Notes and observations. Diversions and digressions. All done far too infrequently.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
ShareThis button causes my Ubuntu laptop to crash!
Saturday, December 18, 2010
R.I.P. Captain Beefheart
Friday, December 10, 2010
An interview with the great Deirdre McCloskey
My alarm comes from the economist’s tendency to reduce humans to Maximum Utility machines. We need a humanomics, of the sort that Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek and Gunnar Myrdal and Kenneth Boulding and Albert Hirschman practiced. Some current practitioners are Nancy Folbre, Arjo Klamer, and Richard Bronk. It’s an economics for grownups.A must-read interview.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Quote of the Day
Friday, October 15, 2010
Keith don't go
"I loved a good high. And if you stay up, you get the songs that everyone else misses because they're asleep," Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones who will publish his autobiography Life on October 26.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
The great sage Taleb speaks
U.S. President Barack Obama and his administration weakened the country’s economy by seeking to foster growth instead of paying down the federal debt, said Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan.”Taleb's two masterpieces, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets and The Black Swan are newly-minted classics that should be read by the hyper-rationalists who occupy the White House, the crowd that believes it can master uncertainty and impose its will on economic actors.
“Obama did exactly the opposite of what should have been done,” Taleb said yesterday in Montreal in a speech as part of Canada’s Salon Speakers series. “He surrounded himself with people who exacerbated the problem. You have a person who has cancer and instead of removing the cancer, you give him tranquilizers. When you give tranquilizers to a cancer patient, they feel better but the cancer gets worse.”
Today, Taleb said, “total debt is higher than it was in 2008 and unemployment is worse.”
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Stephen Johnson, the man who appreciates the slow hunch
This is in many ways a response to Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.
Earlier this year Christopher Lydon interviewed the scourge of the multi-tasker over at Radio Open Source.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
RIP Mike Edwards, formerly of ELO
A strange dark magic has taken a wonderful life.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
An interview with Michel Houllebecq, French iconoclast
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Quote for the day
One of the many disservices done to young people by our schools and colleges is giving them the puffed up notion that they are in a position to pass sweeping judgments on a world that they have barely begun to experience.
Sunday, August 08, 2010
Sunday afternoon music that cooks
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
The seductive power of Emerson, Lake & Palmer's "Take A Pebble"
And let's not forget Part 2:
Sunday, July 25, 2010
One of my major influences, the late Karl Hess
"Libertarianism is the view that each man is the absolute owner of his life, to use and dispose of as he sees fit: that all man's social actions should be voluntary: and that respect for every other man's similar and equal ownership of life and, by extension, the property and fruits of that life is the ethical basis of a humane and open society. In this view, the only – repeat, only – function of law or government is to provide the sort of self-defense against violence that an individual, if he were powerful enough, would provide for himself."More from the Death of Politics.
Quote for the day
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Moral licensing!
We drink Diet Coke -- with Quarter Pounders and fries at McDonald's. We go to the gym -- and ride the elevator to the second floor. We install tankless water heaters -- then take longer showers. We drive SUVs to see Al Gore's speeches on global warming.These behavioral riddles beg explanation, and social psychologists are offering one in new studies. The academic name for such quizzical behavior is moral licensing. It seems that we have a good/bad balance sheet in our heads that we're probably not even aware of. For many people, doing good makes it easier -- and often more likely -- to do bad. It works in reverse, too: Do bad, then do good.
"We have these internal negotiations going in our heads all day, even if we don't know it," said Benoît Monin, a social psychologist who studies moral licensing at Stanford University. "People's past behavior literally gives them license to do that next thing, which might not be good."
The implications of moral licensing are vast, stretching beyond consumer decisions and into politics and environmental policy. Monin published a study showing that voters given an opportunity to endorse Barack Obama for president were more likely to later favor white people for job openings. Social psychologists point to government standards for fuel efficiency as another example of moral licensing at work: Automakers can sell a certain number of gas guzzlers as long as their overall fleet achieves a specified miles-per-gallon rating.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Always look on the bright side of life
Life on Earth is wiped out every 27 million years – and we have about 16 million years left until the next extinction, according to scientists.
Research into so-called ‘extinction events’ for our planet over the past 500 million years - twice as long as any previous studies - has proved that they crop up with metronomic regularity.
Scientists from the University of Kansas and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC are 99 per cent confident that there are extinctions every 27 million years.
In the 1980s scientists believed that Earth’s regular extinctions could be the result of a distant dark twin of the Sun, called Nemesis.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Code on the run
The free software, called Google App Inventor for Android (http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/), has been under development for a year. User testing has been done mainly in schools with groups that included sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors.
The thinking behind the initiative, Google said, is that as cellphones increasingly become the computers that people rely on most, users should be able to make applications themselves.
“The goal is to enable people to become creators, not just consumers, in this mobile world,” said Harold Abelson, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is on sabbatical at Google and led the project.
The project is a further sign that Google is betting that its strategy of opening up its technology to all kinds of developers will eventually give it the upper hand in the smartphone software market. Its leading rival, Apple, takes a more tightly managed approach to application development for the iPhone, controlling the software and vetting the programs available.
“We could only have done this because Android’s architecture is so open,” Mr. Abelson said.
Reason asks: "Where Do Libertarians Belong?"
Sunday, July 04, 2010
Overcoming adversity, without a limb
God bless Brendan Marrocco, he has the courage most of us lack.
Friday, June 25, 2010
The ZaZa Pizza King, Don Michele Caruso has died
Thursday, June 17, 2010
"Loss is nothing but change."
Loss is nothing but change. In this Universal Nature rejoices and by her all things come to pass well. From eternity they came to pass in like fashion and will be to everlasting in other similar shapes. When then do they say 'all things ever came to pass badly and that all will ever be bad'? So no power it seems was ever found in so many gods to remedy this, but the world is condemned to be straitened in uninterrupted evils? - Book IX, Number 36. Meditations, Marcus Aurelius.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Glaeser: The Economics of Libertarianism
I always find it refreshing to take a quick, clean intellectual shower in the cold, pure waters of libertarian thought, but I find myself most interested in the murky areas on the edge of libertarianism, which Professor Miron explores with aplomb. Libertarians are rarely anarchists. Almost all of them believe in some form of state power, at the very least the protection of private property and the enforcement of contracts. Many of them, including Milton Friedman, are quite comfortable with larger exercises of state power, including the redistribution of resources to those who have less. Professor Miron writes that “anti-poverty spending is the most defensible kind of redistribution,” because “the goal of this redistribution – helping the poor – is reasonable and the costs of a well-designed limited anti-poverty program (e.g., a negative income tax set on a state-by-state basis) are modest.”
But once the need for public action is accepted, things start getting very muddy and we can’t rely on either a love of liberty or fear of the state for guidance. Consider the purely hypothetical case of a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The traditional libertarian would argue that regulation is unnecessary because the tort system will hold the driller liable for any damage. But what if the leak is so vast that the driller doesn’t have the resources to pay? The libertarian would respond that the driller should have been forced to post a bond or pay for sufficient insurance to cover any conceivable spill. Perhaps, but then the government needs to regulate the insurance contract and the resources of the insurer.
Even more problematically, the libertarian’s solution requires us to place great trust in part of the public sector: the court system. At times, judges have been bribed; any courtroom can be influenced by the best attorneys that money can buy.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Looking for a clip from today's World Cup game between Italy vs Paraguay game, I found this ditty!
Melodramatic isn't enough to describe this video.
Embed has been disabled by request. The conspiracy continues...
UPDATE: The video has been removed from YouTube.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Senator Tisei's remarks at Wakefield's Memorial Day Observance
I bring you the greetings of the Commonwealth this morning as we pay tribute to the many brave men and women who have given their lives over the years so that we could continue to live in peace and enjoy freedom.
Memorial Day is a day for Americans to reconnect with their history and core values by honoring those who gave their lives for the ideals we all cherish.
Freedom in this country means that it doesn't matter where you come from, or what the circumstances of your birth are. It doesn't matter who you know, or how well connected you are. It doesn't matter what your religious or spiritual beliefs are, or what language you speak at home.
It is the freedom to pursue any goal in life that does not harm others. It is the freedom to speak your mind without worrying about a violent backlash. Its the freedom to come and go as you please and most importantly the freedom to think and act as individuals.. that sets us apart from all of the other nations on this earth.
Our county is unique. There has never been another like it in the history of the world. Our greatness stems from the fact that we are a tolerant nation that welcomes creativity and diversity. As a result every day tens of thousands of Asians, Africans and Europeans of every color, class and background are fighting to come to these shores to experience the American Dream.
Today is a day to remember that these freedoms which we all treasure ....were not free....and the precious liberties that we now take for granted did not come without our nation paying a terrible price.
Over the years, more than 1 million men and women have died in wars fought on our own soil and in remote battlefields in every corner of this world.
Where did we find such brave men and women....who were willing to put on uniforms....take up arms....leave their friends and family behind.... and travel to such far away places to defend freedom and liberty?
We found them right here in our community. The names carved into granite and memorials all around us this morning indicate the tremendous price that this community has paid over the years to defend our country.
These men and women will be forever in our memory, forever in our hearts and we will be forever thankful to them.
As we mark memorial day this year, we do so with heavy hearts remembering all of the service members who have lost their lives fighting terrorism in places like Afganistan and Iraq.
Their sacrifice serves as a reminder to all Americans that we are living in a very dangerous and violent world. At this critical time, we need to be stong and remain prepared as there are plenty of tyrants and terrorists actively working to destroy our freedoms and all that we stand for.
As we face this present danger and confront the struggles which lie ahead, we would do well to always remember the example set by those we honor here today.
Their sacrifice, loyalty and personal courage perserved our freedoms.
Their strength and determination created the America of today, and the heroic actions they took to defend our nation will forever serve as an inspiration to every American.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
You don't say?
And just a few years ago, they thought they were better off than the U.S.
Europe. Old and allergic to rejuvenation of any sort.
Drink up boys and girls!
The reaction so far to government efforts to cut spending has been pessimism and anger, with an understanding that the current system is unsustainable.
In Athens, Aris Iordanidis, 25, an economics graduate working in a bookstore, resents paying high taxes to finance Greece’s bloated state sector and its employees. “They sit there for years drinking coffee and chatting on the telephone and then retire at 50 with nice fat pensions,” he said. “As for us, the way things are going we’ll have to work until we’re 70.”
In Rome, Aldo Cimaglia is 52 and teaches photography, and he is deeply pessimistic about his pension. “It’s going to go belly-up because no one will be around to fill the pension coffers,” he said. “It’s not just me; this country has no future.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Thought for the day
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Beware Liberals speaking with VAT tongue
When liberals advocate a value-added tax, conservatives should respond: Taxing consumption has merits, so we will consider it -- after the 16th Amendment is repealed.
A VAT will be rationalized as necessary to restore fiscal equilibrium. But without ending the income tax, a VAT would be just a gargantuan instrument for further subjugating Americans to government.
Thursday, April 08, 2010
The mastermind of punk has died
Malcolm McLaren dies at the age of 64
Sunday, April 04, 2010
A traditional Italian Easter! Buona Pasqua from East Boston!
Sorry you couldn't make it. The rice pie was just as good.
Easter Sunday, by Patti Smith
Easter Sunday, we were walking.
Easter Sunday, we were talking.
Isabel, my little one, take my hand. Time has come.
Isabella, all is glowing.
Isabella, all is knowing.
And my heart, Isabella.
And my head, Isabella.
Frederick and Vitalie, savior dwells inside of thee.
Oh, the path leads to the sun. Brother, sister, time has come.
Isabella, all is glowing.
Isabella, all is knowing.
Isabella, we are dying.
Isabella, we are rising.
I am the spring, the holy ground,
the endless seed of mystery,
the thorn, the veil, the face of grace,
the brazen image, the thief of sleep,
the ambassador of dreams, the prince of peace.
I am the sword, the wound, the stain.
Scorned transfigured child of Cain.
I rend, I end, I return.
Again I am the salt, the bitter laugh.
I am the gas in a womb of light, the evening star,
the ball of sight that leads that sheds the tears of Christ
dying and drying as I rise tonight.
Isabella, we are rising.
Isabella, we are rising . .
Saturday, April 03, 2010
Bravo Peggy Noonan
John Paul the Great, about whom I wrote an admiring book which recounts some of the scandals—I spent a grim 2003 going through the depositions of Massachusetts clergy—one fact seems to me pre-eminent. For Pope John Paul II, the scandals would have been unimaginable—literally not imaginable. He had come of age in an era and place (Poland in the 1930s, '40s and '50s) of heroic priests. They were great men; they suffered. He had seen how the Nazis and later the communists had attempted to undermine the church and tear people away from it, sometimes through slander. They did this because the great force arrayed against them was the Catholic Church. John Paul, his mind, psyche and soul having been forged in that world, might well have seen the church's recent accusers as spreaders of slander. Because priests don't act like that, it's not imaginable. And he'd seen it before, only now it wasn't Nazism or communism attempting to kill the church with lies, but modernity and its soulless media.Read the entire article.Only they weren't lies.
There are three great groups of victims in this story. The first and most obvious, the children who were abused, who trusted, were preyed upon and bear the burden through life. The second group is the good priests and good nuns, the great leaders of the church in the day to day, who save the poor, teach the immigrant, and, literally, save lives. They have been stigmatized when they deserve to be lionized. And the third group is the Catholics in the pews—the heroic Catholics of America and now Europe, the hardy souls who in spite of what has been done to their church are still there, still making parish life possible, who hold high the flag, their faith unshaken. No one thanks those Catholics, sees their heroism, respects their patience and fidelity. The world thinks they're stupid. They are not stupid, and with their prayers they keep the world going, and the old church too.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Keyboardist Jon Lord To Release New Album In March
According to JonLord.org, Jon Lord will release his next album, To Notice Such Things, on March 22 through Avie Records.I can't wait!
Titled after the main work -- a six movement suite for solo flute, piano and string orchestra -- the album was inspired by, and is dedicated to, the memory of Jon's dear friend Sir John Mortimer, the English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter, author and creator of British television series Rumpole Of The Bailey, who died in January 2009.
"He was a great friend and a great inspiration to me and I hope my love and respect for him comes out in the music," says Jon.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
TSA brilliance
Monday, February 15, 2010
Iron Maiden looking like Metallica doing Jethro Tull
Clever! Very Clever.
Monday, February 08, 2010
What I share with Joseph Schumpeter: a birthday
Hat tip to Organizations and Markets: "Happy Schumpeter Day"
Sunday, February 07, 2010
It was, from the beginning, a power grab!
Good for climate change skepticism. That's how science is supposed to work, isn't it?
But the claim [that the Himalayan glaciers could melt away] was rubbish, and the world's top glaciologists knew it. It was based not on rigorously peer-reviewed science but on an anecdotal report by the WWF itself. When its background came to light on the eve of Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, shrugged it off. But now, even leading scientists and environmental groups admit the IPCC is facing a crisis of credibility that makes the Climategate affair look like small change.
“The global warming movement as we have known it is dead,” the brilliant analyst Walter Russell Mead says in his blog on The American Interest. It was done in by a combination of bad science and bad politics.
The impetus for the Copenhagen conference was that the science makes it imperative for us to act. But even if that were true – and even if we knew what to do – a global deal was never in the cards. As Mr. Mead writes, “The global warming movement proposed a complex set of international agreements involving vast transfers of funds, intrusive regulations in national economies, and substantial changes to the domestic political economies of most countries on the planet.” Copenhagen was never going to produce a breakthrough. It was a dead end.
And now, the science scandals just keep on coming. First there was the vast cache of e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia, home of a crucial research unit responsible for collecting temperature data. Although not fatal to the science, they revealed a snakepit of scheming to keep contradictory research from being published, make imperfect data look better, and withhold information from unfriendly third parties. If science is supposed to be open and transparent, these guys acted as if they had a lot to hide.
Despite widespread efforts to play down the Climategate e-mails, they were very damaging. An investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian – among the most aggressive advocates for action on climate change – has found that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed, and that documents relating to them could not be produced.
Meantime, the IPCC – the body widely regarded, until now, as the ultimate authority on climate science – is looking worse and worse. After it was forced to retract its claim about melting glaciers, Mr. Pachauri dismissed the error as a one-off. But other IPCC claims have turned out to be just as groundless.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Hugo Chavez and his thugs
Is it time again to boycott Citgo?
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Ron Radosh on Howard Zinn
From Zinn's perspective, history should not be told from the standpoints of generals or presidents, but through that of people who struggle for their rights, who engage in strikes, boycotts, slave rebellions and the like. Its purpose should be to encourage similar behavior today. Indeed, Zinn candidly said that history was not about "understanding the past," but rather, about "changing the future." That statement alone should have disqualified anyone from referring to him as a historian.Howard Zinn presented a pedestrian view of American history, a view that found popularizers in small minds like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Ultimately it was insulting to both the profession and the people he championed. The future may need changing but what history has shown is the alternative systems, socialism and communism, no doubt favorites of Zinn, were wisely relegated to the dustbins. The historical illiteracy we face today is part of Zinn's legacy.
More on Zinn here.
Friday, January 22, 2010
The meaning of Scott Brown
There was a collective sigh of relief from the blue-state right on Tuesday night. For years, conservatives and Republicans in overwhelmingly Democratic states had to live their lives in fear and shame, having been convicted without trial on charges of ignorance and intolerance. They suffered in silence, realizing that they could not convince ideologically rigid progressives that they too, believed in equality, fairness and diversity, disagreeing only on the manner through which such goals should be achieved.
Now, in the wake of Brown’s victory, they can finally live in peace and freedom, acknowledging their true selves and affirming their true identities. They can finally march down the street in a parade of patriotic pride.
Brown will forever be a hero to blue-state conservatives. He embodies what conservatism actually is: upbeat, hopeful, forward-thinking, energetic. For too long, progressive activists and Democratic strategists have raised the specter of sulking, snarling, scowling Southern conservatives as a means of scaring people away from conservative and Republican ideas; they will no longer be able to get away with such attacks. Brown has demonstrated that an optimistic person from any part of the country can find merit in the right’s core philosophy.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Against Big Government
Poll: Most Americans Want Smaller Government, Fewer Services "All hail the Libertarian Moment!"
Monday, January 18, 2010
Cato weighs in on gay marriage
No compelling reason has been proffered for sanctioning heterosexual but not homosexual marriages. Nor is a ban on gay marriage a close fit for attaining the goals cited by proponents of such bans. If the goal, for example, is to strengthen the institution of marriage, a more effective step might be to bar no-fault divorce and premarital cohabitation. If the goal is to ensure procreation, then infertile and aged couples should be precluded from marriage.
Instead, most states have implemented an irrational and unjust system that provides significant benefits to just-married heterosexuals while denying benefits to a male or female couple who have enjoyed a loving, committed, faithful and mutually reinforcing relationship over several decades. That's not the way it has to be. Government benefits triggered by marriage could just as easily be triggered by other objective criteria, leaving the definition of marriage in the hands of private institutions.