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Memorial Day being an odd coincidence
I was looking at the referral logs for moodyloner.net and came across A Day in Iraq. It’s a blog written by a soldier from Fort Benning (in Columbus Georgia) and his life there. Fascinating stuff with many pictures. A blog very much worth reading.
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Affordable Family Formation
This article by Steve Sailor (via Mickey Kaus) is will worth reading. Put simply, it explains the current American Red State/Blue State gap largely in terms of self selection and children. It’s much more expensive to have children in a blue (Democratic) state compared to a red (Republican) State. Throw in some freedom of movement and self selection and you’ve got a bifurcated America.
A few quibbles. He seems to throw in Atlanta as a “Red City” which is very much not the case. While metro Atlanta is a very red metro area, the city itself is quite blue. Also, the areas with the most recent and illegal immigrants (here in the Atlanta metro area anyway) seem to be the most Republican areas, which is seemingly at odds with his theory.
He also does not mention the Roe Effect, payroll taxes, the total tax burden, the actual cost of a mortgage (I got the full spiel from my mortgage broker when I refinanced, the cost of the mortgage itself can really vary quite a bit.)
On the whole, well worth reading though.
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A good article from Landsburg
I stumbled across this on Cafe Hayek.
“Diversity” has always been my least favorite Shibboleth of the left. In fact, nothing else even comes close, although the right wing habit of appending “of faith” at the end of ever sentence is rapidly closing catching up.
That was why I liked this piece by Steven Landsburg. Initial Paragraph:
I was invited to speak about “diversity” to an audience of about 80 students, roughly half black and half white. Most of the blacks sat on the left side of the room and most of the whites sat on the right—as good an indication as any that nobody really cares very much about diversity.
How much of life is taken up with these self-conscious display of piety? If you removed all of the man-years that people have spent talking about “diversity”, “sexuality”, “culture of life”,”family values” I wonder what, if anything would be lost.
5-30-2005 Updated for Clarity (verb tense)
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Not that happy with FeedDemon
After a full day’s worth of using the FeedDemon I’m switching back to Abilon. While FeedDemon actually functioned better in every respect, I dislike not being able to see all of the feeds at the same time. Tabbed browsing in the program is essential too. Oh well. I suppose Abilon can always improve with time.
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Bolshevism and Islam
As an amplification of my earlier post about Saudi influence on modern Islamic culture. Throw in a bit of Bryan Caplan and Eric Hoffer, and I’m closer having better thoughts on the subject.
To wit, the problem is the merging of state, society, economy and religion into a single unit. The most obvious parallel is pre-revolution Russia, with the Saudi royal family playing the Romanovs, and bin Laden playing Lenin.
After Ivan the Terrible essentially annexed the Russian orthodox church and installed the Czar as head of the church (or maybe that was Peter the Great, I can’t remember), all authority, be it economic, political, or religious in Russia became ever more centralized in the person of the Czar. When Lenin seized power in 1917 he merely continued this process, finally culminating in Stalin.
All of this centralization basically discards useful information as revealed in action and prices per Hayek in the Fatal Conceit. One man does the thinking for millions, and the society is one millionth as smart as it could be. Could this be what is happening in the Arab world right now? Is the problem just lack of knowledge and power distribution, as it was in the Soviet era, and current North Korea?
As I read over this post I see it is very jumbled and unclear. I’ll explore more on this topic later.
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RSS Readers
I’ve been using the free version of Abilon for a while. It’s very good at some things, the tabbed browsing inside the RSS program itself is especially nice, but it has the unpleasant habit of choking when it tries to update the feeds. Also it will sometimes “lose” feeds. No idea why that happens. I’m current experimenting with FeedDemon but it does not have tabbed browsing inside the program. I’ll keep my loyal readers posted on what I decide.
If only there were some kind of product placement and review system for the blogsphere!
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The Saudis
There are currently unconfirmed reports that King Faud of Saudi Arabia is dead. This is not as momentous as it seems since he’s effectively been out of power for several years.
This leads me to wonder: How much of modern Islam is just Saudi quirks?
In comparison, if you gave one of the more radical environmental groups, say Earth First, 200 billion dollars a year starting in 1985 to spend on the “Movement” what would environmentalism be like now? I would imagine it would be more extreme, and much, much weirder since there would be no idea competition or moderating influences.
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An interesting evening with PBS
I Tivo’d Speaking Freely on a whim and was amused to see that Charlie Daniels was the guest. I actually learned quite a bit.
- He’s a very good fingerpicker, I thought he only played fiddle
- He was on Nashville Skyline I thought that Norman Blake did all of the guitar work on that.
- He is a very articulate and charming guy, which is not the impression I had of him before. Although after 30 years as an entertainer I shouldn’t be surprised he knows how to work a room.
Then it was on to Unfiltered with Tucker Carlson, which is rapidly becoming my favorite of the talking head shows. At first I was surprised when by the quality, since Crossfire was terrible. It opens with a monologue, then on to 2 rounds of interviews with experts of some kind. The absense of politicians reciting canned responses is quite rereshing.
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Hitch puts it very well
Christopher Hitchens gets it right in his latest Slate column (refering to the fatwa put on Salman Rushdie)
Now, everything in me is revolted by the burning of books, let alone the attempt to murder writers, and I claim the right to feel this at least as strongly as any illiterate fanatic may choose to feel about a story in Newsweek. Some of us can be offended at insults to our culture, and we, too, possess unalterable convictions and principles. Many people take the same view of the desecration of Old Glory. But we would never dream of venting ourselves in random assaults on mosques or Muslims, and if anyone on our soil did dare to commit such atrocities, I hope and believe that they would not receive moist and sympathetic treatment in the pages of the American press.
Hitchens is one of the very few commentators that does not treat Muslims as exotic pets.
On a related note this CNN.com article was interesting for a few reasons, money grafs
Women in black veils marched through Kashmir, where schools and businesses were closed as part of the protest, and set American flags and copies of the U.S. Constitution ablaze.
“The defilement of our holy book is outrageous because we consider it to be the word of God,” thundered Asiya Andrabi, head of the women’s group Daughters of the Community, through her veil. “Guantanamo Bay is a cage. It is not a prison.”
- They burned copies of the Constitution? That’s a first. Maybe they DO hate us for our freedom.
- “Daughters of the Community”?
- “Thundered…. through her veil”. Who writes this stuff? Are they trying to work jokes in?
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I’m a Mastermind
I’m an INTJ, or “Mastermind” on Myers-Briggs Tests, specifically
Introverted Intuitive Thinking Judging Strength of the preferences % 78 50 88 78 INTJs are perfectionists, with a seemingly endless capacity for improving upon anything that takes their interest. What prevents them from becoming chronically bogged down in this pursuit of perfection is the pragmatism so characteristic of the type: INTJs apply (often ruthlessly) the criterion “Does it work?” to everything from their own research efforts to the prevailing social norms. This in turn produces an unusual independence of mind, freeing the INTJ from the constraints of authority, convention, or sentiment for its own sake.
INTJs are known as the “Systems Builders” of the types, perhaps in part because they possess the unusual trait combination of imagination and reliability. Whatever system an INTJ happens to be working on is for them the equivalent of a moral cause to an INFJ; both perfectionism and disregard for authority may come into play, as INTJs can be unsparing of both themselves and the others on the project. Anyone considered to be “slacking,” including superiors, will lose their respect — and will generally be made aware of this; INTJs have also been known to take it upon themselves to implement critical decisions without consulting their supervisors or co-workers. On the other hand, they do tend to be scrupulous and even-handed about recognizing the individual contributions that have gone into a project, and have a gift for seizing opportunities which others might not even notice.
Other masterminds include William F Buckley, Michael Dukakis, Donald Rumsfeld, CS Lewis, Colin Powell and Ayn Rand. Where they got that info I don’t know.
How about the rest of my many readers?