• Judaism,  Links

    Wednesday Rapid Fire

    August 4, 2005 /
    • From Yglesias

      …The article claims that “In Israel, American Jewish men are considered nerds,” which seems reasonable. To this Jewish American man, Israelis seem like goyim. The older Ashkenazis, often born abroad, still have some connection to the tradition, but your average Israeli makes a mockery of Jewishness. The idea of a Jewish fireman or a Jewish sailing instructor is ridiculous, and everyone knows it. Of course to many American Jews the very outlandishness of the notion that you could not only have an entire army filled with Jews but that it could actually win wars is much of the appeal of the Zionist enterprise. Still, not the sort of thing real Jews do. One wonders how they find enough non-nearsighted fighter pilots.

    • Sand Bullets in Israel – which is conveniently close to many deserts.
    • .Net DNS component – and only six months after I wrote my own. This one looks better than mine though.
    • Sortable Lists via CSS and Javascript
    • This editorial from the Middle East Times discusses the possibility of the West closing the door to immigrants and visitors (which is probably what will happen if current trends continue) and this one from the Belgravia Dispatch deals with similar matters. I think history will eventually judge the current European assimilation problems as a failure of the welfare state. I was going to do a longer post on nationality and self-identified moral class but I think that will have to wait.
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  • Society,  Web

    Best selling artists

    August 3, 2005 /

    I recently stumbled upon this list of top selling artists of all time. While it was pretty much what I expected there were some notable surprises, most notably, Leonard Cohen is in the top 20! He’s ahead of Mettalica, AC/DC, Bon Jovi, Barbra Streisand and Bruce Springsteen.

    I then go to the Leonard Cohen page on Wikipedia, and see this quote:

    “I feel that, you know, the enormous luck I’ve had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn’t want to write, to be able to have satisfied that dictum I set for myself, which was not to work for pay, but to be paid for my work. Just to be able to satisfy those standards that I set for myself has been an enormous privilege.”

    which is as good a theory of working I’ve seen in quite some time.

    Now readers, whose presence surprised you the most on the list of best selling artists? Comments are open.

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  • Bluegrass,  Music

    The Appalachians

    August 2, 2005 /

    I just finished watching The Appalachians on PBS. On the whole, it was good, but had a few glaring flaws namely:

    • Why was it funded by the Department of Veteran’s Affairs and NASA?
    • The failure to draw the conclusion that successful unionization was the cause of the increased wages for the coal miners, hence the increased mechanization (and safety) of the mines, and also the drop in the people needed to work the mines. The producers treated these as unrelated events.
    • No music past the Carter Family, which is quite notable since there is much footage of Clarence Ashley and Doc Watson available.
    • No mention of traits that carried over from Scotland and Ireland, namely a desire to be on the far edge of society (and I’m sure many others, such as whiskey making) Instead they concentrated just on the music as the only carryover. While important, it was hardly the whole thing.
    • No mention of bluegrass music; they stop at string bands.
    • They omit the details of the modification of the banjo over time. Originally it was a four sting instrument made from gourds. It evolved into a 5 string instrument made from cats, and now leather. They present it as coming into existence fully formed as a 5 stringed instrument. It’s an interesting progression and on that stuck out by it’s absense.
    • And most importantly, they omit the importance of the cultural factors and the terrain in explaining the hardness of their lives. They wanted their independence at any cost, and living on land inhospitable to mankind was the price they paid.
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  • Iraq,  Photography

    Something worth reading

    August 1, 2005 /

    I finally checked out the website of Michael Yon. He’s a photographer and a former special forces officer who’s rambling around Iraq not embedded with any American unit. The commentary is quite different than what one ordinarily sees (it’s more a here’s what I did today in Fallujah) and the quality of the photography is unmatched.

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  • Europe,  Islam

    Fascinating and horrifying

    July 31, 2005 /

    I recently read this interview with a terrorist recruiter in the UK Prospect. It’s quite long but worth reading. The recruiter is some unassimilated Pakistani Brit who seems quite terrifying in his certainty. It brought to mind two things.

    1. It is uncanny how accurate Eric Hoffer was in describing this sort of person in The True Believer as rootless, no strong family, no national identity, no sense of self etc.
    2. The current situation seems to be similar to the international(ist) unrest Trotsky had in mind before he was forced out by Stalin. That is to say; having active agents throughout the world with no strong connections to the center of the movement. The Global Guerillas blog calls this Open Source Warfare.

    And now I see this article on the French deporting radical Muslim clerics. Hmm.

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