criticalculture:

jhnbrssndn:

buffleheadcabin:

Just two days after Chile was struck by a devastating earthquake, Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens informed his readers that Milton Friedman’s “spirit was surely hovering protectively over Chile” because, “thanks largely to him, the country has endured a tragedy that elsewhere would have been an apocalypse…. It’s not by chance that Chileans were living in houses of brick — and Haitians in houses of straw — when the wolf arrived to try to blow them down.”

According to Stephens, the radical free-market policies prescribed to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet by Milton Friedman and his infamous “Chicago Boys” are the reason Chile is a prosperous nation with “some of the world’s strictest building codes.”

There is one rather large problem with this theory: Chile’s modern seismic building code, drafted to resist earthquakes, was adopted in 1972. That year is enormously significant because it was one year before Pinochet seized power in a bloody U.S-backed coup. That means that if one person deserves credit for the law, it is not Friedman, or Pinochet, but Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected socialist President. (In truth many Chileans deserve credit, since the laws were a response to a history of quakes, and the first law was adopted in the 1930s).

Good point—especially since strict building codes aren’t usually associated with strict conservative leaders.

Mel Gibson isn’t the type to use historically inaccurate languages in his historical fiction. Perhaps you saw Apocalypto and were pissed that you had to spend the whole movie reading? Well, Gibson plans to continue that tradition for his upcoming Viking movie by forcing Leonardo DiCaprio to learn some combination of Old English and Old Norse. “I think it’s going to be English—the English that would have been spoken back then—and Old Norse,” he told Collider. “Whatever the 9th century had to offer. I’m going to give you real.” Leo better start studying now. [Collider]

Read more: Mel Gibson Will Force Leonardo DiCaprio to Learn Old Norse — Vulture http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/01/mel_gibson_will_force_leonardo.html#ixzz0dALbFLdg

kgtl:

merlin

Fucking fascinating.