December 2008
17 posts
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Daily Euphony: Igor Stravinsky - Otche Nash (Our...
November 2008
34 posts
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Daily Euphony: Nikolai Kedrov Sr. - Otche Nash...
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Mumbai: Exporting Pakistan’s Resources →
Gary Brecher’s (The War Nerd) brief overview of the Mumbai terrorist attacks has an interesting take on the Mumbai terrorist attacks from an economic perspective:
The reason this was such a good plan is that it maximized the Islamists’ local assets. These guys aren’t smooth enough to get through normal hotel security to plant a bomb, but they didn’t have to be. They just stormed in through...
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Take the Neocon Foreign Policy Quiz →
Are you a neoconservative? Take this quiz to find out.
I scored as an ‘isolationist’.
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London Labour and the London Poor
Following a reference from the Vanity Fair story I just posted, I ran across these wonderful illustrations from Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor:
Kind of an asshole, but his rhubarb prices are the lowest in all of Christendom.
Two words: free boot-laces.
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The Gentleman Grafter →
By night, Joe Ades dines with his fourth wife at exclusive restaurants, sips Veuve Clicquot at the Pierre, and goes home to a three-bedroom Park Avenue apartment. By day, he is something else altogether. At 72, the “peeler guy” in the Turnbull & Asser shirts is a New York legend.
Do we have any interesting street characters like this in St. Louis? Someone with such an unusual charater that...
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This is my Milwaukee →
I am not really sure what’s going on here, but it smells like genius…
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Daily Euphony: Alan Hovhaness - Lousadzak (Keith...
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The Pro-Actionary Principle →
… contrary to the Precautionary Principle, a technology can never be declared “proven safe.” It must be continuously tested with constant vigilance since it is constantly being re-engineered by users and the co-evolutionary environment it inhabits. The automobile today embedded in its matrix of superhighways, drive-ins, seat belts, gps, hypermiling is a different technology that the model T...
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High Seas Piracy + Google Maps Mashup →
This map shows all the piracy and armed robbery incidents reported to the IMB Piracy Reporting Centre during 2008.
via BLDGBLOG
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Daily Euphony: Cowboy Junkies - A Common Disaster...
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We’ve Cut Cigarette Smoking By Half and We Didnt... →
Imagine that; in the past 40 years tens of millions of Americans have voluntarily quit smoking a legal, yet highly addictive intoxicant. Millions of others have refused to initiate the habit. And they’ve all made this decision without ever once being threatened with criminal prosecution and arrest, imprisonment, probation, and drug testing.
By contrast, during this same period of time, state and...
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What happens if the Ford, GM, and Chrystler fail?
I’ve been scanning through the morning news, and keep seeing reference to ‘3 million jobs lost in the auto industry if the Big 3 fail’. At first glance, this seems like it could be accurate if one takes into account 1) people working at the Big 3, 2) their direct suppliers 3) vendors, such as advertising, marketing, public relations,etc. This would of course be bad in the short...
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Daily Euphony: Tomasz Stanko Quartet - Cyhria from...
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Putin: I am going to hang Saakashvili by the...
Putin: I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls.
Sarkozy: Hang him?
Putin: Why not?
Putin: The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein.
Sarkozy: Yes but do you want to end up like Bush?
Putin: …
Putin: Ah — you have scored a point there.
Source: Times Online, Vladimir Putin ‘wanted to hang Georgian President Saakashvili by the balls’
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Daily Euphony: Bon Iver - Flume from the album For...
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Daily Euphony: Avishai Cohen - Remembering from...
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Largest Scam in Human History
The subprime mortgage ‘crisis’ is going to go down in history as the largest scam that humans have ever perpetrated on their fellow man. The techniques used should get their own name, like Mr. Ponzi and his pyramid.
In ‘The End of Wall Street’s Boom’, Michael Lewis (author of Liar’s Poker) tells the tale of a notorious Wall Street short seller, Steve Eisman,...
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Seymore Hersch: 'You cannot believe how many...
In a recent interview, investigative journalist Seymour Hersch (who’s so good at what he does that Richard Perle called him ‘the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist’) says:
“You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on 20 January [the date of the next president’s inauguration],’ he says, with relish. ‘[They say:]...
“Work is love made visible.”
– Kahlil Gilbran
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Iran invests USD 2.5 billion in stem cell research →
The cognitive dissonance of a ‘religious dictatorship’ religious ‘dictatorship’ and ‘rogue nation’ sponsoring this kind of research is likely to make some pundit’s heads explode.
(see comments for a discussion regarding the scare quotes)
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Daily Euphony: Ben Frost - Theory of Machines from...
The Physics of Extraterrestrial Civilizations -... →
The late Carl Sagan once asked this question, “What does it mean for a civilization to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilization is a few hundred years old… an advanced civilization millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bush baby or a macaque.”
Although any conjecture about such advanced civilizations...