Gagdad Bob ponders the riddle of Catholic organizations that are not even a little bit Catholic.
Secular fundamentalists are a huge nuisance and they get into everything.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Owners and managers
The long-standing American tragedy of the separation of ownership from management has struck Chile rather spectacularly.
War dead go out the back gate
... sorry, the "side gate". And then down obscure country roads and bypasses to their resting places. Peter Hitchens noticed.
No sense wasting political capital on war dead honors.
No sense wasting political capital on war dead honors.
Leonardo's Salvator Mundi
A newly certified-as-authentic da Vinci painting goes on sale for $200 million.
That's quite an incentive for art fraud, isn't it?
That's quite an incentive for art fraud, isn't it?
The scientist as socialist saint
Does deference to scientists unfit a people for self-government? A British article has me thinking:
"...a recent survey of public attitudes towards science in the UK suggests support remains healthy. More than eight out of 10 people agree that scientists want to make life better for the average person and nearly nine in 10 people think scientists make valuable contributions to society."What in your life experience would lead you to such a conclusion? Would you trust people this gullible with a voice in government?
The New York Review of Books: down on Obama
A reconsideration worth considering:
Obama has always preferred the symbolic authority of the grand utterance to the actual authority of a directed policy.This too is interesting: "Obama’s first twenty-three months in office saw seventy days on foreign trips and fifty-eight days on vacation trips."
[...]
For Obama, protracted moods of extreme abstraction seem to alternate with spasmodic engagement.
[...]
Obama tends to speak as if he were the United States addressing the world; and he treats the United States as the most grown-up country in the world.
[...]
Barack Obama from the start of his presidency has exhibited an almost exclusive taste for the dignified part of government.
[...]
The new state of social science
From Body & Society (Sage Journals) by Lucy Pickering, School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow: "Toilets, Bodies, Selves: Enacting Composting as Counterculture in Hawai’i" -
Defecation has received limited attention within the social sciences and humanities. Toilets not a great deal. Urination even less.
[...]
Through looking at the everyday defecatory practices of hippies and drop-outs in Hawai’i, this article seeks to examine the interplay of the acts of defecation and urination with the materiality of toilets themselves. Each depends on the other, and both exist in relation to various others: other toilet designs, other communities, other people.
A mousetrap for hipsters
The aging hipster renews his credentials through purchases. Flying off the shelves is the delightful children's story, "Go the F*** to Sleep." It has sold more than Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Details here.
If you are suffering the tax of profanity, you may as well look at this, too.
Hipsters - a major sales demographic.
If you are suffering the tax of profanity, you may as well look at this, too.
Hipsters - a major sales demographic.
Soros: "We are on the verge of an economic collapse"
What Soros means to say is "We are on the verge of an economic collapse due to policies and politicians I have supported in the past." At least he's halfway there.
What would Winston Churchill say?
Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.
Ex-dean of Yale Law School : busted
Nice collar of Harold Hongju Koh, mortal enemy of all that was Bushian, dear defender of all of Obama's Bushisms.
If I recall correctly, some wanted to bring up on charges those who rendered legal opinions to Bush re: Bush war policies. Can Koh be brought up on Obama-related war crimes charges?
The Obama administration has failed to close the military courts at Guantánamo, where it has tried and convicted a child soldier of newly invented ‘war crimes’; it has perpetuated indefinite detention and launched a legal assault on WikiLeaks. Perhaps most significantly, it has radically intensified drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. (Throughout the campaign trail John McCain condemned the expansion of the Afghan War into Pakistan as reckless and foolhardy.) Koh has dutifully produced legal rationales for the drone strikes, supplying the necessary law component to a national security ‘strategy’ of open-ended global counter-insurgency. None of this has provoked much criticism beyond the marginal antiwar left and libertarian right, and Koh’s justifications have been largely ignored by pundits once outraged by similar Bush-Cheney edicts.Once his man was elected, Koh missed an opportunity (in the words of Jacques Chirac) to keep quiet.
Assembled in America
We are proud to assemble Chinese bridges and other infrastructure components here in the land of the shovel-ready.
You see, we allow the export of low-skill work like designing and building bridges, and keep the high-skill work of assembling ready-made components.
We are all about value added.
You see, we allow the export of low-skill work like designing and building bridges, and keep the high-skill work of assembling ready-made components.
We are all about value added.
Socialist morality
Hanson: Do socialists lack personal conviction? Meanwhile, Private Eye already weighed in with the captioned photo of Labor Pary boss Miliband.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
The $100 million flight suit
A Tea Party congressman, with more than a little personal experience in the matter, is moving to kill the USAF $100 million flight suit program.
"The [current] gear endangers pilots' lives, the Air Force says." This would be the same gear that has been endagering pilots lives since the 1950s, apparently.
Gates needs to fire some more generals on the way out the door.
"The [current] gear endangers pilots' lives, the Air Force says." This would be the same gear that has been endagering pilots lives since the 1950s, apparently.
Gates needs to fire some more generals on the way out the door.
It's impossible to spot financial bubbles
It's not possible to spot bubbles. Don't even try. You'll never do it. You have no chance of spotting one.
This article, by a certified member of the crowd (see "madness of"), is fascinating in its militant insularity.
This article, by a certified member of the crowd (see "madness of"), is fascinating in its militant insularity.
Decoding Garry Wills
An interesting review of Wills' latest in a career of "Stakhanovite" literary output. Note the description of his family background. If we view liberalism as public compensatory gestures offsetting deep personal, familial shame and guilt, Wills' career makes a lot of sense.
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