Odd statements

The consensus response after I tell people that sparks flew out of my new vacuum is "What? You were vacuuming? Really?"

Nifty

The 15 best skylines in the world, by city.

Back in Louisville

The lucky silver dollar.

A long post about my grandfather will be up soon.

Sad

Here's the obit.

Blogging will be light the next few days

I'm off the old country tommorow, I'm not sure when I'll return.

Well worth watching

On a related note, everyone should check out the most recent BloggingHeads, which features a very interesting dialogue between James Pinkerton and Mickey Kaus. Very good bigthink about the future (and a lovely new term, technological determinism) and immigration.

One quibble is that he reiterates the theory held by most people, which is that we could reduce illegal immigration to a trickle without much effort by building a wall. It's similar to the thought that we could win the drug war if only we tried harder.

The government can't keep drugs out of prisons, and the Soviets had the biggest police state in history, and they had tremendous drug problems. It's ridiculous to think while we can't successfully ban inanimate objects, we can successfully ban animate ones.

I imagine we'll do what we're doing with the drug war, which is spend a lot of money and civil liberties to create self-perpetuating interest groups (much like the classic bootleggers and Baptists unions of the prohibition era) and to deal with the actual problems as poorly as possible.

For the record I think sanctions on employers is the most effective way of dealing with the total number of illegal immigrants (not that it will do that much) and the main thing we should be doing (if we insist on some collective action) is to rapidly Americanize the immigrants that are here. Put simply, we need to change the Mexicans living here into Americans of Hispanic descent and throw this whole notion of multiculturalism away (the illegal immigrants did).

Alex Tabarrok has the line of the day

In this post

Brad just doesn't know right-wing agitprop. My friends walked out, but I exited the theater, pumped my fist in the air and shouted, Wolverines! (That's when I first knew I was a rather odd Canadian - perhaps this was destiny.)

He would later (legally) immigrate to America and taste the sweet air of freedom.

An undercovered story

Deaths fall for U.S., rise for Iraqis
U.S. military deaths during the past month have dropped to an average of about one a day, approaching the lowest level since the insurgency began two years ago, according to a USA TODAY analysis of U.S. military data.

The decline in U.S. deaths comes as Iraqi casualties are the highest since the U.S. military began tracking them in 2004.

I've noticed this from ABC's This Week coverage as well, though they don't give the numbers over time. It would be interesting to see a chart of democide in Iraq (I'm counting the insurgency as a prospective government for the purpose of this post); I would wager it's roughly stable year to year. After so many decades of being a police state, Iraq contains a sizable number of people for whom killing is their only skill.


And while we're on the topic, check out the WikiPedia entry on Democide. It's an informative read on mass murders by governments over time, going back to the Mongols.

Things I've learned today

1. Batteries Plus will recycle old Uninteruptable Power Supplies
2. To prevent the ever annoying image toolbar from appearing in Internet Explorer, just add <meta equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no"> to the head of the document.

Prince and Tamar deliver one of the best shows I've ever seen

Absolutely flawless. I thought it would be a well done performance in a style I didn't care about, but was absolutely blown away. Prince's shows are as good as everyone says they are.

Quote of the Moment

Whiskey and Beer are a man's worst enemies... but the man that runs away from his enemies is a coward!" --Zeca Pagodinho

Not that impressed with Neko

I thought it was an odd choice of song, and the full band made it sound too full. Not bad though.

Larry the Cable Guy stole the show with the line about the woman so ugly "the Elephant Man would throw a telethon for her."

I plan your life so you don't have to

Your schedule for the rest of the week:

For you Bon Jovi fans out there, they will be performing on the Tonight Show this evening.

For Nick and me, Neko Case will be performing on the Tonight Show on Thursday.

Interesting from the Belmont Club

Whilst perusing Wretchard's thoughts on the current state of Iraq

Philip Bobbitt argued in his book, the Shield of Achilles, that Napoleon's strategic revolution consisted in fielding armies so large that any sovereign who opposed him would, in matching the size of his force, be compelled to wager the entire State, and not simply a wedge of territory in confronting him. Napoleon's campaigns were designed to kill enemy armies -- and thereby enemy states. What Napoleon failed to realize in his 1812 campaign against Russia was that the Tsarist state was so primitive that the destruction of its army simply did not mean the corresponding demise of its state. Like the proverbial dinosaur of pulp fiction, Russia had no central nervous system to destroy and lumbered on, like the bullet-riddled monster of horror stories, impervious to the Grand Armee. What Russia had on its side was chaos as epitomized by its savage winters.

Saddamite Iraq, like most terrorist-supporting states threatening the world today, are like the landscape of 1812 in that they were cauldrons of anarchy given a semblance of shape by fragile, yet brutal shroud-like states.

Most of what I've read actually suggests that Napoleon's brilliance was in organization of his armies, not his actual command or tactics. In Russia, he was captured by not seeing a qualitative difference between Russia and the rest of Europe. Unlike the Nazi Germany, (who did see Russia accurately, but bungled the strategy) the problem was that he did not conceive of Russia properly.

Needed - software that helps in conception via clever use of 3D motion graphics.

Quick round up

• The Simpson's intro - as done by real people.
  
• Spaceplanes
• It's not fascism because we don't call it fascism - the food police are now after soft drinks.
• Some clear thinking on the morning after pill.
• Evidently AT&T has a 1.9 trillion call database.
• Your tax dollars are paying auto workers not to work.
• An article on tracking public opinion on the internet. I will one day get my blogprophet project up and going.
  

An odd choice

Springsteen to cover the songs that Pete Seeger kept alive, but didn't write? Strange.

Missy in the Noir Ground

I just posted the photos I took on Saturday night. The goal of the project is to capture pictures of people silhouetted against interesting backgrounds. These turned out a bit noirish but on the whole I like them. Definitely too much foreground lighting for good silhouettes though.

Someone is finally doing this

I've often wondered why we don't have simple home medical testing kits for the most common problems one is likely to have. Just do a simple blood or urine sample at home once a month, and then send it off to be analyzed for the 15 most common (or cheapest to test for) illnesses and you're much more likely to catch something early. I would imagine legal liabilities are the likely culprit.

It would seem that they're doing something like this in Japan.

I predict that this will be a condition of health insurance in the future.

What's great about America

Take a look at some shots from an underground pot farm in Tennessee. They have blast doors, escape hatches, secret entrances, you name it. As CrimeProf (where I saw it) put it "the technology is of batman-villain quality".

And all of this is from America's stoners! Take that rest of world!

RIP Harry Browne

He passed away in Franklin TN on Wednesday. Here is the UPI obit.

The aquarium photos

I finally got around to pulling the aquarium photos off of the camera, and I'm quite impressed with many of them. It wasn't possible to use the flash, but some of them turned out quite nicely. I decided not to use Flickr for this, but rather to put them in their own gallery.

Quick Round Up

• A cheaper hybrid in the works
• Media format by political affiliation
• Dave Chappelle is quite brazen to be offended that Comedy Central might show some of his unfinished shows. And I would imagine that Chappelle Theory.com is a total crock.
  

China

Tyler Cowen shares my concerns about China, namely that they can't take a punch, or in this case, an economic downturn.

If you are not convinced, raise your right hand and repeat after me: "China in the 20th century had two major revolutions, a civil war, a World War, The Great Leap Forward [sic], mass starvation, the Cultural Revolution, arguably the most tyrannical dictator ever and he didn't even brush his teeth, and now they will go from rags to riches without even a business cycle burp."

It's worth reading the whole thing.

An interesting article

Jews and "The Moses Complex".

An interesting article on demographics

The Return of Patriarchy

While I disagree with him about the value of absolute number in military conflict (that has become increasingly less meaningful over time, particularly in the past 100 years) It's a very interesting read, and falls into my own general meme that self-selection is the dominant force in our society.