ArenaNet has teamed up with several fan sites to offer trial keys to Guild Wars 2 this coming weekend:
Now’s your chance to see what changes we’ve made to the most critically acclaimed MMO of 2012! From April 19-21, 2013 we’re hosting another huge Guild Wars 2 free trial weekend.
We’re partnering with the following websites to distribute serial codes for the upcoming free trial weekend:
- Ten Ton Hammer
- GameSpot
- Twitch.TV
- MMORPG
- Curse
- PC Gamer
- ZAM
In Reason, Steve Chapman wonders if the US embargo has actually propped up the very regime it was intended to topple:
The U.S. embargo of Cuba has been in effect since 1962, with no end in sight. Fidel Castro’s government has somehow managed to outlast the Soviet Union, Montgomery Ward, rotary-dial telephones and 10 American presidents.
The boycott adheres to the stubborn logic of governmental action. It was created to solve a problem: the existence of a communist government 90 miles off our shores. It failed to solve that problem. But its failure is taken as proof of its everlasting necessity.
If there is any lesson to be drawn from this dismal experience, though, it’s that the economic quarantine has been either 1) grossly ineffectual or 2) positively helpful to the regime.
The first would not be surprising, if only because economic sanctions almost never work. Iraq under Saddam Hussein? Nope. Iran? Still waiting. North Korea? Don’t make me laugh.
What makes this embargo even less promising is that we have so little help in trying to apply the squeeze. Nearly 200 countries allow trade with Cuba. Tourists from Canada and Europe flock there in search of beaches, nightlife and Havana cigars, bringing hard currency with them. So even if starving the country into submission could work, Cuba hasn’t starved and won’t anytime soon.
Nor is it implausible to suspect that the boycott has been the best thing that ever happened to the Castro brothers, providing them a scapegoat for the nation’s many economic ills. The implacable hostility of the Yankee imperialists also serves to align Cuban nationalism with Cuban communism. Even Cubans who don’t like Castro may not relish being told what to do by the superpower next door.
In the Globe and Mail Tabatha Southey hears the laments of readers “We need a new John Steinbeck for the Great Bitcoin Depression”, and she delivers:
Pa was a simple man, a techno-anarchist by trade, and long after the Bitcoin bust, he stayed on with the mining. “Don’t know nothin’ else,” Ma said, although she once suggested migrant IT work, at least until her own contract was renewed at the hospital where she worked most of her grown days for a pediatric endocrinologist’s wage.
Pa sat on the sofa, the whir of the computer fans all but drowning out the Cato Institute podcast he’d downloaded the night before. He’s there, frozen in my childhood, Pa, mining, mining, mining, with nothing but his iPhone, his laptop and, for a while, my sister’s old Tamagotchi, which he found in the couch cushions while looking for the remote, to amuse him.
Dodging viruses like crop-dusters, Pa is experiencing hard times. He never did come to trust that ol’ anti-virus software. Said it was reporting on him to the Federal Reserve. And always the dust, the dust, the dust, which may have been because Pa never did get round to changing the furnace filters. His time, he said, best spent elsewhere.
Pa, oh, Pa. He never did stop spreading the word of Ron Paul on completely unrelated news items.
In the Telegraph, Ed West explains some of the reasons for UKIP’s rise in support at the expense of David Cameron’s Tories:
Across the North of England, Ukip is able to appeal to a wide range of socially conservative people who hate the Tories as the people who destroyed their towns and yet are voting for Thatcher’s heir.
The key to David Cameron’s failure, in 2010 and since, has been the pursuit of the centre ground. The key to Ukip’s success is their understanding that there’s no such thing, and that on a range of issues — health, transport and jobs — the public are more Left-wing than the powers that be, and on several others — crime, Europe and immigration — they’re considerably more Right-wing. Whether Ukip’s economic policies would help working-class people is open to debate, although restricting unskilled immigration would help.
The cornerstone of Ukip’s support is the subject of mass immigration, which is not only an unpopular process in itself, but tends to create a code of dishonesty and cant in the political class, further driving them apart from the public. It is an issue inescapably tied up with the European Union, and Ukip has successfully (so far) negotiated a middle course close to the centre of public opinion; most people do not share the political elites’ talk about “Britain’s diversity is its strength”, but neither do they dislike immigrants or wish to support the politics of hate. They just don’t want their country changed beyond recognition, and don’t see why they should be condemned for this.
None of this would matter, of course, if people had particular confidence that one of the major parties knew what they were doing with the economy. As it is, Labour got us into this mess, while having George Osborne in charge rather feels like being on an aeroplane where the company owner’s 12-year-old son has insisted on being the pilot. I hope he knows what he’s doing, but I’m prepared to let someone else have a go.
Powered by WordPress