Mark Field says:
We Californians are amused at your consternation. But we hope everyone’s ok.
[from a Volokh Conspiracy East Coast earthquake thread. He’s right, 5.9 is really not a big deal.
I greatly prefer earthquakes to tornadoes and hurricanes. Earthquakes are easy to protect against and survive.]
We really do romanticize the idea of little mom & pop stores being better than big box stores (especially anti-big box people). Â In my experience, the little retailers who thrive do so not because they try to compete with Home Depot or Wal-Mart, but because they offer the things the big box stores won’t bother stocking. Â My local hardware store doesn’t stay in business by offering everything the Home Depot does, but rather by having an outstanding selection of hardware and a beautiful garden department with heirloom plants & seeds, and the like.
Small businesses that do well fill in the niches and compete against each other.
How to be a good citizen, by David McElroy
After a long hard day juggling deadlines, crafting strategies and executing legal maneuvers, not much can beat a smooth cigar, a smoother single-malt (Singleton, baby!) and sharing a fire with loved ones as the yard lamps glow behind, all flickering to the rollicking blues in the background.
Content and happy, we watch airplanes on the glide path over us, like lazy jewels floating through the pine branches against the emerging stars.
Hope you all are finding respite where you can during these interesting times.
I’ve been working late the past couple of weeks, and the wife sent me this sad photo of Alaska hugging his ball, waiting for me to come home and play…. 🙁
Hari Seldon is fiction, of course, but it sure seems that if psychohistorians existed, they’d carry the more modren title of “complexity theorist.”
Insty linked to an overview article in MIT Technology Review, but I found the actual paper fascinating, and at only 15 pages including graphs and footnotes, surprisingly short and to the point. I’d guess from that writing style there’s less sociology in complexity theory and more mathematics. I like it! Well worth the read.
This despite the general trend of greater food prosperity over time for humanity as shown in The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death 1700-2100 — a book also worth your time, for perspective’s sake.
Most RNS readers are likely not Californians, and so it bears repeating that your humble correspondent lives in California and, like most of the state’s residents, in a county whose Sheriff refuses to issue concealed-carry licenses for self-defense. In a nutshell, the strategy is to force them to change by suing them on the basis that such refusal violates civil rights.
But I’ll let CalGuns Foundation Chairman Gene Hoffman explain the details.
UPDATE: For those who are not members of the CalGuns forum, click over to this post at No Lawyers, Only Guns and Money blog where you can read Gene’s full text.
(It’s early and I’m not able to paste in the details from my phone, so talk amongst yourselves or just follow the above link until I get my ass out of bed and update the post from a real computer.)
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Last week MadRock linked and wrote on the topic of Grade Inflation. If you didn’t hit that link and read, take a few minutes and do so after you’re done here.
As I stated in the comments, I have seen everything described in that post over the last year and a half or so: From girls getting squiggly in front of the male professors to what I would consider lukewarm temperature arguments. The only class I was worried about was my Calculus class, and I’m pretty sure that me not missing a day of class, being on time and ready to try and learn is what put me over the top to my “C” (my lowest grade since beginning school) because my test scores stunk to high heaven.
Now that Summer Quarter is over and things have finally settled down a bit (automotive repairs & vet visits, mostly), I’d like to tell you more about the book I was assigned to use for my Political Science class.
I really cannot say enough good things about this book. You need to buy it. Tomorrow if not today (before next quarter’s students go and snatch them all up).
I was prepared to be bombarded with the typical leftist/academic pap (but I repeat myself) on anyone/anything to the right of the Clinton Administration, but was pleasantly surprised to see Conservatism, Libertarianism and even Anarcho-Capitalism treated with an even hand. No backhanded compliments, snide comments or aligning them in one way or another with Hitler.
The only depressing part was the section on Socialism and its various forms and seeing the confirmation that everything around me fit into just about every little box in the chapter. If you weren’t aware that you lived in a Democratic Socialist nation then, quite literally, read it and weep (and hope your tears don’t make your mag springs rust up).
Seriously though, if you are or know a home-schooler, I cannot recommend this book more highly for political studies courses, though I’d only recommend it to kids with a 9th grade or higher vocabulary. And if you are an adult who wants to start figuring out where everyone stands (or even just yourself) this is a better than “good” starting reference work.
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Fall Quarter starts in a couple weeks, and I’m scheduled to (finally) get back to my Geography studies, as well as a 100 level Economics course. We’ll be using this book and after reviews like this:
I have high hopes for the class
FerFAL’s site is thankfully not one of the one million sites censored by Argentina.
He’s got an excellent article by a fellow for whom prepping paid off
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