Wholesale coffee prices are cratering in large part due to Vietnam’s major growth as a coffee producer. This is creating profound hardships for many small scale coffee growers in Central American and Africa. The resulting economic problems may lead to a surge in people trying to get into the US and renewed instability in many regions of the world dependent on coffee. All this information is contained in this article but boy do you have to wade through a lot of crap to extract it.
A lot of times, hypocrisy is the only tribute that humans can make to virtue so I guess we should not talk trash about it.Justin Trudeau—Illegitimate Premier?
Harvard’s Legacies Are Nothing to Be Proud Of Ironically, the main reason for Harvard’s success is due to the very practices that are attacked in this article. You don’t want to go to Harvard for a better education. You want to go to Harvard to network with rich people. If you did not give rich kids an easy pass into the university, how would that work? But to admit this is to admit how little real education takes place in universities around the country.
A quote from one of the more formative books of my teenage reading….
At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). … For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the stormy applause, rising to an ovation, continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. … However, who would dare to be the first to stop? … After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who would quit first! And in the obscure, small hall, unknown to the leader, the applause went on – six, seven, eight minutes! … They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! …
The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved!
… That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.” — Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
I had to quote that just to provided context for this short clip. Apparently, Stalin was kind enough to solve the problem.
Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria. Should be in the news because most people don’t realize how messed up our copyright laws are. Don’t get me wrong, I think the purposed class action settlement was seriously flawed. But the root of the problem is the changes in copyright law brought about by Disney.
An Urgent Plea to the International Community to Protect Mosul and its Residents. I feel for the dude as supposedly he really is in the city. But this demonstrates the problems with feeling and not thinking. If you think instead of feel, there is nothing worthwhile about this post, particularly as he was crying all along for ISIS to be driven out of Mosul. Regardless of their morals, the Iraqi Army has only three choices. They can leave ISIS alone and not bother them, they can starve them out (the safest way, but every civilian trapped with them will starve along with them), or they can come into where they are fortified and blast them out. None of those options is a good option for the people in the city. They lose no mater which one gets chosen.
