For money-laundering, one of the most useful businesses is something involving small, high-value items which can be sold for cash. Ideally you want things bought by the public (so you can easily get money to/from anybody), resaleable (so you can get multiple transactions), and whose value is hard to quantify (so you can increase or decrease the price as required)

Art is great for this. China’s art market is most famed as a tool of corruption — a piece of art is an elegant gift for an official — but can also be used in other forms of fraud. It doesn’t much matter if it is good, bad, or even fake.

Susan Grossey reports on increased global interest in another sector: fine French Wine:

Chinese criminals have joined their Russian and Ukrainian counterparts in targeting French vineyards – not for tasting, but for owning….

[French anti-money-laundering agency Tracfin reported] that some buyers of vineyards were using “complex judicial arrangements with holding companies located in fiscally privileged countries”, making it difficult to establish the origin and legality of the funds brought into France.

Got some dirty dollars? Invest them in Argentina!. The government has a plan to let you turn tainted dollars legal; you just need to find an Argentinian to buy property with your cash:

The scheme, referred to locally as the “laundering law”, invites those with undeclared dollars to invest in property and the energy industry without facing penalties for their previous financial chicanery. The government believes that Argentines have about $160 billion tucked under their mattresses or hidden away in foreign bank accounts. That is about four times the value of Argentina’s foreign currency reserves.

To disapprove of writing is something of a tactical mistake, from a memetic point of view. Most of the ancient arguments against writing must have been lost because, well, nobody wrote them down.

Socrates, at least, managed to have his cake and eat it. Part of his Phaedrus is devoted to outlining the limits of writing — but since

Phaedrus

itself was written down, we can at least follow his arguments.

Being Mr. Dialogue, Socrates loathes the fact that

writing can’t answer questions

; a text gives “one unvarying answer” whatever you ask it. Also — an argument surely understandable by anybody who has studied classics or philosophy — he worries that written texts will be passed down through generations of people who never really understand them.

Finally — and part of the reason I’m posting this — Socrates fears writing will undermine memory. He recounts that an Egyptian king, Thamus, was approached by the god Thoth. Thoth offered Egypt all kinds of knowledge, including writing. King Thamus turned down the gift of writing, lest it destroy Egyptians’ memories:

[Writing], said Theuth, will

make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories

; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied:…. this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because

they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters

and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

Socrates, then, is the moderate anti-scribe, the one who scraped into history because his disciple, Plato, was willing to commit something to paper.

If you want the extreme of the anti-writing faction, try Pythagoras. Not only did he avoid writing anything, he made sure his followers did the same. For a century or more, many people built their life around his maxims (“

acusmata

“), handed down orally within the cult of Pythagoras. Disciples abjured not just writing but even speaking, beginning with 5 years of total silence and continuing to keep some ideas secret within the sect. This “

Pythagorean silence

” had the effect that, according to one Greek writer, people “marvel more at the silence of those who profess to be his pupils than at those who have the greatest reputation for speaking”.

Well, perhaps. The above, like everything we “know” about Pythagoras, is a compote of rumour and guesswork. Pythagoras only narrowly avoided the oblivion usual for those who avoid writing. We know little about the likely core of his work — as a religious leader, a philosopher of reincarnation, and founder of a lifestyle of ritual and self-discipline. Instead he is now remembered for a theorem on triangles which he probably didn’t even invent. Bad luck, Pythagoras — try writing a book in your next reincarnation, mmkay?

I can’t help wondering, though, how many other Pythagoras-like figures there have been in history. People of great immediate influence, whose lives left no longer mark because they distrusted writing. Probably they account for the vast majority of pre-modern thinkers. I’d say we should remember them, but we can’t.

You’re a money launderer. You’re keen that, even if you get caught, you should get off with a minimal sentence. Here’s how to arrange your life:

• 
  Remorse
  
• Good character and/or exemplary conduct
• Serious medical condition requiring urgent, intensive or long-term treatment
• Sole or primary carer for dependent relatives
• Early active co-operation particularly in complex cases
• Determination and/or demonstration of steps having been taken to address offending behaviour
• Activity originally legitimate

These — via Susan Grossey — are from proposed UK sentencing guidelines for fraud, bribery and money laundering. . They are the planned ‘mitigating factors’ — reasons to reduce a sentence. Demonstrate tese to the court, and you’ll have an easier time of it.

The problem is, most of these are things a well-lawyered fraudster will have an easy time showing — as Susan hints, they are “

a standard disguise for your professional launderer

”

The New York Times hilariously manages to claim the US has “limited options” about Egypt. The reason they’re limited is that cutting of the annual $1.3 billion of military aid is inconceivable. Sigh.

How Philip Morris is lobbying to avoid plain cigarette packaging in the UK, based on internal plans leaked to the Guardian. I guess it does no harm to have one of your lobbyists working as chief election strategist for the Tories.

Also infiltrating government is Prince Charles, who has lent one aide to the Cabinet Office, and another to DEFRA.

Ecuador agreed to protect its part of the Amazon, in return for compensation payments from the developed world. They coughed up a whole 0.36% of what they promised — so Ecuador has abandoned the idea

Fitful Head, Tongue of Gangsta, The Trip

: Shetland and Orkney have some wonderful place names. Steve Goldman has done a wonderful job of collecting them.

Strange Maps picks out some of the best of them:

Somehow, the

Banks of Runabout

sounds vaguely like a critique of the financial sector. And the

White Stane of Willies

might as well have been mentioned in the lewd paragraph. The

Taing of the Busy

? That’s that faint ringing noise that gets inside your head when you’ve been up for 24 hours straight. Also known as the

Head of Work

. The

Knowes of Euro

?


The

Candle of Sneuk

? The

Riff of Wasbister

? We sort of know what half the name means. But how frustrating to have not even the glimmer of a clue about the

Neven o’ Grinni

, the

Sinians of Cutclaws

, the

Glifters of Lyrawa,

or the

Quilse of Hoganeap.

Aaron Swartz on leaving a legacy. The gist is that you should achieve something which, in your absence, would not have happened:

So what jobs do leave a real legacy? It’s hard to think of most of them, since by their very nature they require doing things that other people aren’t trying to do, and thus include the things that people haven’t thought of. But one good source of them is trying to do things that change the system instead of following it. For example, the university system encourages people to become professors who do research in certain areas (and thus many people do this); it discourages people from trying to change the nature of the university itself.

Marco “Instapaper” Arment in praise of RSS:

The true power of the RSS inbox is keeping you informed of new posts that you probably won’t see linked elsewhere, or that you really don’t want to miss if you scroll past a few hours of your Twitter timeline.

If you can’t think of any sites you read that fit that description, you should consider broadening your horizons.

I’ve been baffled by how so many people seem not to notice the value of this. And twitter doesn’t help:

The fundamental flaw in the stream paradigm is that items from different feeds don’t have equal value: I don’t mind missing a random New York Times post, but I’ll regret missing the only Dan’s Data post this month because it was buried under everyone’s basketball tweets and nobody else I follow will link to it later.

What would Hannah Arendt think about Drones, and should we agree with her? Much distrust of drones, argues Abu Muqawama, comes from the same tradition as Arendt’s horror at the ‘banality of evil’. Its model of evil is the Nazi bureaucrat, efficiently implementing Genocide while mentally insulated from the reality.

Arendt tapped into a wave of humanistic sentiment that prefigured her journalism, and she popularized the fantasy of the ice-cold bureaucratic murderer. As wrong as she was [Muqawama considers Eichmann as much idealist as pen-pusher], she crafted a compelling narrative of a sociotechnical system that diminished the humanity of the men who operated it and killed millions.

So drone operators, like Eichmann, can be simultaneously driven by scientific rationalism and by rabid murderous ideology. Um, great!

Or to put a kinder spin on it: drone pilots are subject to the same passions as soldiers in the field. But, being in a less brutal environment, they might be more open to compassion than to revenge:

in what universe does does a 19-year old rifleman who took to war directly from high school prom, who has just seen his friend lose his limbs a week before in a IED attack, somehow become an a priori better choice than a Air Force officer sitting in a Creech Air Force Base trailer?

Swallows have evolved to better dodge cars, according to an article in

Current Biology

. They are gradually getting shorter wings, which help them fly up from the road and swerve around cars.

During a 30-year study on social behavior and coloniality of cliff swallows (Petrochelidon pyrrhonota) in southwestern Nebraska, we found that the frequency of road-killed swallows declined sharply over the 30 years following the birds’ occupancy of roadside nesting sites and that birds killed on roads had longer wings than the population at large.

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