It's a Small World

For no particular reason I got to my favorite living thinker Thomas Sowell's site , and there is the normal picture of him, with the caption "Photo by Ted Mock". Ted Mock is the father of my friend Don Mock, Don and I did his web site several years ago.

Tiny, tiny world we live in these days.

Thinking about Culture

First I come across this interview with the Aspen institute with some serious thinkers (Irshad Manji, Steven Emerson and Gilles Kepel), about how Muslim immigration into Europe is changing the immigrants, then 5 minutes later I come across this Rumble In Europe post (speculation about how Muslim immigration into Europe is changing the Europeans. Then that night, I see an interview with Irshad Manji on Tucker Carlson's program (synopsis, Islam is infected with Arabian culture).

All quite interesting to read and watch, I suppose the most interesting part is that I came across all of the independently, all within 2 hours of each other, and they all had the same general topic.

New Picks

After 2 months of loyal service, it is time to retire custom Fender Extra Heavy, and move on to the Dunlop Stubby 2.0 mm.

Wow

Due to he technological miracle of DNS pointing and server to server FTP, this site will now be available at www.moodyloner.net

This is really quite a robust and mighty tool.

AJAX

Asynchonous Javascript and XML - which allows the browser to communicate with the server without refreshing the page (a la GMail) is going to be revolutionary. An over view and a specific. Wow.

And the cool thing is that it's a synthesis of technologies, nothing really new. Wow.

Addendum - From Mike, another very cool article on it here

Some information wants to be free

I discovered the sites in this order

• Roger McGuinn's Folk Den - Where Roger McGuinn keeps his favorite folk songs alive, with both lyrics, mp3s and tab.


• The Mudcat Cafe / Digital Tradition - a truly staggering selection of traditional music information and what not.


• Bluegrass Box - Seemingly all user contributed freely and legally available music, all in ftp form.


• The Steam Powered Preservation Society - Mostly the field recordings of Tut Taylor, who seemingly has been recording for 40 years.

We truly do live in a golden age in a lot of ways.

I wonder

If the primary reason people oppose abortion these days isn't directly tied to ardent pro-choicers being far more wretched than ardent pro-lifers. Case in point is this Mathew Yglesias post about the topic of parental notification. Quite a few of the pro-choicers seem to be trying to convince themselves with hyperbolic language.

The Three Types of marriage

All this occurred to me in the car one day.....

Based purely on observation and insight I arrive at this conclusion

• Cult marriage - This does not mean that the people involved are in a cult, or were married in a cult, but rather that they act a private cult of two. Often called "Joined At The Brain" these two differ only in gender and maybe appearance. Holding identical views on things, these people are rarely apart and share without thinking. Over time they also adopt similar body language.
  


• Team marriage - In contrast to the cult marriage, these two contrast well with each other. Their skills do not overlap and they work very well together, though with each playing a different part. Life is measured in tasks completed and there must always be some project in the works.


• Role Based marriage - The most common type, this is the storybook marriage, with each partner self-consciously acting the part of the husband or wife. The term "being a good husband" or "being a good wife" can only be meaningfully applied to this type.

Or something like that.

An interesting debate

David Boaz and Judy Waxman debate the ethics and legality of the morning after pill in an interesting exchange. IMHOP, the root thing they're debating is the nature of rights, Boaz having the negative (no one should be forced to do something) view and Waxman having the positive (people have a right to things) view. It's not a very new debate but they're doing it fairly well.

I do think we're going to see a lot more of these type of debates, and also that it will be a good thing.

To wit these things are being debated at the federal level, and presumably setting nationwide law and legal precedent. In doing so it brings the strongest libertarian argument against a national health care system, which is that national health care would invariably be top-down, and this is what is would look like.

Thoughts while waiting for an upload to finish

I wonder if anyone else (besides the Belmont Club folks, where I heard about it it) thinks that the reason China is importing so much oil is so that they can launch an OOTB attack on Taiwan and not suffer from the inevitable oil blockade that the Taiwanese, US and probably Japan would impose.

One more and it's

a bad case of Blogorrhea