I only learned who Brett Kimberlin a couple of days ago when a Facebook friend  posted a link to Patterico's Pontifications Blog a couple of days ago. The blogs author reports being  a victim of harassment by Brett Kimberlin and today's entry is a particularly chilling tale.

I did a little googling about Kimberlin this morning  and found out that today is Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day. Thus this post.

I haven't posted much about the stock market lately because I haven't been involved in it for a while. But I, like many many  other people, bought some Facebook stock. I'm happy to say I was smart enough not to buy it on the opening day. I felt sure the price would be pumped up before the markets even opened. I'm not certain if that's what happened, but it sure did plummet later in the day.

I'd like to tell  you I bought it today. But that's not the case either. I bought it Monday. I didn't make a blog entry about it at the time because I was blogging about more important things like kissing pretty girls. It was down 10% from it's opening, so I thought it was bottoming out. Nope. It continued to fall for the next couple of days.

I wish buying too soon was the dumbest aspect of my trade. It's not. I wasn't paying close enough attention and I bought it in my IRA account instead of my brokerage account as I had intended. I am willing to do some modest speculation, but not in my IRA. Speculation can involve selling for a loss, and that should never be done in an IRA.

So I was doubly stupid (or at least stupid and a half). It might not be a complete disaster though. It closed up 3% today and I have almost broken even. One friend to whom I confessed my stupidity suggested it wasn't really a speculative trade. He has a small point...facebook is not exactly a penny stock, and it's not likely to go out of business anytime soon. It might still do as well as google.

This could still turn out to be a bad decision in the long run, but I don't think it will cause me to have to live off of dogfood when I'm elderly. Maybe I will have to take up the dogfood diet, but this trade probably won't be the only reason.

Many today are celebrating the birthday of Robert Moog (rhymes with "vogue"), inventor of the Moog synthesizer. Google even has a special doodle that, when clicked, opens an online synthesizer app that the user can play.

Moog touched my life in a couple of small ways. When I was about 12,I acquired the album Switched-On Bach, a set of performances of Bach's music on a Moog synthesizer. Shortly thereafter, I picked up the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange, which contained similar renditions of other classical music. I couldn't see the movie. It was rated X and my mom wouldn't even let me see PG-rated horror movies. That's OK. I thoroughly enjoyed the album, and when I finally did see A Clockwork Orange at a midnight movie after I turned 18, it was a bit anticlimactic.

The synthesizer was not the only electronic musical instrument Moog made. The first was a theremin, which he built in 1948. Later, his company Moog Music started making them.

I never learned how to play the synthesizer. But I did get me a theremin from Moog's company. I was no Clara Rockmore, but I figured out how to play a few tunes. Of course I learned the Good Vibrations riff, and I also learned to play Amazing Grace and There Is A Fountain Filled With Blood. For some reason old hymns and the theremin are unusually well suited to each other.

I'm proud to say that in his later years, Bob Moog settled down in my home state. He lived and ran his company in Asheville, North Carolina, which is about 2 hours away from where I live. This was a cause of pride, but it did become a source of regret later. Some of my coffee shop buddies used to talk about making a road trip to Asheville and trying to meet Bob Moog. Sadly, all we did was talk about it and when he died in 2005 I could have kicked myself. It's was yet another reminder that people die, and you don't know when it will happen. Forgetting this can be a big cause of regrets.

But enough morose introspection. Let's listen to some Bach (performed on a moog synthesizer of course.)

I don't remember exactly how old I was. I was a teenager, and probably older than I wish to remember. I was at a party given by my sister's BFF Patsy, and we were playing a game called five minute date. That's pretty much the same as the game more commonly known as 7 minutes in heaven. Only it's truncated. Patsy and most of her friends went to Catholic school, so maybe 5 minutes is all they are allowed (less time for SERIOUS shenanigans).

I was paired off with a beautiful young woman named Laura. She was Lebanese, which probably has a lot to do with my taste for sultry women. We went off to a clearing in the woods behind the house, and stared at our feet and made awkward conversation for a couple of minutes.

I didn't want to do this for the whole five minutes, so I asked her if I could kiss her. She said yes and we kissed on the lips. I liked it a whole lot, and have been a big fan of kissing women ever since. Thanks Laura, wherever you are.

This calls for fireworks!!!

The UPI recently released a story which is puts another dent in  the original  narrative:

Report: Zimmerman had broken nose

This is fairly conclusive evidence that Zimmerman's account of Martin attacking him was truthful.

Beyond what this story says about the Zimmerman case, reaction on the internet says a lot about how the left responds to inconvenient facts. I first found this story on Tara Servatius's facebook page. Most of the responses were fairly sane, but one person said the following:

If I were a 17 yr old heading home, and a nut job like Zimmerman started following me, then chasing and confronting me, a broken nose, a couple of black eyes, and some scrapes would be the least of his concerns

So apparently Zimmerman had the beat down coming. I guess this poster thinks Zimmerman should not have done anything to stop it, since he was only getting what he deserved.

I shared the link to the story on my page. The first person to respond said the following:

not that it's what he did, but he could have easily broken his own nose the minute he realized how unattacked he appeared to public scrutiny


Let's pretend for a moment that "unattacked" is a word.  And let's forget that it's pure speculation that Zimmerman broke his nose.We still have that he was not  subject to public scrutiny until about a month after the attack. The broken nose was known about the next day.

Another commenter on my page repeated that Zimmerman had a beat-down coming:


if someone started following me around in the dark I'd deck them and break their nose too if they got near me.

This same person later said, in reference to Zimmerman, "It's hard for me to have much sympathy for people who eschew discipline under the guise of demanding more freedoms." I guess breaking a complete stranger's nose is a sign of self-discipline.


I posted a factual news story. Nobody disputed the facts in the story (I'm not sure any of the commenters even read it). All they had was wild speculation, blame-shifting, and goalpost moving.

It was an excellent illustration of how folks on the left react to facts that don't fit the narrative.

My friend Annie has a blog called Intentional Living as The Rogue Chef/Yogi/Gardener. She used to have a blog in which she was merely The Rogue Chef. She appears to have expanded her scope.

I saw her this morning in the coffee shop where we briefly chatted about it. I told her I thought the broadening of her topic was a good idea. In my mind, it's hard to be a prolific blogger when you limit yourself to one topic. (A possible exception is motherhood....mommie bloggers always seem to have something new to write about.)

I know that I would not have nearly a thousand entries in this blog if it was only about a single topic. I know for a while this was the Ira Yarmolenko blog to a lot of  people, which is great. But as much as I poured my heart into blogging about her, I still blogged about other things. And I only had 28 entries about Ira.

I didn't share all of these thoughts with Annie. There was someone there that I didn't want to know about my blog.

She said that the single topic hadn't been a problem, she just hadn't been keeping up the blog because she was busy living life. That sounded like a good idea to me. Living your life gives you something to blog about.

Although she is writing about multiple  topics, they all appear to fall under the umbrella theme of "intentional living" Her credo is "I choose everything I do. I take responsibility for ALL my actions". 

That's not a bad philosophy. My life would be a lot better now if I'd had that good a head on my shoulders when I was her age. I did arrive at the idea of "intentional living" when I was a lot older than she is. To me, it is having some rationale for everything you do. Even if it's sitting around doing nothing (sometimes you need to recharge your batteries.)

I'm looking forward to seeing her explore this philosophy. I know I'll enjoy it and will probably learn a thing or two.

I stopped by the campus bookstore today and did some browsing. I found a book called The Republican Brain by Chris Mooney, who also authored the Republican War On Science.  I haven't read his previous book. This one doesn't look very inviting either.

The subtitle "The Science Of Why They Deny Science-- and Reality"  suggests the book is yet another attempt to ground political arguments in cognitive science. The trouble with this approach is that the focus of the argument becomes the opponents brain rather than the actual facts and principles under discussion.In other words, cognitive science provides a very modern, high tech ad hominem argument.

Of course I haven't read the book. It's entirely possible it's more nuanced and fair than the provocative title suggests, so I won't make further criticisms. I could read the book, but my conservative brain would probably be pathologically resistant to it's brilliant arguments.

Jonah Goldberg has read it, and so he has a right to criticize. Which he does in this review.

I also saw a copy of Steven Colbert's latest book I Am A Pole (And So Can You!). It looked like it might be amusing, but the most attractive part was the blurb by Maurice Sendak: "The sad thing is, I like it". This will go down in blurb history, especially since it was released  on the day of Sendak's death.

The blurb alone tempted me to buy the book. But I was strong. And besides, it's only 32 pages long so I could probably read it for free sometime.

I almost didn't make the poetry reading last night. I'd given three exams  Wednesday and Thursday that needed grading, and final grades are due Monday. 

But I am a die hard, and decided to just bring some tests with me and grade them while other people were reading. I usually don't like to do things like that. When I'm one of the readers at a poetry reading, I believe it's better etiquette to listen (or at least not be visibly occupied with other things) while others are reading. But the alternative was not going at all.

So I can't tell you much about the other readers this time. I read the following haiku:

( Click here for haiku )

By the time the coffee shop closed, I'd gotten one classes worth of exams graded and got a good start on another. It was a pretty good reading.

I've actually had three encounters with the later NASCAR driver Alan Kulwicki, although I never spoke to him. Since he passed away in 1993, I've often wished that I had.

The first time I saw him was in a karaoke bar. The MC called his name and he came up to the mic, looking very befuddled. Someone had given his name to MC without his knowledge. But he sang anyway. I honestly don't remember what he sang or how well he sang. But he did appear to be a good sport who  could take a joke.

The second time was in another bar. He was sitting at the bar, and I wasn't sure it was him. But he sure looked like the guy I had seen at the karaoke bar. I'd asked a few people if the guy was Alan Kulwicki. Nobody seemed to know for sure. But after he left the bartender, who apparently had asked him, confirmed to me that it was in fact Kulwicki.

The third time was at a local 4th of July concert. My brother's band was the opening act. The whole family went, and initially we all sat together. As the night wore on we dispersed some. At the end of the evening I looked around and saw my father talking in a very animated manner to the man next to him. Pop kept pointing at the stage, so I knew he was bragging about my brother. The man he was talking to didn't say much, but nodded occasionally. Since this was my third sighting, I quickly recognized him as Alan Kulwicki.

When I caught back up with my father, I asked him if he knew who he was talking to. My father's eyes were bad and he wasn't much of a Nascar fan, so he didn't. I told him he was talking to Alan Kulwicki (something Kulwick himself obviously didn't tell him.)

This last encounter gelled my opinion of Kulwicki. Here was a man of considerable fame and accomplishment listening patiently to a complete stranger talk about his son's accomplishments. And he did this without once saying "I'm Alan Kulwicki". He was obviously a very classy guy.

Four years ago my friend Ira Yarmolenko died. I haven't written about her as much lately, certainly not as much as I did in the year following her death. 

I've been thinking about her in the last couple of days. Friday I went into the coffee shop and there was a large bouquet of flowers on the counter. It was right next to Ira's picture and memorial book, but I didn't give that much weight when I saw them. I thought they were for one of the ladies currently working there. 

I asked the barista who the flowers were for and she told me they were for Ira. Of course. Friday was Ira's birthday, and some kind soul wanted to commemorate her birthday. (That's probably healthier than remembering the anniversary of her death.) She said the man who brought them in  also gave the barista on duty $100 and told her to give people free coffee until it ran out. Then he  gave her a $40 tip.

I was curious as to who this generous man was. The barista said he was in his 30's and looked native american. That didn't sound like anyone I knew, but Ira's circle of friends was a lot larger than our group of mutual friends. I looked at the card on the flowers. It was just a happy birthday card with the words "We love you" written on it. There was no signature.

I felt a little bad that I have never made a grand gesture like that on her behalf. But I'm glad somebody did. I'm sure somewhere Ira is very very pleased that a barista got a $40 tip because of her.

When I took creative writing under  Robin Hemley he  had a lot of things to say about using material from real life in fiction.
In particular, he  stressed that the truth of a detail does nothing for it's credibility.If someone argues that a particular incident is unbelievable, it is no defense to say "but it really happened!".

He must have done a good job of stressing this point because I am always finding movies and fiction whose creators could have benefited from his advice. One example is a scene from Almost Famous (which is for the most part an excellent film) where the young protagonist just happens to run into his sister in an airport far from home. 

In the DVD commentary, director and screenwriter Cameron Crowe explains that he really did run into his sister at an airport once. Sorry Cameron, verity is no defense. In fact, I didn't really find the scene all that unbelievable until Crowe  insisted on defending it in the commentary! If he'd had Robin's class (or read his book on the subject) he would have known better than to do that.

I cam across another example more recently in the short story The Martyr by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. It's the story of a young orphan taken into a Christian monastery who leads a happy and blessed life there until he is accused of impregnating a village girl. He is then cast out and shunned. For the most part it's a compelling story about Christian charity and forgiveness. At the end though, there is a rather jarring plot twist. I won't say what it is, but I can tell you it was a distraction from the story's main points. It was also pretty hard to square with a lot of things that went on earlier in the story. I wondered why Akutagawa put it in there.

I didn't wonder long.  The story has a postscript giving some background on the source of the story. It's from a book called Legenda Aurea. Akutagawa quotes from the introduction to the original story. It "is presumably a truthful record of a happening which took place  in a Christian Church at Nagasaki." Maybe the plot twist I found so incredible has some truth to it after all. Even so, it should have been left out. Even if it really happened.

But  I can't be as hard on Akutagawa as I was on Cameron Crowe . He died 29 years before Robin Hemley was born and was unable to avail himself of Hemley's wisdom. Crowe has no such excuse.

This article is a sort of   homage to James Altucher, who often makes posts with similar titles and formats. Here are some examples:

• 9 Things I Learned From Woody Allen
• 6 Things I Learned from Charles Bukowski
• 5 Unusual Things I Learned from Isaac Asimov

This differs from Altucher's blog posts  in that Mr.Fancy Pants is not a famous person but a song by Jonathan Coulton. Here is a video of him singing it in San Francisco:



This is my favorite Coulton song, and it has taught me three things.

If you commit yourself to creating something on a regular basis, you will eventually come up with something really cool.

As he said in the introduction, Mr. Fancy Pants was of his Thing A Week. He committed himself to coming up with a new song every week. As far as I know, this is the only Thing-A-Week song I've heard. But it doesn't matter if I hate the rest. This one is great, and it might not have been created if he hadn't forced himself to come up with something on a weekly basis.

If your audience likes it, go with it even if you don't like it yourself.

You saw how much the audience loved the song in the video. But you will also notice Coulton apologizing for it. He thought it was a throwaway. Creative integrity is important, but so is your audience. There would be no point in creating without them.

I had this realization on a much smaller scale with my memorial haiku. I've always thought they were trivial and felt like I should bring something to the poetry readings. But everyone at the poetry readings loves them. That counts for something, probably more than I think it does. That's why I still write haiku about the recently departed every month. (If I haven't made it clear, I know my stature as a poet is nowhere near Coulton's as a singer/songwriter. But I think that's the only place the analogy breaks down.)

Anything with the word "pants" in it is funny

An obvious and trivial point I know. I threw it in because two items is not enough for a list-style posting.

Originally posted by melvin_udall at "If I wanted America to fail"

Today is the anniversary of quite a few historical events. I enumerated several of them in a much earlier post. The one that still looms largest in my mind is the fire at Waco, even though it was 19 years ago. The whole Waco siege the worst atrocity committed by the American government against American citizen, even if you believe that the Branch Davidians themselves started the fire. The fire was started only after a 51 day siege during which the Branch Davidians were submitted to a relentless psy-ops campaign. And after the fire started, federal agents blocked firefighters from doing anything to help. That alone was criminally negligent.

I posted this link to an article about Waco  by David Hardy on my facebook page. My friend steeltoe responded with a link to a picture he took at the site of the Branch Davidian's home. 

Here are links to a couple of other informative pages on Waco:

Michael Rivero's Waco Page

We’re All Branch Davidians Now

---

Since my first post about April 19th, I've learned of a couple of other noteworthy events that happened on this day. One of them is that today is Bicycle Day, the anniversary of Albert Hoffman first intentionally ingesting LSD, back in 1943. It is also the birthday of pioneer computer scientist Fred Brooks. He was celebrating his 12th birthday while Albert Hoffman was tripping. Interesting.

And Levon Helms died today. He was a great musician with a lot of talent and a lot of heart. He also had a minor acting career, most famously playing Loretta Lynn's father in Coal Miner's Daughter. He was also in a wonderful buried treasure of a film called End Of The Line, which I highly recommend. He added a lot to American culture and touched a lot of people with his music. He will be missed.

One of the most valuable talents conservatives have is the ability to detect the bad ideas of intellectuals. Whole books by conservatives have been devoted to this.A few examples are  Paul Johnson's Intellectuals, Jacques  Barzun's The House Of Intellect, Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals And Society and Daniel J.Flynn's Intellectual Morons.

The problem is that someone who  reads  enough of the works of intellectuals to  write a book about it is probably an intellectual himself. So a sweeping indictment of all intellectuals is probably not a good idea.Fortunately, most conservative intellectuals are, in addition to being intellectuals, actually smart. They know to  limit the scope of their criticism.

Daniel J. Flynn, in his latest book Blue Collar Intellectuals does more than this. He demonstrates  that , in spite of all the indecipherable papers and nutty ideas that come out of modern academia, the life of the mind is a good thing and intellectuals can make positive contributions. He makes this case with  biographical sketches  of Will&Ariel Durant, Mortimer Adler, Milton Friedman,Eric Hoffer, and Ray Bradbury, the "blue collar intellectuals" of the title. Flynn defines a blue-collar intellectual as  "a thinker who hails from  a working class background, and whose intellectual work targets, in part or whole, a mass audience".

I expected this book to be enlightening and wasn't disappointed. I didn't expect it to be as entertaining as it was. Will Durant's scandalous romance with the young Ariel & associations with anarchists would fit nicely in a screenplay.Many novelists would love to have written the following real life detail about Ray Bradbury

Ray graduated from high school wearing his only suit, which his uncle had been wearing when murdered by a stick-up man...It still sported the bullet hole.

Eric Hoffer's early life almost seems to come out of Dickens. Flynn does warn us that there is little corroboration for Hoffer's childhood tales beyond Hoffer himself. But aspects of his later life are more credible and just as interesting.He  continuied to work as a longshoreman after writing his bestselling The True Believer.He  refused  an invitation to the White House because he didn't own a tie. His fish-out-of-water existence in 1960's San Francisco is also  interesting. As Flynn writes

In the Star Wars bar scene that was the Bay Area in the 1960s, Eric Hoffer played the most exotic alien of all. Amidst militaristic Black Panthers,drugged-out flower children...and strident student radicals, the burly senior citizen clad in 1940 workman's clothes with closely cropped white hair bordering a bald dome elicited stares

Amidst all these colorful anecdotes a theme emerges. These blue collar intellectuals lived and worked in a time when the masses sought intellectual enrichment. The heroes of this book delivered it to them,in spite of academic resistance to "popularization". Flynn believs that the gap between the masses and the intelligentsia is wider than it has ever been. I don't think it's as wide as Flynn does, but that's a quibble. The gap exists, and we could certainly use the likes of Eric Hoffer and Mortimer Adler today to help bridge it.

I brought two haiku to last night's poetry reading. I had one for Mike Wallace and one for Thomas Kinkade. Jonathan asked me if I had one for Earl Scruggs. I'd forgotten about him, so I cobbled one together. That sort of thing seems to happen a lot, but the resulting haiku are often not too shabby (which isn't to say they aren't shabby at all.) I also noticed that my Thomas Kinkade haiku had eight syllables in the second line, so I had to think up a quick fix for that. Fortunately I came up with a seven syllable line that wasn't too contrived.

Here are the haiku:


( Click here for haiku )

I actually suggested a similar question back in 2009 shortly after Elle and  I saw Willie Nelson with Asleep At The Wheel. We had a wonderful time together and it was a very memorable day. Even more wonderful and memorable than drinking sangria in the park.

On the way home, while I was thinking about what a perfect day we'd had, it occured to me that I would really love to hear Willie Nelson sing Lou Reed's "Perfect Day". Of course part of the reason was that I'd had a damn near perfect day that involved Willie Nelson. But it's also easy to imagine him singing it. His voice is unusually well suited to that song.

I taught naked today. Not literally. I sometimes like to teach without any notes or prompts. It is a little like standing in front of the class naked if you are not prepared.

The class was data structures. I'd arrived at work, and made a last minute decision not to go up to my office to get my notes. The subject was heaps, which I have taught many times in many different classes. I was able to show an example of a heap, show how elements are added and removed, and how a heap is best represented entirely from my head.

Teaching naked only works for a few select subjects.

After class, I browsed the internet a bit before getting back to work. I found an interesting post at James Altucher's blog which contained the following tidbit:

 Everyone gives the advice, “picture everyone in the audience naked.” I guess that’s supposed to make you at ease somehow. Everyone naked. Haha.

But it’s bullshit. Picturing everyone in the audience naked sounds repulsive to me. How am I supposed to speak in a room filled with naked people? ...

Instead, do this: picture YOURSELF naked. And say, “I’m sorry folks. Someone gave me the advice that I should picture all of you naked. I’d rather not offend you in that way so for the next hour you should PICTURE ME naked while I talk.” You’ll get some laughs. You can begin your talk. And, if you’re built like me, you’ll probably get a lot of phone numbers at the end.

OK, i didn't do that. And it's probably good that I didn't, because unlike James Altucher, I am 54 years old and very overweight. But still, I taught naked, if only metaphorically.

Great minds do think alike.

The other day in my database class I was going over a test I had just given back. A common mistake was students omitting a needed GROUP BY clause in a query. One of the students asked why it was necessary. I told her that without the GROUP BY  clause, the query would still be syntactically correct, but would not give the desired results, or even useful ones.

I talked a little about what the differences were, and then told the class that leaving out the GROUP BY clause is as serious an error as leaving out the comma in this sentence:

Let's eat, grandma


Of course the "let's eat, grandma" example is an old internet meme. I was still pleased with  myself for thinking of it and seeing how it applied to my lesson. But I was also grateful to the internet grammar nazis for providing me with useful material. Thanks, internet grammar nazis!!

---

I did not want to give the test question or correct query here. That's why I was a bit skimpy in this post about the SQL-specific parts of my explanation. For those wanting a little more depth, I found a remarkably similar example here.

A facebook friend of mine (I'll call her Nancy)  recently posted that she'd heard some news that made her very said. She wasn't specific about what the news was, so I asked her about it in chat. I learned that  she has an elderly neighbor who is very ill and near death.

My friend had been this woman's neighbor for a long time and had a lot of happy memories of her. One of them was that the neighbor shared a birthday with one of Nancy's daughters and they would celebrate together. That's quite a happy accident. It's an even more unlikely happy accident than you might think at first, because the shared birthday was the fourth of July.

As I said to Nancy, they were a couple of Yankee Doodle Dandys.

Shared birthdays aren't extremely unusual, but shared birthdays that are also national holidays are. So it's a bit remarkable that I actually know another such story. And this story is just as sad.

When I lived in Raleigh  in the late 70's and early 80's , I was a big fan of a local band called the Fabulous Knobs. I went to all their shows and wrote about them for the school paper. My devotion probably put a dent in my GPA.

I've learned lately that drummer Terry Anderson and guitarist David Enloe shared a birthday. And just like the shared birthday of Nancy's daughter and her neighbor, it's a holiday.Anderson and Enloe were born on December 25th.

I'd mentioned that this story is just as sad. Another of the things I've recently learned is that David Enloe died in 2007 at the age of 50. That was quite a shock. He was a good guy and an excellent musician. Here's a tribute video:



I always think of Terry Anderson at Christmas time now and wonder if it's triggering for  him. From what I know, he does appear to be soldiering on. Good for him.

From today's Washington Examiner:


Barry: 'We’ve got to do something about these Asians coming in'


From the BBC on August 7,1972:


1972: Asians given 90 days to leave Uganda

I went to get my car registration renewed today. The registration renewal near my office had closed, so I had to go way across town. I knew where it was, but I hadn't driven to that part of town in a while.

On my way there, I passed a vacant lot where a movie theater used to be. The movie theater was the one where I first saw Goodfellas on the big screen.

It was that memorable.

I loved it so much I told my father he should see it. This was unusual. I seldom drag anyone, especially my dad, to a movie because it's a "must see". But really, that's because there are so few movies so good people actually MUST see them. Goodfellas is an exception.

I saw Goodfellas again with him about a week later. Both of us thoroughly enjoyed it, even though I had seen it a week before and he preferred somewhat older fare.

It was that good.

Will Ron Paul Become the 2012 Version of Candidate Warren Harding? by Robert Wenzel


I plan to make this the last of my lazy postings for a while. I'm doing this one because the headline made sharing irresistable (and also gave me a good excuse to use my Warren Harding profile pic.)

Regular readers know that I won't think it's a bad thing if Ron Paul goes on to be a 2013 version of President Warren Harding. Harding kept us out of war and had sound fiscal and monetary policies. Just like Ron Paul will do.

What War Really Is


This is the second article from The Bionic Mosquito (via lewrockwell.com) about Herbert Hoover's posthumous The Secret History. From the two articles I've read, it looks like a fascinating and thought-provoking book. I'm definitely going to grab a copy before years end.