Who's Your Big Brother?

Price is what you pay, value is what you get.--Warren Buffett

Mom had her first relaxing day in a while.
I did not. I went to the feared book group on The Plague. I have always thought the modern history of the European states was one of how they adapted to the homicidal mania of the two great wars and the French have adapted the worst. Their modern philosophies seem to me to be a jumble of rationalizations, with the Camus "Existence precedes essence" notion looking to me little more than a sports half-time exhortation. But the book is brilliantly written, really beautiful.

A new bill to prevent “social media addiction” would have the government manage social media website design.

Chinese officials are blaming the United States for the enormous political protests  in Hong Kong in recent weeks.

"…socialist experiments usually go through three stages, in terms of their reception by Western intellectuals. The first is a honeymoon period, during which they are widely held up as a glorious example of “real” socialism in action. The second is a period of angry defensiveness, during which some of the 
system’s failures are acknowledged, but blamed on external constraints. The third stage is the stage of retroactive disowning: intellectuals now claim that the country in question was never socialist, and that it is a cheap strawman to even mention it. The Western reception of the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Vietnam and, more recently, Venezuela followed this pattern to a tee. Cuba, in contrast, is a bit of an outlier, in that the country seems to be permanently stuck somewhere between stages two and three. It may no longer attract widespread enthusiasm, but Cuban socialism has never completely gone the way of Soviet, Maoist, Vietnamese or North Korean socialism."--Niemietz

The NFL says its fan base is increasingly made up of women and girls, up to 45% now of the NFL’s overall total. Antonio Brown being the face of the next weekend--and the league--would be a real PR nightmare.
On the other hand, why is his accuser meeting with the league?

I’m in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.--Freidman
What about the problem of contagion though? If you value individual decision making to the exclusion of contagion risks, you could argue against vaccines.

Over the past 50 years, Ashkenazi Jews have consistently tested well above the norm in almost every IQ study. Some the findings were startling. Looking at worldwide population groups, Jews appear at the top of the IQ charts, followed by East Asians, Whites, Arabs, other Asians, Indians, Blacks and Australian Aborigines. Studies have set average Ashkenazi IQ at anywhere from 107 to 117, which would rank them as the highest tested population in the world, as much as a full standard deviation above the general European average of about 101.

There are signs that the United Kingdom is at the start of a sterling crisis that could have serious implications for global financial markets and the European economy. 

On this day in 1862, Union soldiers found a copy of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s orders detailing the Confederates’ plan for the Antietam campaign near Frederick, Maryland.

               Who's Your Big Brother?

A recent article in the WashPo claimed  “big business is a greater threat to liberty than big government.”
This is usually met with the equally lame "No business can force anyone to buy its products. Only the government can force me to do anything." But life is more complicated than that.
The government may have been the enabler, but it was the banks that invested in derivatives and in subprime mortgages and and the result was an economic disaster that trapped us all. The publishing companies certainly gives us enough misinformation to impair our decision-making. And how much information gathering and storage is too much?
So the basic question is, on the current large scale, does it matter who is doing the gathering, the misinforming and making the financial errors?