Daily Archive: November 30, 2010
Training the Mind
Newsweek has an interesting article showing Sam Harris to be more religious than you’d expect. I remember, a little while back, a few of his right wing Christian critics uncovered his affinity for Eastern...
Malkin Award Nominee: Andrew Sullivan
[updated – I, II] Andrew Sullivan has an odd post up about the debt and Obama. First, he confuses the proposed federal wage freeze with some other program that will actually help combat the...
Jack London, the socialist Ayn Rand
Last night I was researching early dystopian fiction for some reason when I came across a reference to Jack London’s 1907 novel The Iron Heel, which concerns a worldwide struggle between oligarchs – the modern...
Secrecy and the state
“If secrecy is necessary for national security and effective diplomacy, it is also inevitable that the prerogative of secrecy will be used to hide the misdeeds of the permanent state and its privileged agents....
Talking past one another on partisanship
Okay. So everyone is right and everyone is talking past one another. I responded to James Fallows yesterday, who was responding to Ross Douthat on his column about partisanship. Daniel Larison weighed in twice...
A Book Club in Winter
League alumnus Freddie deBoer is hosting a book club on Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose: First published in English translation in 1983, it is an incredibly well-realized piece of historical fiction, a...
Yuan Denominated Assets
We sell to China a lot more than they buy from us (the US for our foreign readers). They finance a lot of our debt. Hence they hold a lot of US dollars. They...
Ultimate Beliefs
If you push long enough in the direction of a person’s ultimate beliefs, sooner or later you will always reach something tremendously silly. This might be the best explanation I know of for religion:...
