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Wednesday Rapid Fire
- Yahoo News with Yahoo Maps – I’ll give Google 5 days to do this too. HT: Make
- Google Maps with Transparencies – HT: Make
- A glut of flat screen technology – which would be cool.
- Google Maps Walking Distance
- New MS Money
- Mencken
“All the extravagance and incompetence of our present Government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizens has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we’d be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.”
- Tom G Palmer has some nice words about Admiral Stockdale, clearly the classiest guy to run for national office in quite some time.
- Yet another review of Freakonomics, this time by James Q Wilson, the authors are on the Charlie Rose program tonight. Money quote
“…quoting someone whose name I have forgotten: social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have trouble enough predicting the past.”
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Any dog in a storm…
I get back from the Luxury Kings show last night and find out that Drex has had a …. strong reaction to being alone when there’s thunder outside. It is a nice picture of the two of us together. Note the hole in the wall (about two thirds of it was already there, but still, this was a bit excessive.) There are new teeth dents in the doorknob too.
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Live 8
A very good post from the Agitator about this current foolishness
It’s all the more perverse when you consider that corporate farms in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. are a big reason why Africa remains so poor. In heavily subsidized crops like cotton and corn, farmers in these countries can sell their crop on the international market for less than what it costs them to grow it. There’s simply no way poor farmers in emerging economies can compete with that. So lavish subsidies in rich countries keep poor countries from competing, which in turn keeps them poor. The rich countries feel guilty, so they sap taxpayers to come up with aid projects that don’t work, and really only benefit the exact same industries that benefit from the subsidies. All the while, each time public aid does fail, it makes private donors think Africa’s a lost cause, and therefore makes them less likely to give. Which is tragic, because private aid does seem to work. It’s more likely to find its way around the corruption, and hit the people who need it.
Which brings us back to Live 8. The whole purpose of the event, Geldoff kept telling us, was not to raise private funds for Africa. Rather, it was to encourage the citizens of developed countries to lobby their governments for more public aid. Oh, and also to make spoiled rock stars feel better about their respective social consciences.
There is also this very good post from Josh Trevino who’s reporting on the G-8 protesters
But the true believers exist, and they are capable of organizing themselves. A counterintuitive thing, one would think, but the anarchist/hard left capacity for assembling at set times and doing set things is a well-proven one. Just like libertarians availing themselves of public services, the contraindicating intersection of reality and ideology is often employed, but never acknowledged. As at Seattle, DC, and Genoa, so too Edinburgh: the city is overrun in a well-planned influx from across the developed, Western, wealthy world to protest developed, Western, wealthy things.
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An Evening at Blind Willie’s
Where surprisingly few photos turned out that well. Here is one.
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A backyard fourth
Random shots from the Ettel’s backyard.
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More Photos
I went to the A-Sides show last night, and afterwards went out to my favorite skyline place, at Freedom Parkway and 75 at 3:00 in the morning for the optimal mix of ambiance and safety…
Ghost Adam
Atlanta at Night
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Feeling the Burn
Today Mark, Emily and I rode at little over 30 miles in the 90 plus heat. While it was a good and needed ride it was very taxing on the system and produced a very dramatic sunburn (happily only on my arms).
The Wrist
The Elbow
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First Photos
The new digicam is quite something I do have to say. Something complicated anyway. Here are the first decent photos I’ve taken with it.
and here is the second
Happily Olympus has some free online lessons. I’m going taking some cityscape shot tomorrow, we’ll see how that goes.
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Flagrant gadgetry
- Navicore Personal GPS – it wirelessly turns your bluetooth phone in to a GPS device. Very cool, but it seems to only be available in Europe, though I imagine that will change soon. HT: Gizmodo.
- 10 Million Candlepower flashlight – with built in recharging! And only $49 bucks too. There’s a 15 million candlepower for sale too.
- The Pain Ray – Not really a gadget, but cool in a creepy way. It uses microwaves to heat nerve endings. Supposedly for security and crowd control.
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Random thoughts
- A pretty significant alliance between the US and India. You would think that this would be much bigger news, especially given the rivalry between India and Pakistan and India and China.
- Convictions in the East St Louis voter fraud trial – no surprise there really (it was all on tape). That also should have been much bigger news.
- In South Korea (the most web connected country in the world), a woman doesn’t clean up after her dog and achieves blog infamy within one day. Start the link chain here.
- The Rhode Island Legislature has voted to legalize medical marijuana, without even the pressure of a voter initiative. One wonder when principal-agent theory becomes something the media talks about.
- Free Individualist Stickers – I’m pleasantly surprised by the move to brevity in bumper stickers as seen in the gold and blue “=” stickers one can see on cars in my neighborhood. The guy linked is giving out free “i” stickers (for individualism). Judging from his blog he’s a Randian of some sort and a fellow IHS seminar attendee.
- Exposure Manager (run by a Winds of Change blogger apparently) is offering a deal to Instapundit readers.