Os maçons brasileiros deixaram os segredos de lado e enviaram ao Palácio do Planalto uma carta destinada à presidente Dilma Rousseff pedindo sua renúncia. Em tom agressivo, a mensagem chama a chefe do Executivo de mentirosa, diz que está vilipendiando o povo brasileiro e afirma que o PT é partido de quadrilheiros. Na carta, exige que os recursos públicos sejam aplicados sem má fé, sem negligência ou incompetência. A mensagem pede reforma no governo com a redução do tamanho da máquina administrativa, transparência na aplicação dos recursos públicos, o fim do “aparelhamento” do PT de cargos no Judiciário e até a saída do ministro Dias Toffoli, do STF e TSE, da turma que vai julgar o petrolão. Os maçons dizem na carta que a presidente perdeu o respeito dos brasileiros. Estima-se que existam quase 300 mil maçons no País. Mais
The U.S. imprisonment trend also looks like a hockey stick. Stable and modest growth occurred throughout the early twentieth century. Then in the 1970s, the line shot up, quintupling by the 2000s. Aside from dampening economic optimism, this trend evokes a similar visceral reaction to McCloskey’s. The change in U.S. inmate population has been so big and its accumulation so fast that it can’t be ignored.
David Garland coined the phrase “mass imprisonment” because he thought the phenomenon deserved a name all its own. Like Europe’s “great confinement” of the 17th century or Russia’s “gulag archipelago,” modern America’s mass incarceration appears unique via two defining features, its sheer size and its racially disparate application.[2] The term has become standard parlance, and such “American” features take center stage in most causal explanations. Popular accounts tend to focus on economic conditions; America’s individualist culture; its history of slavery, segregation, and racism; and conservative political preferences regarding prohibition and retribution. To fix incarceration, it’s implied that America must change its conscience and support controls against racial bias, better social programs for the poor, drug decriminalization, and less punitive policing. Mais
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2015/09/11/nyc-judge-delivers-massive-victory-to-uber-and-explains-modern-world-to-taxi-industry/#ixzz3lqXxrnM2
Uber and other ride-sharing platforms have been handed a major victory after Queens Supreme Court Justice Allan Weiss threw out a legal challenge to ride-sharing companies’ freedom to be hailed from apps.
Four credit unions with significant financial interests in yellow cab medallions argued that app-based services such as Uber are more akin to street private-hire vehicles, that can only pick up pre-booked passengers, but the app enables them to act like a street hail service.
However, Weiss rejected the arguments, saying that Uber was not breaking any regulations or infringing on the yellow cabs exclusive right to pick up street hails. The judge delivered a strongly worded response explaining some basic economics to the plaintiffs.
MOTIVATIONAL PRODUCTS DON'T WORK. BUT OUR DEMOTIVATOR® PRODUCTS DON'T WORK EVEN BETTER.
When we started Despair, we had a dream. To crush other people's dreams. But we knew, given our goal, we'd be in for a fight. After all, the Motivation Industry has been crushing dreams for decades, selling the easy lie of success you can buy. That's why we decided to differentiate ourselves- by crushing dreams with hard truths!
Three Popular Psychology Studies That Didn't Hold Up
In an unprecedented analysis, a team of 270 researchers redid 100 studies published in three top psychology journals. The team was interested in duplicating them as closely as possible to see whether they held up. Only 35 did so, according to the most frequently used statistical test. Below are three popular studies that did not check out, along with some possible reasons. Mais
Chronicle Review photo illustration by Ron Coddington, original image by De Agostini, Getty Images
By Terry Eagleton
"... teaching has been for some time a less vital business in British universities than research. It is research that brings in the money, not courses on Expressionism or the Reformation. Every few years, the British state carries out a thorough inspection of every university in the land, measuring the research output of each department in painstaking detail. It is on this basis that government grants are awarded. There has thus been less incentive for academics to devote themselves to their teaching, and plenty of reason for them to produce for production’s sake, churning out supremely pointless articles, starting up superfluous journals online, dutifully applying for outside research grants regardless of whether they really need them, and passing the odd pleasant hour padding their CVs.... Mais
There’s an ideological divide in China, and it’s basically statist vs. classical liberal, as Tyler Cowen puts it.
Based on 171,830 responses to an online survey, Jennifer Pan and Yiqing Xu “offer the first large scale empirical analysis of ideology in contemporary China.” They “identify one dominant ideological dimension in China.” Mais
Hitler e soldados se drogavam sistematicamente, diz escritor
Em entrevista à DW, autor de livro sobre uso de drogas na Segunda Guerra afirma que ditador tomava esteroides e substância equivalente a heroína, enquanto soldados se dopavam com o que hoje é conhecido como crystal meth.
O princípio imaginário da “vedação ao retrocesso” e a crise do Welfare State
Em sua clássica obra A Lei, Frédéric Bastiat, ainda no Século XIX, descrevera de maneira quase profética um dos grandes males de nosso tempo. Segundo Bastiat, a lei deveria ter como única função a “proteção das pessoas, de todas as liberdades e de todas as propriedades” [1], sob pena de, ao exceder esses limites, promover a espoliação da propriedade alheia.
Assim, Bastiat defende que uma lei que excede seus limites deve ser imediatamente revogada, pois, caso contrário, a consequência seria a contaminação do sistema jurídico: Mais
MITO 1: “As cruzadas foram um ataque gratuito dos cristãos ocidentais contra os muçulmanos”.
Uma revisão cronológica honesta derruba esta mentira. Até o ano 632, o Egipto, a Palestina, a Síria, a Ásia Menor, o Norte da África, a Espanha, a França, a Itália e as ilhas da Sicília, da Sardenha e da Córsega eram todos territórios cristãos. Dentro das fronteiras do Império Romano, que ainda existia no Mediterrâneo oriental, o cristianismo ortodoxo era a religião oficial e esmagadoramente maioritária. Fora daquelas fronteiras, havia ainda outras grandes comunidades cristãs, não necessariamente ortodoxas e católicas, mas, ainda assim, cristãs: a maioria da população cristã da Pérsia, por exemplo, era nestoriana. Também havia várias comunidades cristãs espalhadas pela Arábia.
Apenas um século mais tarde, em 732, os cristãos já tinham perdido o Egipto, a Palestina, a Síria, o Norte da África, a Espanha, a maior parte da Ásia Menor e o sul da França. A Itália e as suas ilhas associadas também estavam sob ameaça; tanto que as ilhas acabariam sob o domínio islâmico no século seguinte. Logo após o ano de 633, as comunidades cristãs da Arábia foram inteiramente destruídas. Tanto os judeus quanto os cristãos foram expulsos da península arábica. Os da Pérsia estavam sob forte pressão. Dois terços do antigo mundo cristão romano viam-se agora governados pelos muçulmanos.
Embora atualmente muito se fale sobre a economia da China e muito se critique o país, o que é realmente notável em todos esses comentários e críticas é quão distantes e limitados eles parecem ser quando se pensa na história recente da China. E esse é um assunto profundamente doloroso, horrível em seus detalhes, mas altamente elucidativo e útil para nos ajudar a entender a política — e que também põe em perspectiva as notícias sobre esses recentes problemas na China.
É um escândalo, de fato, que poucos ocidentais sequer estejam informados — ou, se estão, não estão conscientes — sobre a sanguinolenta realidade que predominou na China entre os anos de 1949 e 1976, os anos da ditadura comunista de Mao Tsé-Tung. (Ou Mao Zédong). Mais
A Marxist radicalized into a free-market libertarian by a year working at the U.S. Labor Department, Sowell is now the go-to black academic for conservative media outlets. The son of a maid, he earned his way in the old-fashioned style to and through New York’s elite Stuyvesant High School, Harvard College, Columbia and the University of Chicago. He has waged a relentless crusade against those who would try to alleviate poverty or equalize opportunity through welfare, affirmative action or anything else that interferes with the operation of free markets. Mais
Thomas Sowell turned 85 years old this summer, which means he has been teaching economics to Americans through his books and articles for some four decades. So it seems like a natural question: Have we learned anything? Has the level of economic thinking in political debate gone up at all?
“No—in fact, I’m tempted to think it’s gone down,” Mr. Sowell says, without much hesitation. “At one time you had a lot of people who hadn’t had any economics saying foolish things. Now you have well-known economists saying foolish things.” Mais
Campbell and Manning describe how this culture of dignity is now giving way to a new culture of victimhood in which people are encouraged to respond to even the slightest unintentional offense, as in an honor culture. But they must not obtain redress on their own; they must appeal for help to powerful others or administrative bodies, to whom they must make the case that they have been victimized. It is the very presence of such administrative bodies, within a culture that is highly egalitarian and diverse (i.e., many college campuses) that gives rise to intense efforts to identify oneself as a fragile and aggrieved victim. This is why we have seen the recent explosion of concerns about microaggressions, combined with demands for trigger warnings and safe spaces, that Greg Lukianoff and I wrote about in The Coddling of the American Mind. Mais
"We behold a system of taxation that has spread ruin, madness and starvation over the land; a band of Sinecurists, Pensioners, Bankers, and Funders, who strip the land of all its fruits, except the portion which they share with the standing army who aid them in the work of seizing on those fruits; a people who have no voice in the choosing of those, who make laws affecting their property and their lives; a House of Commons, the sale and barter of seats in which has, within its own walls, been acknowledged to be as notorious as the sun at noon-day; and, finally, in answer to the nation’s petitions for a redress of this enormous grievance, the cause of every calamity, we behold Acts passed by this same House of Commons, which have taken from the people all liberty of the press, all liberty of speech, and all the safety which the law gave to their very persons …" William Cobbet 1817 Mais
"The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion." --Ludwig von Mises
Em seu novo livro, Percival Puggina apresenta seus artigos escritos entre 2011 e 2015 – em um dos períodos de maiores turbulências da democracia brasileira. Atualizados e organizados por temas, os textos oferecem uma visão sobre os problemas nacionais de uma forma tão distante do padrão jornalístico atual quanto próxima da percepção do povo brasileiro. A tomada do Brasil pelos maus brasileiros– Crônicas à margem da história contemporânea, reúne os últimos cinco anos de escritos de um dos pensadores mais originais e tenazes da jovem e cambaleante democracia brasileira. Da revolução cultural ao desarmamento civil, das decisões do STF à Comissão da Verdade, de Marx a Lula, passando por Foro de São Paulo, Partido dos Trabalhadores e Teologia da Libertação, nada escapa a Percival Puggina.
As causas e origens de nossos problemas são complexas, mas a situação se tem agravado graças à ação dos maus brasileiros, que soem transitar pela via esquerda de nossa História. E os textos que compõem este livro estão organizados de modo a oferecer explicações sobre esse processo. São comentários atuais e certeiros, crônicas inseridas em contextos específicos, mas que, articuladas como se apresentam, descrevem com precisão os porquês da penúria brasileira. E ainda apontam como podemos reagir e ressurgir.
Aos 70 anos de idade, o autor é membro da Academia Rio-Grandense de Letras e colunista do jornal Zero Hora e de dezenas de jornais e sites de todo o Brasil.
1. Rights, by definition, are universal, meaning that everyone can exercise them, even simultaneously. For instance, everyone can simultaneously exercise one’s right to property without generating any necessary conflict of interests, let alone a logical contradiction. But since exercising a “positive right” means coercing another to provide one with a specific good or service, everyone attempting to exercise a “positive right” simultaneously results in no one being able to exercise it, since where everyone wants to take, there is no one left to take from. Mais
