Another surfin' safari

Entrepreneur or con man? I admire this guy's industry and creative spirit, but it seems that he's a magnet for trouble too. [Seattle Times]

American Caste: A critique of Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, by Kay S. Hymowitz [City Journal]. Single mother-based families just are not able to make a go of it in post-industrial America.

"Solid-state revolution: in-depth on how SSDs really work" [Ars Techica] SSD's reduce latency between the CPU and the data storage tier.

Washington, D.C. city government needs to stop being a one-party monopoly if it wants to make any progress on its problems says Colbert I. King @ the Washington Post. I've been saying the same thing about Ann Arbor for a while now myself and largely for the same reasons as King.

Dogs use humans as their tools [Scientific American]

pot-shots

The Cranberries are back. I always liked them.

Everybody's a critic. And to po-mo art critics everyone (else) is a hypocrite too.  Ann Althouse has a piece on her blog somewhat critical of Seattle's The Stranger's art critic. My response to that was: "When I see Jenny Graves write articles like this about Maplethorpe or Basquiat then I'll know that the po-mo artsy fartsy critics are serious about their 'insights'. Until then she should piss off. When has art had to made by perfect human beings? Has it ever?" Not bloody likely.


Seth Casteel's images of dogs diving underwater to fetch balls are both terrifying and bewitching. Twenty pic photo blog slideshow.

Right-wing cultural warriors should grow some balls or else STFU. Today's example: John Derbyshire. Not that what Derb says isn't true, but I am shocked that he's shocked. When wasn't it like this? It's just that in the digital age it's so  much easier for people to vent, taunt, flaunt, tease, and otherwise show what irritating half-wits they are.


So why did the USSR break-up? One academic paper on the SSRN says, to paraphrase, "diversity equals disintegration for nation states".  I hope so myself.

Some thoughts on people shooting their neighbor's dogs

That's how things are being reported over in countryside near here.  One dog had his ear shot off by a hunting arrow launched by an irate archer although it lived. Another dog was shot dead under more serious circumstances possibly justifiable.

It seems to me that you cannot even have a dog any more in these United States other than the little chi-chi dogs who are smaller than house cats, (and who barely even qualify as dogs in my opinion) these days without having to live in fear of lawsuits, complaints, and police citations, as well as the unabashed antipathy from many of your neighbors.