perspective and explains the inner workings of Central Banks and the Money creation process.

When money drives almost all activity on the planet, it's essential that we understand it. Yet simple questions often get overlooked, questions like; where does money come from? Who creates it? Who decides how it gets used? And what does this mean for the millions of ordinary people who suffer when the monetary, and financial system, breaks down? 

Produced by Queuepolitely and featuring Ben Dyson of Positive Money, Josh Ryan-Collins of The New Economics Foundation, Ann Pettifor, the "HBOS Whistleblower" Paul Moore, Simon Dixon of Bank to the Future and Nick Dearden from the Jubliee Debt Campaign.

Political philosopher John Gray, commented, "We're not moving to a world in which crises will never happen or will happen less and less. We are in a world in which they happen several times during a given human lifetime and I think that will continue to be the case"
If you have decided that crisis as a result of the monetary system is not an event you want to keep revisiting in your life-time then this documentary will equip you with the knowledge you need, what you do with it is up to you...
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Linguagem política

Sua vida não é minha culpa

Missão do Instituto Mises

Think tank mission statements. Instituto Mises Brasil's ("IMB") mission below.

IMB is an enterprise devoted to the production and dissemination of economic and social science studies that promote the principles of free markets and of a free society.

In its actions, IMB aims to:
...

I - promote the teachings of the economic school of thought known as the Austrian School of Economics;
II- restore the crucial role of theory, both in economic science and in the social sciences, as opposed to empiricism;
III - defend the market economy, private property, and peace in interpersonal relations, as well as oppose state interventions in both markets and society.

IMB believes that our vision of a free society must be reached through the respect of private property, of voluntary exchanges among individuals, and of the natural order of the markets, free from governmental intervention. Therefore, we hope that our actions influence public opinion and the academia to further the acceptance of the principles above, and to supersede governmental actions and institutions that merely:

a) protect the powerful and the interest groups,
b) create hostility, corruption, and hopelessness,
c) limit prosperity,
d) repress free expression and the opportunities of the public.
http://www.chafuen.com/balticrules/think-tank-mission-statements

Eleições

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

~George Eliot, in "Felix Holt, the Radical"

Anarquismo libertário

Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to Ten Objections

Posted by Roderick Long 

Libertarian Anarchism: Transcription of a talk by Roderick T. Long
I want to talk about some of the main objections that have been given to libertarian anarchism and my attempts to answer them. But before I start giving objections and trying to answer them, there is no point in trying to answer objections to a view unless you have given some positive reason to hold the view in the first place. So, I just want to say briefly what I think the positive case is for it before going on to defend it against objections.
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Ensino

"Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and it annoys the pig."

Peter Heinlein

Democídio

Qual ditador matou mais em todos os tempos?

Em números absolutos, o maior matador foi o ditador chinês Mao Tsé-tung, que mandou nada menos que 77 milhões de compatriotas para o além.

por Texto Roberto Navarro

Em números absolutos, o maior matador foi o ditador chinês Mao Tsé-tung, que mandou nada menos que 77 milhões de compatriotas para o além. Em percentual relativo, o líder mais sanguinário foi o general Pol Pot, que assassinou “apenas” 2 milhões de pessoas – um terço da população do Camboja, país em que ele foi primeiro-ministro entre 1976 e 1979. Na ilustração abaixo, reunimos os 10 governantes mais assassinos de todos os tempos. A relação tem como critério básico o total de mortes causadas pela ação ou omissão de líderes com poderes ditatoriais. Isso inclui desde fuzilamentos no paredão até grandes fomes causadas por uma guerra civil, por exemplo. Os números foram coletados pelo cientista político e historiador americano Rudolph J. Rummel, que escreveu quase duas dúzias de livros com informações sobre casos de “democídio” – o nome que Rummel dá ao assassinato de uma pessoa por um governo. Foram muitos, sobretudo nos últimos 100 anos. “Se enfileirarmos os cadáveres das vítimas de democídio no século 20, eles dariam 6 voltas em torno da Terra”, diz o historiador.

Dez maiores matadores tiraram mais de 200 milhões de vidas

Imperatriz Cixi - China (1835-1908) - 12 000 000
Kublai Khan - Mongólia (1215-1294) - 19 000 000
Leopoldo 2º - Bélgica (1835-1909) - 10 000 000
Gêngis Khan - Mongólia (1162-1227) - 4 000 000
Mao Tsé-tung - China (1893 -1976) - 77 000 000
Adolf Hitler - Alemanha (1889-1945) - 21 000 000
Hideki Tojo - Japão (1884-1948) - 4 000 000
Hideki Tojo - Japão (1884-1948) - 4 000 000
Joseph Stalin - URSS (1879-1953) - 43 000 000
Chiang Kai-shek - China e Taiwan (1887-1975) - 10 000 000

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Liberdade de expressão

"The freedom of expression is the foundation of the whole edifice of liberty. If the unrestricted freedom to speak one's mind anywhere and anytime is taken away, what's then still left of liberty will be lost, too."
A. P. Mueller
Concordo completamente com Mr. Bean
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8 filmes para entender a crise

Raízes da crise financeira

São Paulo - O sistema bancário mundial, em que os bancos criam e emprestam dinheiro sem limites reais, é quem seria o maior responsável por jogar as economias nacionais na crise. Mas é também o grande responsável em os tirar dela, alimentando o ciclo de expansão monetária seguida de novas, e cada vez mais graves, recessões.
Exame.com separou 8 documentários que investigam os bastidores dos governos e das instituições financeiras em busca dos culpados. O mais recente deles, “Fraude – explicando a grande recessão” apresenta ao público uma visão completamente diferente da que culpa o capitalismo por essa crise sem precedentes e avisa que quem tenta salvar a economia mundial é também quem, primeiro, a fez entrar em colapso: os governos.

http://exame.abril.com.br/mercados/noticias/8-filmes-nao-convencionais-que-buscam-as-raizes-da-crise#6

Tribute de Friedrich Hayek

Veja video clip

Fidel Castro

Leia como Fidel Castro queria matar 100 milhões - mas felizmente os Soviético não pemiteram:

In an act of madness, Fidel Castro furiously demanded Khrushchev launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the US. Decades later, Castro admitted this was a terrible mistake. Fortunately, the Soviet leadership said "nyet!" A nuclear exchange in 1962 between the US and USSR would have killed an estimated 100 million people on each side. 
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O declínio da educação superior

Dark Satanic Mills of Mis-Education: Some Proposals for Reform

by Robert C. Koons

The “higher education system” in the United States has metastasized to the point that the body politic will soon be unable to sustain it. Tuition and fees have grown at more than three times the cost of living in the last two decades, outstripping even the rise in the cost of medical care. These enormous costs reflect the burden of a tenured professoriate that is increasingly well paid and decreasingly burdened with identifiable classroom duties. At the same time, the value of the education that it provides is vanishing, even when measured in terms of the financial bottom line. Only a minority of college graduates secures a job that in any sense “requires” a college-educated holder, while total college debt now dwarfs the aggregate of consumer debt and approaches that of all mortgages. At the same time, it is harder and harder to maintain with a straight face that students are— by engaging with pop culture studies, turgid French semiotic theorizing, or left-wing activism— acquiring the intangible and ineffable values of a liberal education, as classically understood. The higher education “bubble” threatens soon to burst, with consequences more calamitous than the recent collapse of the booms in internet companies or high-risk mortgages.

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Mandelbrot set

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jGaio87u3A

Bolsa Fulbright para os Estados Unidos

Buscamos professor(a) no nível associado, 6-10 anos de experiência, boa lista de publicações, fluente em inglês.
Contacto

Enganho

Bolsas

The Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow Program combines a paid public policy internship with two career and policy seminars. Fellows gain real-world experience, take a crash course in market-based policy analysis, and acquire the professional skills necessary to effect change. Participating internship hosts include more than 80 think tanks and policy organizations across the United States.

As one of 80 Koch Summer Fellows, you will work with others on research projects throughout the summer and make lifelong friends from among the many Fellows who share your interest in ideas. You will also join the network of more than 900 program alumni succeeding in policy, journalism, legal, business, and academic careers.

Program Elements

• 10-week program: June 2 – August 10, 2013
• Eight-week internship at a state, federal, or single-issue policy organization
• Weeklong career and policy seminars, before and after internship
• Weekly lectures on popular policy issues
• Professional resume review and editorial guidance on writing assignments
• $1,500 stipend plus housing assistance and a limited number of travel scholarships
• Undergraduates, recent graduates, and graduate students from all countries and studying in all majors are eligible

In one summer, the Koch Summer Fellow Program can give you the real-world experience and professional network you need in today’s competitive job market.
The Koch Summer Fellow Program is made possible by the generous support of the Charles Koch Foundation.
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Porque ainda estamos escravos

Robert Nozick explica: 
http://xrepublic.s3.amazonaws.com/videos/converted/3230/The_Tale_of_the_Slave_-_Robert_Nozick_mp4_1350468789.mp4

Teoria política do populismo

A Political Theory of Populism
Daron Acemoglu
MIT
Georgy Egorov
Northwestern University
Konstantin Sonin
New Economic School
September 21, 2012
Abstract
When voters fear that politicians may be in‡uenced or corrupted by the rich elite, signals of integrity
are valuable. As a consequence, an honest politician seeking reelection chooses ‘populist’policies— i.e.,
policies to the left of the median voter— as a way of signaling that he is not beholden to the interests of
the right. Politicians that are in‡uenced by right-wing special interests respond by choosing moderate, or
even left-of-center policies. This populist bias of policy is greater when the value of remaining in o¢ ce is
higher for the politician; when there is greater polarization between the policy preferences of the median
voter and right-wing special interests; when politicians are perceived as more likely to be corrupt; when
there is an intermediate amount of noise in the information that voters receive; when politicians are more
forward-looking; and when there is greater uncertainty about the type of the incumbent. We also show
that ‘soft term limits’may exacerbate, rather than reduce, the populist bias of policies.
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Saúde

Putting Health in Perspective

Yuval Levin

The conservation of health ... is without doubt the primary good and the foundation of all other goods of this life.

—René Descartes (1637)

If government’s purpose isn’t to improve the health and longevity of its citizens, I don’t know what its purpose is.

—Michael Bloomberg (2012)

On its surface, the political life of the United States cannot help but strike us as impossibly complicated. At any given time, we confront an astonishingly diverse array of public policy problems. Each of these “issues,” as we have come to call them, seems almost impenetrably convoluted in itself and largely disconnected from all of the others. Who could simultaneously understand the intricacies of our tax code, the inefficiencies of our entitlement system, the inadequacies of our transportation system, the moral challenges presented by the abortion or marriage debates, and the ins and outs of the dozens of other prominent public questions demanding our attention all the time? And if we are not competent to think about all of these problems in detail, how can we expect to govern ourselves?
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Capitalismo de compadre americano

David Stockman was the architect of the Reagan Revolution meant to restore sound money principles to the U.S. government. It failed, derailed by politics, special interests, welfare, and warfare. In The Great Deformation Stockman describes how the working of free markets and democracy has long been under threat in America, and provides a nonpartisan, surprising catalog of the corrupters and defenders. His analysis overturns the assumptions of Keynesians and monetarists alike, showing how both “liberal” and “neo-conservative” interference in markets has proved damaging and often dangerous. Over time, crony capitalism has made fools of us all, transforming Republican treasury secretaries into big government interventionists, and populist Democrat presidents into industry wrecking internationalists. Today’s national debt stands at nearly $16 trillion. Divided equally among taxpayers, each of us is $52,000 in debt. This book explains how we got here—and why this warped crony capitalism has betrayed so many of our hopes and dreams.
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Infantilismo - a cultura dominante de nosso tempo

Thomas Sowell: "... Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state, whether in Western Europe or on this side of the Atlantic.
Economist Edward Lazear has cut through all of Barack Obama's claims about "creating jobs" with one plain and inescapable fact – "there hasn't been one day during the entire Obama presidency when as many Americans were working as on the day President Bush left office." Whatever number of jobs were created during the Obama administration, more have been lost.
How are children supposed to learn to act like adults, when so much of what they see on television shows adults acting like children?
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Livro de orações

The Book of Common Prayer at three hundred and fifty.

by James Wood 

 Thomas Cranmer’s phrases echo through English literature and popular culture.

Suppose you find yourself, in the late afternoon, in one of the English cathedral towns—Durham, say, or York, or Salisbury, or Wells, or Norwich—or in one of the great university cities, like Oxford or Cambridge. The shadows are thickening, and you are mysteriously drawn to the enormous, ancient stone structure at the center of the city. You walk inside, and find that a service is just beginning. Through the stained glass, the violet light outside is turning to black. Inside, candles are lit; the flickering flames dance and rest, dance and rest. A precentor chants, “O Lord, open thou our lips.” A choir breaks into song: “And our mouth shall shew forth thy praise.” The precentor continues, “O God, make speed to save us.” And the choir replies, musically, “O Lord, make haste to help us.”

The visitor has stumbled upon a service, Evensong, whose roots stretch back at least to the tenth century, and whose liturgy has been in almost continuous use since 1549, the date of the first Book of Common Prayer, which was revised in 1552, and lightly amended in 1662, three hundred and fifty years ago. The Book of Common Prayer was the first compendium of worship in English. The words—many of them, at least—were written by Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury between 1533 and 1556.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/10/22/121022crat_atlarge_wood#ixzz29PqjYVNG

Obama

Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm took part in one of the most extraordinary conversations ever on British television. Speaking in 1994 to the author Michael Ignatieff about the fall of the Berlin Wall five years earlier, the historian was asked how he felt about his earlier support for the Soviet Union.
If Communism had achieved its aims, but at the cost of, say, 15 to 20 million people - as opposed to the 100million it actually killed in Russia and China - would Hobsbawm have supported it? His answer was a single word: ‘Yes’.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2211961/Eric-Hobsbawm-He-hated-Britain-excused-Stalins-genocide-But-traitor-too.html#ixzz29JlYMSZz

Avaliação da "produção" científica

Veja artigos de Konradin Metze sobre os problemas da avaliação da "produção" científica na área de medicina

Konradin Metze

Konradin Metze , MD, PhD, pathologist, is leader of the research group analytical cellular pathology, member of the National Institute of Science and Techonology on Photonics Applied to Cell Biology (INFABIC) , professor at the postgraduate courses of Medical Pathophysiology and Medical Sciences at the University of Campinas, Brazil and academic editor of the scientific electronic journal Plos One.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2972600/
http://www.scielo.br/pdf/clin/v65n10/v65n10a02.pdf
http://junq.info/?p=1300

Política como ela é

Assim funciona política

Rigged market capitalism

http://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2012-10/interview-michael-lind

Everything is riggedd!

(NaturalNews) I've been pondering this topic for weeks, trying to find the words to communicate the full impact of this realization to which we are all increasingly awakening. Everything is rigged... the stock market, the news, the food, your taxes, public schools, the health care system, and on and on.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/037508_rigged_awakening_consciousness.html#ixzz291ixZpRY

Patentes provocam caos

“There’s a real chaos,” said Richard A. Posner, a federal appellate judge who has helped shape patent law, in an interview. “The standards for granting patents are too loose.”
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Bolívar (sobre Chávez)

Por que os mentirosos ganham as eleições

Why we vote for liars

By Jack Shafer

"... The pervasiveness of campaign lies tells us something we’d rather not acknowledge, at least not publicly: On many issues, voters prefer lies to the truth. That’s because the truth about the economy, the future of Social Security and Medicare, immigration, the war in Afghanistan, taxes, the budget, the deficit, and the national debt is too dismal to contemplate. As long as voters cast their votes for candidates who make them feel better, candidates will continue to lie. And to win.

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Ciência em perigo

O moderno sistema de subsídios para "projetos" atrapalha o progresso científico

Wissenschaft in Gefahr 

"Den Fressnapf der Forscher verschoben"

Die ständige Frage an Wissenschaftler nach dem Nutzen ihres Tuns beschneidet massiv die Freiheit der Forschung, sagt Gerd Folkers, Professor an der ETH Zürich. Die Praxis der Förderung von Staat und Stiftungen berge die Gefahr, der Findung des Neuen entgegen zu wirken.

Da staatliche Förderung und Stiftungen aber die hauptsächlichen Finanzquellen für eine unabhängige akademische Forschung sind, stellt sich zunehmend die Frage nach ihrer tatsächlichen Unabhängigkeit. Durch das Projekt-/Peer-Review-System, laufen sie zumindest teilweise Gefahr der Findung des Neuen entgegenzuwirken.

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Complexidade

Why short-term thinking is the greatest threat to the global economy

BY DANIEL ALTMAN

The biggest problem facing the global economy is not climate change, trade imbalances, financial regulation, or the eurozone. It is short-term thinking. An epidemic of myopia has swept over the world in the past few decades, and it threatens our living standards like nothing else.

It's an epidemic with more than one cause, and not all of them are obviously sinister. Part of the problem is the growing complexity of the global economy. Life is simply getting harder to handle with the brainpower at our disposal.

To understand why, imagine a chess master. She might be able to think her way through the game about eight moves in advance. Now add more squares to the board, and perhaps a few new pieces. How many moves in advance can she think? Not eight -- maybe not even five. Because of the growing interconnectedness of the global economy, our lives are becoming more complex in much the same way, with many more moving parts; we can no longer worry just about those closest to us. As a result, we can't plan for the long term as easily as we used to. Every corner of the global economy is like a chessboard with an infinite number of squares; there's simply too much uncertainty.
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Hobbes - o anti-libertário clássico

After more than 350 years, the first critical edition of Hobbes’s “Leviathan”

Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan. Edited by Noel Malcolm. Oxford University Press; 2,355 pages; $375 and £195. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

A modern materialism, as opposed to the ancient materialism of Democritus, was one of Hobbes’s two main philosophical innovations. The other was a novel way to see government: Hobbes’s method in political philosophy was the opposite of Utopianism. Instead of describing an ideal society, as Plato does in “The Republic”, Hobbes starts by imagining the horrors of a lawless world, where everyone is left to fend for themselves. The result, as he famously wrote, would be “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” To avoid this result, man must cede his natural right of self-defence, and much else, to a sovereign authority with very broad powers, preferably an absolute monarch. Anything less leads to hellish consequences.
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O estado idiotizador

Guevara sobre os negros

O que significa "governo"?

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon:

“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. 

That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality."

Fonte

Welfare state americano

Obama encouraging Americans to get on welfare

By MICHAEL TANNER
"There are 33 housing programs, for example, run by four different Cabinet departments, including, bizarrely, the Department of Energy. There are 21 programs providing food or food-purchasing assistance. They’re administered by three different federal departments and one independent agency. There are eight different health care programs administered by five separate agencies in HHS. Six Cabinet departments and five independent agencies oversee 27 cash or general assistance programs. Altogether, seven different Cabinet departments and six independent agencies each administer at least one anti-poverty program.
All those programs cost taxpayers more than $668 billion last year. That’s an increase of more than $193 billion since Barack Obama became president. It’s roughly 2½ times greater than any previous increase over a similar time frame in U.S. history and will increase means-tested welfare spending by about 2.4 percent of gross domestic product.
Moreover, if one includes state and local welfare spending, government at all levels will spend more than $952 billion this year to fight poverty...
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Linguagem e natureza humana

    Steven Pinker - The Stuff of Thought: Language as a window into human nature  

For Steven Pinker, the brilliance of the mind lies in the way it uses just two processes to turn the finite building blocks of our language into infinite meanings. The first is metaphor: we take a concrete idea and use it as a stand-in for abstract thoughts. The second is combination: we combine ideas according to rules, like the syntactic rules of language, to create new thoughts out of old ones.

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