Tuesday, December 28, 2010

ShareThis button causes my Ubuntu laptop to crash!

I tried to install the very likable and useful ShareThis button as an add-on for Firefox on my Ubuntu 10.04 laptop. It crashed the machine. Anyone have similar experiences?

Saturday, December 18, 2010

A delightful version of From the Beginning

A pop hit from ELP: "From the Beginning."


R.I.P. Captain Beefheart

Endlessly weird, provocative (enough to catch Frank Zappa's eye) but an original talent, Don Van Vliet, Captain Beefheart, extended the boundaries of music. May he rest in peace.

Friday, December 10, 2010

An interview with the great Deirdre McCloskey

She is one of the most innovative scholars to be found. A veritable public intellectual, if only people in charge would listen.
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

 "In life, people who mistake dreams for reality are called crazy. In politics, they’re called leftists." - Dan Flynn writing in Mutiny on the Goodship Obama? in Human Events.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Keith don't go

QUOTE OF THE DAY:
"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

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB:
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.”

“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.”
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.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Stephen Johnson, the man who appreciates the slow hunch

An impressive explanation of creativity by way of Bong Boing: Where Good Ideas Come From.



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

Sunday, September 19, 2010

An interview with Michel Houllebecq, French iconoclast

I have never read any of Michel Houllebecq's work but this interview in the Paris Review is remarkable.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Quote for the day

Thomas Sowell:
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

They certainly don' t make music like Be Bop Deluxe any more. Bill Nelson where are you?

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Sunday, July 25, 2010

One of my major influences, the late Karl Hess

The Death of Politics by 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

"Freedom regularly makes ridiculous anyone who thinks he has figured out the limits of what is possible." - Charles Murray, What It Means To Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Moral licensing!

In the deep recesses of the inner mind is the Great Offset!
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

It's OK to kick problems down the road. We've got some time!
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

Google always appears to be one step ahead.

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?"

All three writers -- Brink Lindsey, Jonah Goldberg and Matt Kibbe -- in this symposium are cogent, refreshing and passionate about the relationship between libertarians and conservatives.All three make observations that can't be overlooked. However, I say Goldberg and Kibbe get the best of the debate.

Friday, June 25, 2010

The ZaZa Pizza King, Don Michele Caruso has died

I was saddened to learn this morning driving on Main Street in Melrose that the ZaZa King Don Michele Caruso, died at the age of 80. A memorial photograph was posted on the front door and an announcement of the closing posted on the store window. Don Michele was a character and his restaurant was a throwback to the old days -- a little eccentric in design but very comfortable and a nice place to eat Old World cooking. The decor of his restaurant demonstrated that he certainly was a proud Italian. And he was a follower of Padre Pio. He will be missed in Melrose and beyond. Up above Padre Pio is guiding his soul.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

"Loss is nothing but change."

On with the routine: starting the day with Marcus Aurelius:
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

Incompetence BP style

Is is any wonder that BP can't get its act together?

Glaeser: The Economics of Libertarianism

Ed Glaeser confronts the paradox 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!

The Korean Conspiracy of 2002 to operatic music:

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


The following is the text of Senator Richard Tisei's remarks at Wakefield's Commemoration of Memorial Day on the Upper Commons
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.

Memorial Day in Wakefield, Massachusetts 2010



The master partisan

Why we loved Johnny Most

Sunday, May 23, 2010

You don't say?

Payback Time - Deficit Crisis Threatens Ample Benefits of European Life - NYTimes.com

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.

My son the pianist

Bravo, I say!

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Thought for the day

An arrow's path and the mind's path are different. Nevertheless, both when it is on its guard and when it revolves round a subject of inquiry, the path of mind is none the less direct and upon its object.
Book VIII, Number 60. Meditations, Marcus Aurelius.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Beware Liberals speaking with VAT tongue

GEORGE WILL
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

He certainly shook things up when he unleashed the Sex Pistols upon the world of rock music!

Malcolm McLaren dies at the age of 64

Sunday, April 04, 2010

A traditional Italian Easter! Buona Pasqua from East Boston!

Here's my mother's pizza chena, a regular at our Easter table.


Sorry you couldn't  make it.  The rice pie was just as good.

Easter Sunday, by Patti Smith

Always worth a listen on Easter Sunday from my favorite odd-ball, 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

Peggy Noonan spells it out wonderfully
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.

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.

Read the entire article.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Keyboardist Jon Lord To Release New Album In March

An interesting conceptual enterprise from Jon Lord, who once attacked keyboards with great ferocity  for Deep Purple.
According to JonLord.org,  Jon Lord will release his next album, To Notice Such Things, on March 22 through Avie Records.

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.
I can't wait!

Soft Machine in Italy

One of the great progressive music bands in my lifetime: Soft Machine.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

TSA brilliance

Let's put a 4-year-old with leg braces through a little airport screening hell. But let's not call it a war on terror.

Monday, February 08, 2010

What I share with Joseph Schumpeter: a birthday

Joseph Schumpeter was born on this day. So was I.

Hat tip to Organizations and Markets: "Happy Schumpeter Day"

Sunday, February 07, 2010

It was, from the beginning, a power grab!

The global warming consensus is falling apart.

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

What the liberals and socialist from Amherst to Cambridge choose to ignore: Hugo Chavez and violence against protesters. Joe Kennedy call your office.

Is it time again to boycott Citgo?

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Ron Radosh on Howard Zinn

The "historian" as propagandist. Ron Radosh, speaks truth to the legacy of 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

D.R. Tucker:
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

Monday, January 18, 2010

Cato weighs in on gay marriage

The Moral and Constitutional Case for a Right to Gay Marriage | Robert A. Levy | Cato Institute: Commentary
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.

In honor of Dr. King

Required reading: Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

Sunday, January 10, 2010