Paris - um choque cultural

'Paris Syndrome' strikes Japanese

By Caroline Wyatt BBC News, Paris The reality of Paris does not always live up to the dream A dozen or so Japanese tourists a year have to be repatriated from the French capital, after falling prey to what's become known as "Paris syndrome". That is what some polite Japanese tourists suffer when they discover that Parisians can be rude or the city does not meet their expectations. The experience can apparently be too stressful for some and they suffer a psychiatric breakdown. Around a million Japanese travel to France every year. Shocking reality Many of the visitors come with a deeply romantic vision of Paris - the cobbled streets, as seen in the film Amelie, the beauty of French women or the high culture and art at the Louvre. The reality can come as a shock.  Mais

Holodomor

O que a mídia ignora

A mais perigosa ideologia

Marxismo: a máquina assassina

por R.J. Rummel, domingo, 28 de abril de 2013

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Com a queda da União Soviética e dos governos comunistas do Leste Europeu, muitas pessoas passaram a crer que o marxismo, a religião do comunismo, está morto. Ledo engano. O marxismo está vivo e vigoroso ainda em muitos países, como Coréia do Norte, Cuba, Vietnã, Laos, em vários países africanos e, principalmente, na mente de muitos líderes políticos da América do Sul. No entanto, de extrema importância para o futuro da humanidade é o fato de que o comunismo ainda segue poluindo o pensamento e as ideias de uma vasta multidão de acadêmicos e intelectuais do Ocidente.
De todas as religiões, seculares ou não, o marxismo é de longe a mais sangrenta — muito mais sangrenta do que a Inquisição Católica, do que as várias cruzadas e do que a Guerra dos Trinta Anos entre católicos e protestantes. Na prática, o marxismo foi sinônimo de terrorismo sanguinário, de expurgos seguidos de morte, de campos de prisioneiros e de trabalhos forçados, de deportações, de inanição dantesca, de execuções extrajudiciais, de julgamentos "teatrais", e de genocídio e assassinatos em massa.
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Universidades sem cultura

'Democracy May Have Had Its Day'

Donald Kagan, Yale's great classicist gives his final lecture, fighting as ever for Western civilization.

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By MATTHEW KAMINSKI

New Haven, Conn.
Donald Kagan is engaging in one last argument. For his "farewell lecture" here at Yale on Thursday afternoon, the 80-year-old scholar of ancient Greece—whose four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War inspired comparisons to Edward Gibbon's Roman history—uncorked a biting critique of American higher education.
Universities, he proposed, are failing students and hurting American democracy. Curricula are "individualized, unfocused and scattered." On campus, he said, "I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness." Rare are "faculty with atypical views," he charged. "Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of our Western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values." He counseled schools to adopt "a common core of studies" in the history, literature and philosophy "of our culture." By "our" he means Western.
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Ditadura perfeita

Acorda Brasil

Depois de tudo, Demóstenes pode ser aposentado com R$ 22 mil por mês

24/4/2013 17:09
Por Redação - de Brasília

A situação o senador cassado Demóstenes Torres consegue se manter vitalício no cargo

Por maioria simples, o Conselho Nacional do Ministério Público (CNMP) decidiu, na tarde desta quarta-feira, que o ex-senador Demóstenes Torres – afastado do cargo de procurador de Justiça do MP de Goiás até o fim de maio – terá como pena máxima a aposentadoria compulsória. Passará a receber R$ 22 mil por mês, em caráter vitalício, mesmo depois de ter o mandato cassado por envolvimento com o contraventor Carlos Augusto Ramos, o Carlinhos Cachoeira. Após o prazo de afastamento, o CNMP poderá resolver por mantê-lo afastado por mais um período de tempo ou até mesmo reintegrá-lo ao cargo. A decisão de afastar o político goiano fora tomada unilateralmente, em março, pela relatora do caso, a promotora Cláudia Chagas.
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O fim do poder

The End of Power

How wealth, health, cheap flights, and prepaid phone cards are undermining authority across the globe

Moisés Naím 

Power is shifting—from large, stable armies to loose bands of insurgents, from corporate leviathans to nimble start-ups, from presidential palaces to public squares. It has become harder to wield power and easier to lose it, and the world is becoming less predictable as a result. As people become more prosperous and mobile, they are harder to control and more apt to question authority.
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Estudo sugere que vida é mais antiga que a Terra

Estudo sugere que a vida é mais antiga que a própria Terra.

Aplicando a ciência da computação à biologia, pesquisadores levantaram a intrigante possibilidade de que a vida surgiu antes da própria Terra, tendo se originado fora do nosso sistema solar. A Lei de Moore é a teoria de que os computadores aumentam exponencialmente sua complexidade, dobrando sua capacidade de processamento a cada dois anos.
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Verdade?

If you loose both your legs from explosive trauma half your blood is gone in one minute via the femoral arteries, youre dead after two. Bleeding out is worse with blunt force trauma (like shrapnel) because flesh is torn rather than cut, exposing more arterial and vascular tissue. The human body holds 5 to 6 LITERS of blood. If that really happened you would see blood EVERYWHERE, the guy would be drenched in it. You would also see what’s called arterial spurtting from the injury. Most likely he would vomit after turning ghost white from shock, then turning delirious or passing out. As for the “tourniquet”…
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Augustino

Augustine, Modernity, and the Recovery of True Education

April 5, 2013 By Bradley Green 2 Comments

St. Augustine

by Bradley G. Green

In the Western world there is a rich tradition of the life of the mind. Much of the emphasis on the life of the mind in the West flows from our Christian inheritance, as seen in the biblical documents, and in key thinkers of the West (e.g., Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Calvin, among others). As the modern world has jettisoned its Christian intellectual inheritance, there has been a corresponding confusion about the value of the mind, and indeed, even of the possibility of knowledge at all, whether of God or of the created order.

In terms of reflection upon the nature of the intellectual life, I would suggest that one of the most pressing tasks for contemporary Christians would be the recovery and cultivation of the inextricable link between the Christian faith and the intellectual life, or the intellectual endeavor. In order to engage in such reflection, I take up the relationship of Christianity and the liberal arts, and in particular seek to draw from Augustine as we reflect upon this relationship.

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O verdadeiro Marx

The Real Karl Marx

John Gray

Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life
by Jonathan Sperber
Liveright, 648 pp., $35.00
In many ways, Jonathan Sperber suggests, Marx was “a backward-looking figure,” whose vision of the future was modeled on conditions quite different from any that prevail today:

The view of Marx as a contemporary whose ideas are shaping the modern world has run its course and it is time for a new understanding of him as a figure of a past historical epoch, one increasingly distant from our own: the age of the French Revolution, of Hegel’s philosophy, of the early years of English industrialization and the political economy stemming from it.

Sperber’s aim is to present Marx as he actually was—a nineteenth-century thinker engaged with the ideas and events of his time. If you see Marx in this way, many of the disputes that raged around his legacy in the past century will seem unprofitable, even irrelevant. Claiming that Marx was in some way “intellectually responsible” for twentieth-century communism will appear thoroughly misguided; but so will the defense of Marx as a radical democrat, since both views “project back onto the nineteenth century controversies of later times.”
Certainly Marx understood crucial features of capitalism; but they were “those of the capitalism that existed in the early decades of the nineteenth century,” rather than the very different capitalism that exists at the start of the twenty-first century. Again, while he looked ahead to a new kind of human society that would come into being after capitalism had collapsed, Marx had no settled conception of what such a society would be like. Turning to him for a vision of our future, for Sperber, is as misconceived as blaming him for our past.
Using as one of his chief sources the newly available edition of the writings of Marx and Engels, commonly known by its German acronym the MEGA, Sperber constructs a picture of Marx’s politics that is instructively different from the one preserved in standard accounts. The positions Marx adopted were rarely dictated by any preexisting theoretical commitments regarding capitalism or communism. More often, they reflected his attitudes toward the ruling European powers and their conflicts, and the intrigues and rivalries in which he was involved as a political activist.
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Educação - resumo de 15 anos de pesquisa

Bildungsforscher Hattie: "Die Schule kann nicht alle Probleme lösen"

DPA

Schulkinder, Lehrerin (Archiv): Manchmal geht es mehr um die Eltern als um die Kinder

Kleinere Klassen? Bringen nichts! Abitur nach zwölf oder 13 Schuljahren? Eine sinnlose Debatte! John Hattie, einer der einflussreichsten Bildungsforscher, räumt im Interview mit den Mythen der Schulpolitik auf - und mahnt: Lehrer müssen sich auf ihr Kerngeschäft konzentrieren, den Unterricht.

SPIEGEL: Herr Hattie, Sie haben 15 Jahre lang Bildungsstudien ausgewertet, mit dem Ergebnis, dass guter Unterricht den Ausschlag gibt. Funktioniert Schule so einfach?

Hattie: Meine Arbeit zeigt, dass es ein ganzes Bündel von Faktoren gibt, die den Schulerfolg von Kindern prägen können: ihre soziale Herkunft, die Familienverhältnisse, ihr Selbstverständnis. Am wirksamsten ist aber das, was im Unterricht zwischen Lehrern und Schülern passiert. Und das können wir im Gegensatz zu Armut oder Reichtum in der Schularbeit direkt beeinflussen. Was mich interessiert, sind erfolgreiche Lehrer.SPIEGEL: Was macht einen guten Lehrer aus?
Hattie: Dass er sich seiner eigenen Wirkung bewusst ist und sich fortlaufend überprüft. Dass er Stoff mit Leidenschaft vermittelt. Dass er sich dafür zuständig fühlt, dass alle Kinder in seiner Klasse etwas lernen, nicht nur einige wenige. Dass er eine Geisteshaltung mit ins Klassenzimmer bringt, die zum Lernen ermutigt und Fehler zulässt. Dass er anspruchsvolle Ziele vorgibt. Dafür werden Lehrer bezahlt.
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How intellectuals tick

Noam Chomsky explains
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SewlKDMFR4

8 caminhos para destruir o mundo

Mapa global de taxa de homicídios

Mapa global com as taxas mais recentes dos países por taxa de homicídio a cada 100.000 habitantes. Fonte: UNODC.

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Convite

Antony Mueller
palestra sobre "o euro - um caminho errado?"
no 19/04/2013 - Auditoria da reitoria da UFS 
14-18 h
Congresso Internacional SIRI
http://media.wix.com/ugd//ab0822_390324f9c09fce2da6370376fb88a918.pdf

Saber não é suficiente

Direito e Economia - innovação e crescimento

http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=books

Como ensinar "justiça social"

"Você pode ensinar seu filho sobre como funciona o estado de uma maneira fácil. Ofereça a ele $10 para lavar o carro. Quando ele tiver terminado dê-lhe apenas $5 e diga que os outros $5 ficaram como impostos. Dê $1 para o irmão mais novo e diga a seu filho que isso é "justiça social". E diga que você, o governo, precisa dos $4 restantes para cobrir os custos desse "trabalho" de redistribuir o dinheiro. Quando ele chorar e disser que isso é injusto, diga-lhe que ele está sendo "egoísta" e "ganancioso". (Joseph Sobran, jornalista e escritor americano.) - Do mural de Cristiano Fiori Chiocca

Higgs sobre guerra

Robert Higgs:
I have never considered myself a good public speaker, but that opinion has not caused me to decline all invitations to speak. In February 2012, I spoke at Furman University for a program on war. I dealt with a topic that has engaged me more than any other over the past fifty years -- war and its relation to our liberties and our economic affairs. The speech runs about 50 minutes. It ends here about 4 minutes into the Q&A (after a gap, the next speech, by Tom DiLorenzo, begins). I am grateful to Thomas Hanson for filming my speech and making it accessible on the Web.
Assista a palestra de 50 minutes

A essência do racismo

Aracaju é ou não é NE?

Alunos do Norte e NE têm 4 anos de atraso em relação aos do Sul e Sudeste

Estudantes no 9º ano do ensino fundamental em Alagoas, Maranhão e Amapá sabem menos português e matemática que aqueles de Minas e do Distrito Federal

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Akido verbal

How To Respond To Criticism (Part 1: Verbal Aikido)

Fred Kofman

Professor of Leadership and Coaching, Author of Conscious Business

prevents rational discussion. They are rules of engagement similar to the ones of the scientific method, which focus on reason and evidence. They take hostility out of the equation, allowing for a logical consideration of the different points of view.

1. Speak with humility. Present your argument in safe language, as I described here. Own your opinions. Present them in first person as the conclusion of your reasoning process. This gives others the chance to present a different opinion without clashing with yours. For example, when you say, “In light of the evidence from the focus groups, I believe that the marketing campaign is ready to launch.” you make room for your counterpart to say, “I disagree. The focus groups may have liked the ads, but our retailers are not convinced.”
   
2. Listen with respect. Pay attention to others’ arguments, as I described here, especially when you disagree with them. Reciprocity is the most powerful influence you can exert. If you genuinely try to understand their perspective, they are more likely to try to understand yours. For example, when you say, “It worries me that the retailers are not convinced, what do you suggest we do about it?” you neither discount his data nor yours. This allows both of you to examine all perspectives.
   
3. Choose your battle. If the disagreement is a matter of personal preferences, there is no need to agree. It is futile to argue whether chocolate “tastes” better than strawberry. It may taste better to you, and it may taste worse to him. Unless a joint decision is necessary, it is best to agree to disagree. The desire to “be right” fuels fights that serve no practical purpose.
   
4. Choose your battlefield. Culture can be defined as “the way we do things around here”. If you live in a culture where might makes right, your humility and respect will weaken you. Bullies will always win out in bully-land. Or at least until the group is eliminated by fitter competitors. Reason always beats force in the long term. If you don´t want to go the way of the dinosaurs, evolve to a more rational niche.

In spite of your preventative actions, you may need to face an arrogant attack. It`s time to apply verbal aikido.
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Anarquo capitalismo

Custo Brasil

Telecoms in Brazil

Living the custo Brasil

A YEAR ago my Brazilian mobile phone stopped working properly. The problem was not the device, but the network. Despite being switched on and a good signal showing, calls would be routed to voicemail—and the voicemail only arrive in my inbox several hours later. E-mails arrived sporadically. Often I was unable to make calls myself. When I did manage to talk to someone I could barely hear them. Calls would break up and end abruptly.
Asking around I discovered that many of my Brazilian friends who were with the same network, TIM, were having the same problems. One had gone into a shop to complain. Oh, we sold too many contracts this year, the sales assistant said blithely, and now the network is always overloaded. She estimated it would take "a few years" for the infrastructure to catch up with the glut of new customers.
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Mistérios da vida brasileira

Francês que mora em BH faz lista com 65 impressões sobre o Brasil

A controversa lista fala sobre assuntos do cotidiano, que incomodam os brasileiros e chamaram a atenção de Olivier

Um texto bem-humorado do francês Olivier Teboul, de 29, anos, virou febre nas redes sociais dos belo-horizontinos na manhã deste sábado, 14. O engenheiro de computação, que trabalha no escritório do Google em BH há cerca de um ano e meio, coletou curiosidades sobre o jeito de ser dos brasileiros e registrou tudo em seu blog.

A lista se espalhou rapidamente pela internet e, apesar de controversa, já foi acessada por cerca de 15 mil pessoas e comentada por quase 500. Em entrevista ao jornal Estado de Minas, Olivier disse que o objetivo do texto não era ofender os brasileiros, e sim dizer sua percepção das diferenças entre a França e o Brasil.

Confira alguns itens da lista de Olivier:

1 - Aqui no Brasil, tudo se organiza em fila: fila para pagar, fila para pedir, fila para entrar, fila para sair e fila para esperar a próxima fila. E duas pessoas ja bastam para constituir uma fila.
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Patentes

56 percent of all patent lawsuits are made by patent trolls

Summary: According to a new, comprehensive report by Lex Machina, more than half of all patent lawsuits in the US now come from patent trolls.

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for Between the Lines | April 11, 2013 -- 16:50 GMT (09:50 PDT)

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Patent lawsuits are used as weapons in business wars between companies such as Oracle vs. Google and Apple vs. Samsung. Behind the intellectual property (IP) headlines, however, Lex Machina, a Silicon Valley startup, has found that patent troll lawsuits have increased from 24 percent of cases filed in 2007 to 56% in 2012.

Lex Machina proves what we've feared all along: Patent trolls are winning

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a "patent troll uses patents as legal weapons, instead of actually creating any new products or coming up with new ideas." They collect their patents for pennies on the dollar from companies down on their luck. Since the Patent & Trademark Office (PTO) has a bad habit of issuing very broad patents for ideas that are neither new nor revolutionary, it's easy for a patent troll, which typically has no other business, to send out threatening letters to anyone who might conceivably infringe their patents.  These letters usually threaten a lawsuit unless the alleged infringer agrees to pay a licensing fee. These charges can range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Patent trolling is a very successful business.
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Defesa

"The problem in defense is how far you can go [in military spending] without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without." -- President Dwight Eisenhower, January 18, 1953

Chavismo

Reinaldo Azevedo

Chávez está morto, e o chavismo também! Fraude tira a eleição do oposicionista Capriles; Maduro é “eleito” com menos de 2 pontos de diferença. É roubo!

Bingo!

Escrevi ontem aqui: “É a ditadura que sustenta o chavismo, não é o chavismo que sustenta a ditadura”. Com essas palavras, chamava a atenção para o fato de que é mentirosa a versão de que a sociedade venezuelana foi mesmerizada pelo tirano e de que a oposição representa não mais do que a vontade de uma extrema minoria. Nicolás Maduro, que já exerce o poder de forma ilegítima — cuja posse foi legalizada por uma Corte de Justiça composta de eunucos —, foi declarado o vencedor das eleições deste domingo. Com pouco mais de 99% da apuração concluída, obteve 50,66% dos votos, contra 49,07% do oposicionista Henrique Capriles, que não reconheceu o resultado e pediu a recontagem do total de votos, não de apenas uma parte. Os oposicionistas dizem ter recebido mais de 3 mil denúncias de fraudes, vindas de todo o país. No discurso da “vitória”, Maduro diz concordar com a recontagem, mas tentará sabotá-la, podem ficar certos.

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Ciência falsa no serviço do estado

Pseudoscience and Statism

Posted by Charles Burris on April 14, 2013 07:34 AM

Ideas do not exist in a sterile vacuum but are often intertwined and serendipitously related to each other. Such is the case of various statist doctrines that came to fruition in the 19^th century, and which still dramatically affect our world today. “Scientific racism,” “social Darwinism,” eugenics, Comtean positivism, imperialism, and “social imperialism,” were pseudoscientific rationales for the expansionary and invasive welfare-warfare state at home and abroad. Intellectuals and politicians in the United States were drawn to Progressivism by the same elitist positivism that drew them to other "social control" rationalizations; commitment to the explanatory power of scientific social inquiry to get at the root causes of social and economic problems; the legitimacy of coercive social control, deriving from a holist conception of society as prior to and greater than the sum of its constituent individuals; and the efficacy of elitist social control via expert management of the state apparatus.

When life was good

"My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey." -- William Faulkner

Propriedade intelectual

The Overwhelming Empirical Case Against Patent and Copyright

by Stephan Kinsella on October 23, 2012

Below is an excerpt adapted from my draft paper “Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society,” collecting and summarizing just some of the empirical case against patent and copyright.
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O moderno caminho para ganhar felicidade permanente

MinusIQ | The pill to lower your IQ permanently
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9pD_UK6vGU

País de juízes

Justiça estadual baiana tem déficit de 300 juízes

Por Victor Vieira

O déficit nas comarcas baianas já é de 300 juízes. Essa foi uma das conclusões do Diagnóstico do Poder Judiciário Estadual, feito pela seccional da Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil na Bahia. O trabalho, elaborado entre março e abril, reúne os principais problemas de 130 comarcas. O presidente da OAB-BA, Luiz Viana Queiroz, entregou o relatório ao presidente do Tribunal de Justiça baiano, desembargador Mário Alberto Hirs.
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Lembrete:
"O Judiciário brasileiro tem 91 cortes, mais de 300 mil servidores e aproximadamente 16 mil juízes."
No Reino Unido em total tem 969 juízes!

Explicar

Holocausto africano

Congo Free State, 1885-1908
From 1885 to 1908, it is estimated that the Congolese native population decreased by about ten million people.[2] Historian Adam Hochshild identifies a number of causes for this loss under Leopold’s reign—murder, starvation, exhaustion and exposure, disease, and plummeting birth rates. Congolese historian Ndaywel e Nziem estimates the death toll at thirteen million.[7]  Leopold capitalized on the vast wealth extracted in ivory and rubber during his twenty-three year reign of terror in the CFS. He spent some of this wealth by constructing grand palaces and monuments including the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren. Ironically, Leopold never visited the kingdom in which he committed such atrocities, to witness the tragedy of his greed.
Russell Schimmer, GSP, Yale University
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As regras da felicidade

22 Things Happy People Do Differently

by Joseph Mercola

Many people spend their lives waiting to be happy. You may think, “if only I had more money,” or “could lose weight,” or you fill in the blank, then I would be happy.
Well here’s a secret: you can be happy right now. It’s not always easy, but you can choose to be happy, and in the vast majority of circumstances there’s no one who can stop you except for yourself.
The truth is, happiness doesn’t come from wealth, perfect looks or even a perfect relationship. Happiness comes from within. This is why, if you truly want to be happy, you need to work on yourself, first.

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Verdades del pasado e os mentiros de hoje

Instituto de política externa do Ron Paul

Ron Paul to Launch Foreign Policy Institute Next Week

Matthew Feeney|Apr. 12, 2013 3:35 pm

Credit: David Carlyon/wikimediaFormer Congressman Ron Paul will launch the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity next week in Washington D.C. The institute will be headed by Daniel McAdams, Paul’s former Congressional foreign policy aide.
From the announcement:

The Ron Paul Institute will focus on the two issues most important to Dr. Paul, education and coming generations. It will fill the growing demand for information on foreign affairs from a non-interventionist perspective through a lively and diverse website, and will provide unique educational opportunities to university students and others.
The neo-conservative era is dead. The ill-advised policies pushed by the neo-cons have everywhere led to chaos and destruction, and to a hatred of the United States and its people. Multi-trillion dollar wars have not made the world a safer place; they have only bankrupted our economic future. The Ron Paul Institute will provide the tools and the education to chart a new course with the understanding that only through a peaceful foreign policy can we hope for a prosperous tomorrow.

The Institute’s board of advisors includes Lew Rockwell, Andrew Napolitano, former Ambassador Faith Whittlesey, Rep. Walter Jones, Jr. (R-N.C.), Rep. John Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.), and former Congressman Dennis Kucinich.
Read more from Reason.com on Ron Paul here.

A nova revolução industrial

The Cottage Industrial Revolution
April 12, 2013 

“The simple truth is that our businessmen do not want a government that will let business alone. They want a government that they can use.”          -- Albert Jay Nock, Cogitations

Dear Capital & Crisis Reader, 

The 20th century was an age of big business. And investors did well backing the giant blue chips on their march to glory. But those days are over. In its simplest terms, my thesis is to bet with the small guys. 

I think of them as cottage industrials. A cottage industry brings up images of small-scale, local industry. It’s a good metaphor for what I have in mind. 

Author William Thorndike -- of whom we heard in your last letter -- sets the scene: 

“[I]n American business, there is a deeply ingrained urge to get bigger.Larger companies get more attention in the press; the executives of those companies tend to earn higher salaries and are more likely to be asked to join prestigious boards and clubs. As a result, it is very rare to see a company proactively shrink itself… [Yet] growth, it turns out, often doesn’t correlate with maximizing shareholder value.”

It used to be economies of scale meant you had to get bigger. But there are alsodiseconomies of scale. Companies can get too big. They can get inflexible. They can saddle themselves with such enormous expenses to support that they no longer can compete effectively in smaller spaces. Yet the returns in those smaller spaces are richer than in the open plains. 

Jim Gober, the CEO of Infinity Property & Casualty, told me something fascinating about his business. (Infinity is a small auto insurer I profiled in your last letter.) He said that even with all the advertising dollars spent by the big companies in recent years, consumers are no more likely to switch insurers. As a result, the small guy could compete on price by not spending the money on national advertising. By not having to maintain a national “brand,” he kept his costs lower. 

So Infinity has been able to compete successfully with companies 50 times as large in small markets. In fact, Infinity has outperformed them in almost every way for the whole 10 years of its existence as a public company -- including the one that really counts: returns to shareholders. The big companies don’t have what it takes to compete with Gober on his own turf. They can’t. 

Size, then, can actually be an impediment to good shareholder returns. 

Think about what keeps the giants humming. Fat cat salaries for the brass. Lavish bonuses and stock option plans. Corporate suites with wood furniture and art on the walls. Headquarters in office towers that employ thousands of people. (Doing what? I always wonder as I walk past them in Manhattan.) Glossy annual reports that say nothing. And to top it off, they produce mostly lousy products that people hate. (Does anybody love Microsoft’s products? Try LibreOffice. It does everything Microsoft Office does -- for free. It is hard not to love free.) 

Where is the shareholder in all this? 

Nowhere… The big blue chips are mostly faceless, bureaucratic monstrosities. Like all bureaucracies, they exist to pile food on their own plates. Shareholders are people to keep quiet and out of the way. 

A better model is the cottage industrial. 

But what is a cottage industrial exactly? The table below stacks up, in general terms, what I think of as “cottage industrial” set against the giant offspring of state corporatism: 

Giant Corporations	Cottage Industrial
Large	Small
Global	Local/focused
Agent managers	Owner managers
Many markets	Niche markets
Large overhead	Lean
Hierarchical	Flat
CEO in the news	Never heard of the CEO

Here is another example of a cottage industrial: Contango Oil & Gas. 

Ken Peak is the founder and was the CEO and largest shareholder until recently. He was an owner, not an agent. Even at Contango’s height, it was a fraction of the size of large natural gas producers like Chesapeake. But Contango focused on creating value per share. It had eight employees and just 11 wells. Its biggest expense was taxes. 

Contango was always among the lowest-cost producers of natural gas in North America. As an investment, investors are up over 2,000% since inception in 1999 -- trouncing the Dow’s paltry 26% over the same period. (That’s the Dow Jones industrial average, made up of the giants of American business.) Contango’s investors have been up as much as 4,000% before natural gas prices collapsed. 

Contango, as with Infinity above, is a model of the kind of business I’m talking about owning. 

(As footnote to Contango: We owned it here and made a 24% gain. I owned it twice in my Special Situations newsletter, once clearing a 107% gain and another time eking out just a 1% gain. Peak, sadly, is ill and on medical leave. I wish him well.) 

All is to say there is an alternative to having to shack up with the swollen GEs and AT&Ts of the world. Your returns will be greater, and instead of backing overpaid CEOs, expense accounts, overhead and bureaucracies… you’ll own shops where people are intrinsically motivated to do well because they own a piece of their work. You’ll own something you can grasp on a human scale. 

Our entire portfolio is made up of companies I consider cottage industrials. They are small players in their industries. They focus on local niche markets. They are lean. And they are run by owners -- not hired agents. 

But there is more to this story… 

***The Cottage Industrial Revolution 

The above is a simple enough idea. In some ways, the above has always been true. What makes it timely for today? 

I have to backtrack a bit and tell you about the darker side to gigantism in Corporate America. It is the history no one talks about. The history that tells you how much the state and big business are partners in crime. 

For example, one of the biggest misconceptions about FDR’s New Deal is that it was somehow revolutionary and anti-business. Actually, it was the culmination of a trend that began much earlier. And business welcomed it. 

The great Murray Rothbard summed up government intervention this way: 

“The intervention by the federal government was designed, not to curb big business monopoly for the sake of the public weal, but to create monopolies that big business… had not been able to establish amidst the competitive gales of the free market.”

(You can read the full essay here. It’s long, so save it for when you have some time. It will adjust your political perspective.) 

He cites the work of Gabriel Kolko, who showed how the vast structure of regulations we take for granted was conceived by -- and championed by -- big businessmen. 

If you apply this kind of thinking to today’s giants, it is not hard to see how government policy enabled them to achieve their great girth: 

What is Boeing if not for the military-industrial complex and the huge sums of tax money dumped into building civil aviation? What is JP Morgan without the helping hand of the Federal Reserve Bank? What is Wal-Mart without the U.S. taxpayer laying out the enormous capital required to build out the nation’s interstate highways and railroads to carry its cheap junk? Without zoning laws and licensing fees that stifle competition from the small shopkeeper? What is Microsoft or Pfizer without the state-granted privilege afforded by copyright and patents?

To answer my own questions: At a minimum, these firms are much smaller without the taxpayer subsidy. State privilege was a crutch that made them the giants they are today. 

Today, the state weakens as its finances soften. The state can’t keep up with the roads. Intellectual property is harder to defend in an Internet age. New technologies enable all kinds of small-scale producers to compete effectively with giants. 

At the very least, this thesis means lower returns for the old giants. The behemoths that prospered in the old world are ill fitted for the new world that awaits them. In impact, this new world could well be akin to another industrial revolution. Hence, the cottage industrial revolution. 

I haven’t fleshed all of this out fully, but I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. Am I crazy? Or do you too see how small, or locally based, owner-managed businesses are turning the tables on the giants -- like Infinity? 

I admit to a bias. 

When I travel, I aim to stay at locally owned hotels. When I seek out good restaurants, I go for the local haunts, not the chains. I prefer locally grown produce over gas-ripened tomatoes shipped from 1,000 miles away. (We have a milkman, for crying out loud!) Local is often better, in more ways than one. But mine is also a personal revolt against sameness and mass-produced crap. This carries over to my investing style, too, as I much prefer a smaller company that I can get my hands around to trying to figure out, say, GE.