1. Dark flow?
4. Is shipping food really an environmental problem?
5. More good reasons not to trust former Nazis.
6. First pictures of extrasolar planets.
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The food article makes a kind of stupid point. Yes, it is obviously inefficient for Icelanders to grow bananas versus importing them from Costa Rica. However, a local food proponent’s alternative would be that Icelanders eat fruits that actually can be grown in Iceland. (Iceland is kind of an extreme example because I don’t know that much of anything can be grown there, but the article also mentions British tomatoes. Again, a local food proponent would suggest that British people not use fresh tomatoes in the winter when they are either being produced in greenhouses or distant locales.) The volume numbers are well taken, but I’m not sure that the fact that something isn’t a large problem is a good reason not to go ahead and fix the problem anyway.
Love #1. I wonder what all is too big, too small, too far away, beyond our limits.
From the comment section of the number five link…
Speaking as a 20 something, I have never met anyone with communist sympathies or affiliation who was the least bit embarrassed to admit this in a crowd. And there is good reason for this; I have never been in a crowd that experienced any negative affect from hearing such a confession. In fact, any of the times I’ve seen such a statement met with opprobrium (always by some token dude. Not me, I’ve learned when to show my cards.
), it is the one who challenges the communist who experiences social stigma (e.g. “McCarthyite”, “red baiting”, etc).
Sure if someone who is a “true believer” starts yelling at everyone about their Wicked Capitalist Ways, they get shunned, but this is true for almost all belief systems; people don’t like to get lectured by evangelists. But people with passive Communist beliefs are seen as interesting, intellectual, or fashionable. This is certainly not true for fascism, or even mainstream conservatism.
“But people with passive Communist beliefs are seen as interesting, intellectual, or fashionable.”
Interesting and fashionable, surely. Intellectual is not a word I’d toss in there, except perhaps to those even less intellectual. Which is not to say that intellectualism and communism cannot go hand in hand, but young communists, particularly those who wish to ‘confess’ their ideology, don’t generally stand out as shining examples of thorough thought, any more than typical mainstream conservatives.
The Canadian banks also survived the depression much better. Not a single one of the five Canadian banks failed.
But how much of their performance is due to the point that they are an oligopoly rather than a more competitive model?
I sometimes see libertarian using the Canadian banks as an example, but why would a oligopoly model be preferable to a more competitive model to libertarians?
Interestingly this particular argument about former Nazis really only holds water when applied to those who avowed Nazi sympathies *after* WWII, since Nazism was not unpopular in Germany itself before that time. So we couldn’t really have used this argument against someone like Kurt Waldheim or say Leni Riefenstahl.
Of course, the original Nazis are more or less all dead now, and I would tend to agree that the argument applies to those who have professed to be Nazis since 1945. But I’ll admit I’m a little uncomfortable with the general form – basically, the author is arguing that some views are *so unpopular* that those who espouse them must be insane. This is a little thin inasfar as it relies not one whit on the actual precepts of Nazism to make its evaluation, but only on herd wisdom, which I mistrust.
Anyone who has read Wilhelm Reich “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” already knew it was hard for fascists to change their behavior.
One theory in the anti-aging realm is that people born when their gestation is out of season of plentiful fruits and veggies age faster because they start out with “unreliable” systems due to undernourishment. So, preggers should most definitely eat tomatoes whenever they feel like it.
The interesting thing in my book is if the disaster had been a few years longer in coming, there might have been much left of the Canadian banks as they would have been picked off by the much more profitable American banks. There’s just no way to avoid crises that take more than a few years to manifest.
As is, the Canadian banks may well get side-swiped by the crisis anyway. As Arnold Kling has pointed out, being an ant is not a winning strategy.
Don K
I live north of the 50th parallel. My wife, despite strong enviro-sympathies, insists on a green salad with fresh hothouse tomatoes to begin dinner each day.
I am reminded of a Beverly Hillbillies’ quote that, mutatis mutandis, seems apt here: “Once you’ve tasted turkey, you won’t settle for tripe.”
Let the southward exodus begin.
I still don’t get what makes Communists and Anarchists less objectionable than Nazis and Fascists. Is it because they killed over 100 million people in operations other than war while supposedly pursuing a utopian agenda while the Nazis and Fascists killed 20 million while pursuing a utopian agenda?
They’re both equally evil in my book.
are you write these books/
you can not care about these books
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