Special vs Useful, Revolution and Moral Cowardice

May 28, 2011

A few thoughts on “special” vs. “useful” on a Saturday morning. First from my Twitter stream: 8:08 AM May 28th, “young people don’t want/need to be told they are ‘special’ – what they really crave is to be told they are ‘useful’” 8:10 AM May 28th, “the late 20-something life crisis consists of realizing that [...]

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GDP and Happiness

May 23, 2011

A friend and I got into a discussion the other day about the tendency of Americans to use GDP as cosmic trump card when comparing the U.S. to other countries.  A typical discussion, “Man, the Europeans sure have it figured out with their long vacations and siestas…”  normally spoken with tentative longing by a stressed-out [...]

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Free Market in Death

May 9, 2011

“We are at a distinctive moment in history: the State is losing its monopoly over the means of mass destruction. And once a harmful technology escapes into the black market it is almost impossible for governments to suppress the trade. Think of drugs and guns…The root of our problem is not Islam or ideology, but [...]

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Anthony Bourdain on Vegetarians and Saving for Well-Done

May 9, 2011

Finished reading Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly” last week and found myself rolling when I got to this part, “Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn.  To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky [...]

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Deresiewicz on The Crisis in Higher Education

May 8, 2011

“What we have in academia, in other words, is a microcosm of the American economy as a whole: a self-enriching aristocracy, a swelling and increasingly immiserated proletariat, and a shrinking middle class. The same devil’s bargain stabilizes the system: the middle, or at least the upper middle, the tenured professoriate, is allowed to retain its [...]

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Empathy

April 26, 2011

“Man is always worse than most people suspect, but also generally better than most people dream.” – Reinhold Niebuhr Ryan Holiday, whose blog I’ve now read and enjoyed for the past couple years, wrote a very good post the other day on the subject of empathy. He writes, There was a moment in the Civil [...]

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Christ in Us, Us in Christ

April 24, 2011

Beautiful A Portrait of Christ from Jeremy Cowart on Vimeo. Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body; if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall. It was not as the flowers, each soft Spring recurrent; it was not as [...]

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Eiger Speed Solo Record

April 23, 2011

Ueli Steck soloes Eiger (3,970 m (13,025 ft)) in 2 hrs 47 minutes. As was pointed out on Sullivan’s blog, the first ascent happened in 1938 and took 3 days. Steck starts hauling around 2:20.  The first ascent of the Eiger was made by Swiss guides Christian Almer and Peter Bohren and Irishman Charles Barrington, [...]

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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

April 21, 2011

“Perhaps science does not develop by accumulation of individual discoveries and inventions.” – Thomas Kuhn As part of my ongoing study of the theories of John Boyd, I recently read Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”  Boyd frequently cited Kuhn and his influence on Boyd becomes all the more obvious as one gets in [...]

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My Wifey’s New Blog – Not Without My Mom

April 18, 2011

I know that many of you have already checked out my wife’s incredible new cooking blog, Not Without My Mom (some in fact have already tried recipes and reported back), but if you haven’t yet made your way over don’t wait, do it now! The longer you wait the longer you have to live in [...]

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