Links
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Random thoughts
- A pretty significant alliance between the US and India. You would think that this would be much bigger news, especially given the rivalry between India and Pakistan and India and China.
- Convictions in the East St Louis voter fraud trial – no surprise there really (it was all on tape). That also should have been much bigger news.
- In South Korea (the most web connected country in the world), a woman doesn’t clean up after her dog and achieves blog infamy within one day. Start the link chain here.
- The Rhode Island Legislature has voted to legalize medical marijuana, without even the pressure of a voter initiative. One wonder when principal-agent theory becomes something the media talks about.
- Free Individualist Stickers – I’m pleasantly surprised by the move to brevity in bumper stickers as seen in the gold and blue “=” stickers one can see on cars in my neighborhood. The guy linked is giving out free “i” stickers (for individualism). Judging from his blog he’s a Randian of some sort and a fellow IHS seminar attendee.
- Exposure Manager (run by a Winds of Change blogger apparently) is offering a deal to Instapundit readers.
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Wednesday rapid fire
- A post well worth reading at Asymetrical Information
- Solar Drone New Endurance Champ
- Orwell on Fascism
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Links for future reference
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Rapid fire Friday
- Tupac Shakur arts center opens – and so very close to me. Meanwhile the guy who created the first schools for blacks in this state can’t even get an elementary school named after him.
- Poll: In wake of Iraq war, allies prefer China to U.S. – To thine own self be true America. If all of the aid we donated both publicly and privately in the wake of the Tsunami didn’t help anything in these countries, then not much will. Immigration is a much better metric than polls anyway.
- The One Campaign – solve Extreme Poverty and Global Aids (why are they extreme and global?) via nagging and fashionable wristbands. It’s so cool, after all Bono and Angelina Jolie are for it. Brought to you by people who don’t understand the difference between stock and flow.
- Palestinian Woman Heading for Treatment at Israeli Hospital Caught Carrying Explosives – really! To Quote:
At the Shikma Prison in Israel’s Negev Desert, where the Shin Bet security service allowed Israeli TV reporters to interview her, al-Biss said she was determined to carry out a suicide attack against Israel because of its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
“My dream was to be a martyr,” she said, adding that she was recruited by the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a violent offshoot of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement. “I believe in death.”
Sitting calmly across from an Israeli TV interviewer, the young woman with large brown eyes and curly dark hair pulled back in a ponytail said her decision had nothing to do with her disfigurement, which might make her less desirable as a bride.
“Don’t think that because of how I look I wanted to carry out an attack,” said al-Biss. “Since I was a little girl I wanted to carry out an attack.”
RTWT. She takes a bit of it all back, worth reading.
- The Two Blogospheres – an interesting article by Mathew Yglesias
- ScriptCenter: ATM for Drugs – much more on this later, but definitely a step in the right direction.
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Catch Up Day
As work has finally relented a tad, here are the links I’ve been meaning to post
- The Moving GMAP, a combination of Google Maps and GPS data, I need to get me one of them.
- The best curved corners code I’ve seen yet.
- James Lileks is a very good writer.
And here is a very grainy photo of the usual Jakes’ bluegrass crew. From left to right is Jim (playing Beths’s guitar, he usually plays dobro), Beth, and Walter on mandolin.
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Links
Rounder, Sun Expose Archives Digitally
Add Google Maps’ Directions to Your Site
And this thought from Will Wilkinson
My hunch is that these folks aren’t really utilitarians after all. They have a prior intuition about the injustice of inequality, and the justice of progressive redistribution. Then, they attempt to undermine resistance to higher tax rates on the wealthy by pointing to research that they interpret to say that this won’t make the wealthy any less happy, and so, Why worry? The trouble is, it won’t make the poor (in a country like the US where the poor are already rich) much happier either, and won’t do anything to change relative position in the distribution. So what’s the point? The point is more progressive redistribution, to which many folks are committed to prior to and independent of utilitarianism or their interest in happiness.