Daily Bafflements

• As news breaks that David Cameron has personally intervened on behalf of fellow plutocrats in their battle to protect their offshore accounts from new EU tax rules, it is becoming more and more clear that the UK’s austerity policies are hardly the inevitability that Cameron and others have claimed. As our own David Graeber wrote in the current issue, austerity is “an economic doctrine . . . that no one genuinely believes in and whose results pretty much everyone deplores . . . in response to an existential crisis that does not exist.”

• Whole Foods has a bold new strategy to pull its expensive grocery stores out of a rut with—you guessed it—cheaper grocery stores. The company’s new chain of stores, called 365 by Whole Foods Market, will save money by offering (gasp!) only ten varieties of olive oil. Such sacrifices abound for the organics company: “Bottled water, for example, is a category in which 365 won’t have a particularly deep selection, because it takes a lot of effort to stock and because 365 executives don’t believe their [philistine] customer demands it.”

• As such elite outlets as the New York Times reflect on Facebook’s role in gun sales to militias, we at The Baffler are left scratching our heads over a little social media puzzle: Though the social network hasn’t shown much previous interest in these groups, replete with photographs of young children aiming rifles, and only recently bothered to ban the private sale of weapons via the site, Facebook just last week rejected our advertisement for a recent column on police brutality because of the Stephen Kroninger art that accompanied it, depicting a police officer beating a suspect. According to a staffer, “Section C. under ‘Prohibited Content’ explains that all ‘Shocking, sensational, disrespectful, or excessively violent content’ isn’t allowed.” Apparently, we’ll have to work a little harder to please our censors in the future.