Michael Gove :
The EU is an institution rooted in the past and is proving incapable of reforming to meet the big technological, demographic and economic challenges of our time. It was developed in the 1950s and 1960s and like other institutions which seemed modern then, from tower blocks to telexes, it is now hopelessly out of date. The EU tries to standardise and regulate rather than encourage diversity and innovation. It is an analogue union in a digital age.
Let’s start with an important fact that Apple elides in its statement: Apple engineered this problem and it did so intentionally. In the wake of the Snowden leaks, Apple specifically decided to encrypt material end-to-end and at rest by default on the devices it manufactures and to not maintain any ability to decrypt material unless users specifically gave it the power to recover that material. It boasted about this decision and used it as a marketing weapon against its competitors. Reasonable people can argue about whether or not Apple did so for good reasons and whether or not doing so was the optimal way for the company to enhance the cybersecurity of its users. But the simple fact remains that Apple used to have the capacity to comply with warrants, and now it cannot without a certain amount of reengineering. And that was a matter of its own choosing made despite repeated warnings from the government that this choice would cause substantial problems for law enforcement, national security investigators, and public safety.
FBI and Justice Department officials, we think, can be forgiven if they’re a touch cynical about all of Apple’s elaborate legal argumentation and suspect that this all just masks what appears to be Apple’s genuine litigating posture towards the government: You can’t make us do anything, because we are immensely politically powerful, our CEO is on the phone with the President regularly, we are too big and way too cool to fail, and people around the world like us more than they like you. So what about that dead woman in Louisiana? Sorry, but bringing her killer to justice—and preventing his or her future violence—just isn’t as important as the data security of our devices. And about protecting people from ISIS? We’ll help out if it’s not too much trouble, but don’t ask us—ever—to do something that will make us look bad to the ACLU, even if there’s a very good legal argument that you can.
The group was tired, but also optimistic. Yangon is an N.L.D. stronghold and, although the final results wouldn’t be released until the next day, they predicted that Tint would win. All three had spent years in military prisons for resisting the regime. Kyaw, the campaign manager, shared a hundred-square-foot prison cell with two other men for eight years, as punishment for participating in the 1988 student movement against military rule. “Back then prison was the place for people who believed in democracy,” he said, laughing. “Now it’s Parliament.” More than fifty former political prisoners were candidates.
While the King may not be dead yet, long live the King :
The Donald’s reputation for building castles had inspired many apprentices who sought to learn at his feet. When apprentices displeased him, however, he would elucidate their inferior qualities and then place them inside a cannon. As an underling fired it, the Donald would declare, “You’re fired—out of a cannon.”
This phrase had long delighted the people, as had the other phrases he habitually employed, but the people were in a quandary. Experts in kingship had assured them that there was no harm in voting for the Donald, as he did not stand a real chance of ascending to the throne; yet these scholars were now saying, tarry, it might happen, and imagine what our realm would actually look like if we had a King the Donald!
This new form of lawsuit funding is called litigation finance. It lies at the crossroads of two Anglo-American tendencies. The first is our litigious side, in which we celebrate our equality before the law by dragging those who have wronged us before a judge. The second is our ingenious mercantilism, as demonstrated by our penchant for turning everything from church raffles to mortgages into marketable securities to be chopped up, bundled and resold. Like the celebrity bonds backed by royalties and popularized by David Bowie during the 1990s, litigation finance represents the expansion of securitization into hitherto virgin territory.
Abnormal Capitalist 