Via NRO comes this article

I am both Muslim and Christian
Shortly after noon on Fridays, the Rev. Ann Holmes Redding ties on a black headscarf, preparing to pray with her Muslim group on First Hill.

On Sunday mornings, Redding puts on the white collar of an Episcopal priest.

She does both, she says, because she’s Christian and Muslim.

Redding, who until recently was director of faith formation at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, has been a priest for more than 20 years. Now she’s ready to tell people that, for the last 15 months, she’s also been a Muslim — drawn to the faith after an introduction to Islamic prayers left her profoundly moved.

I suppose she’s a vegetarian that eats veal as well. If an atheist is some who believes in no God, then what do you call someone who believes in all available Gods? Judaism and Zoroasterism await I suppose.

From Marginal Revolution

If they were more like me, they wouldn’t be them in the first place.

Sorry for the lack of updates, I’ve actually got a backlog of things to write about, as well as pictures to post, but the workload lately has been absolutely crushing, and all-nighters aren’t as easy as they used to be.

No end in sight actually.

I just got back from my first meeting at the new Green Media Works world headquarters. It’s in the Flatiron building downtown, and manages to be two corner offices in one. A very cool space. It had sort of New York in the 20s vibe, very similar to the headquarters of Doc Savage or the Shadow (as told in the comic books). It was our initial meeting on our current plan for untold wealth and world domination. More on that as things develop.

The photo was taken from one of the windows.

Multiple winners this year. As PJ O’Rourke put it, this is the proper way to waste taxpayer’s money.

Tyler Cowen says it much better than I can. For an example of what his work is like, see this article on nuclear war.

And all it took was two days at the DMV. Oh the fun.

I go there at yesterday at 2:40 in the afternoon, and I’m five people away from being called when they close.

I get there at 1:30 today, and walk out at 4:45. The actual process took a mere 3 minutes.

As one might imagine, there was very little of interest happening. I went to the DMV at South DeKalb mall, where the only interesting things were

• The two people behind me debating the terms of a plea bargain
• A minor confrontation between a countrier than thou hipster and a guy in a bad toupee (toupee was trying to cut in line)

All in all, a waste of time.

Anyone who’s talked to me for a while knows that I think self-selection is a powerful thing. It is illustrated very well in this Steven Landsburg column, Why Jews Don’t Farm.

So, what’s different about the Jews? First, Botticini and Eckstein explain why other groups didn’t leave the land. The temptation was certainly there: Skilled urban jobs have always paid better than farming, and that’s been true since the time of Christ. But those jobs require literacy, which requires education—and for hundreds of years, education was so expensive that it proved a poor investment despite those higher wages. (Botticini and Eckstein have data on ancient teachers’ salaries to back this up.) So, rational economic calculus dictated that pretty much everyone should have stayed on the farms.

But the Jews (like everyone else) were beholden not just to economic rationalism, but also to the dictates of their religion. And the Jewish religion, unique among religions of the early Middle Ages, imposed an obligation to be literate. To be a good Jew you had to read the Torah four times a week at services: twice on the Sabbath, and once every Monday and Thursday morning. And to be a good Jewish parent you had to educate your children so that they could do the same.

The literacy obligation had two effects. First, it meant that Jews were uniquely qualified to enter higher-paying urban occupations. Of course, anyone else who wanted to could have gone to school and become a moneylender, but school was so expensive that it made no sense. Jews, who had to go to school for religious reasons, naturally sought to earn at least some return on their investment. Only many centuries later did education start to make sense economically, and by then the Jews had become well established in banking, trade, and so forth.

I have no particular point with any of the above, I just wanted to get it online before I forgot about the article.

In this case, an entry on the last major Nazi war criminal believed to be alive, Alois Brunner. Evidently he’s hiding in Syria which is not great surprise I suppose. The strange thing about him (besides still being alive and unpunished) is that he has lost several fingers and an eye from letter bombs sent to him by Israeli intelligence. It’s good that the Israelis still go the extra mile in these matters but it’s astonishing that after losing an appendage to a letter bomb, Brunner would still open suspicious packages.