Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height
- The plan to dismantle Egypt’s Great Pyramids.
Assyrian News Agency, Via Althouse: According to several reports in the Arabic media, prominent Muslim clerics have begun to call for the demolition of Egypt’s Great Pyramids–or, in the words of Saudi Sheikh Ali bin Said al-Rabi’i, those “symbols of paganism,” which Egypt’s Salafi party has long planned to cover with wax. Most recently, Bahrain’s […]
- New farm bill likely to be a budget and trade disaster
Leave it to the government to buy high, sell low: Effectively, Price Loss Coverage is a price-based income support program. When the market price for a commodity covered by the program falls below a new and, by historical standards, very high target price level, farmers will almost certainly get a payment for every acre they […]
- Europe’s Zionist Anti-Semites
Well, as long as we’re not their biggest complaint… Most went to Israel with a deep-seated conviction that the country — given its presence on the front line in the conflict with Islam, as Strache told SPIEGEL ONLINE last year — deserves greater support from Europe. Most came back with an even deeper mistrust of […]
- What’s Holding Back The Facebook Mobile App?
Rethinking the FB mobile app from outside: Yet maybe the problem isn’t just Facebook. (C’mon haters, there’s a lot of great information in Facebook, or we wouldn’t all use it.) Maybe the problem is that Facebook is too worried about being Facebook to rethink its experience on mobiles. Gabi certainly makes a case along those lines. […]
- Positive Liberties and Legal Guarantees
From Bleeding Heart Libertarians: I believe both negative liberty and positive liberty, so defined, are morally important. It matters that people are not subject to continued wrongful interference, from each other or from the state. It also matters that people have the effective means to exercise their wills, to do as they please (provided they […]
- A Plea for Smart, Forward U.S. Military Engagement
From The Diplomat: Our military posture should thus be tailored in a strategic way that reflects the imperatives of regional threats and respects the interests of partners and allies. In places such as the Korean peninsula, the Straits of Hormuz, or Malacca, a clear, visible U.S. posture is required; in other regions a less visible, over-the-horizon […]
- What Moves? Culture & Interaction Design
Seems so intuitive, doesn’t it? The choice of metaphor dictates the proper design for interaction. Similar issues show up in other domains. Consider the standard problem of scrolling the text in a window. Should the scrolling control move the text or the window? This was a religious debate in the early years of display terminals, […]
- The Birth of Conservative Judaism
Not a European-pedigreed movement, but largely an American attempt at reinvention: But [Schechter] did not intend to pioneer a movement. Rather, using the model of the United Synagogue in Great Britain, Schechter sought to create what Cohen calls “Americanized traditional Judaism” by training English-speaking, secularly educated rabbis who would preside over synagogues that would pray […]
- Re-opening the American mind
Reconsidering Allen Bloom’s book, 30 years later: Liberals are most closely associated with the promotion of this relativist outlook, and they (rightly) took Bloom’s criticisms as being directed at them. But then they – as well as conservatives – concluded that Bloom must be calling for a return to absolute, traditional values. But that’s not […]
- This is what global cooling really looks like…
So it turns out that this era is neither the hottest, nor the fastest-warming in the last 2 millennia, after all: h/t Watts Up With That
- How Europe Can Support the ‘Pivot’
Will it? The overriding—and heartening—impression I took away from the week’s events was that our European friends are serious people grappling with serious diplomatic and strategic problems. One question came up repeatedly, suggesting it weighs on their minds. How can seafaring countries like France support the U.S. “pivot” to Asia, or the “rebalancing” between oceans, […]
- New Mercatus Paper on the Costs of Special Interest Politics
Mercatus introduces a new series of papers on the costs of special interest politics: The financial bailouts of 2008 were but one example in a long list of privileges that governments occasionally bestow upon particular firms or particular industries. At various times and places, these privileges have included (among other things) monopoly status, favorable regulations, […]
- Lost in LaMancha
Via Marginal Revolution: Grandiose projects across Spain now sit empty and dying. The New York Times focuses in on Ciudad de la Luz, a mega-movie studio built far from cultural centers that is now foundering. The Daily Mail takes a look at Spain’s “ghost airport,” a billion Euro project that was meant to serve 5 million passengers a year […]
- Check Out NASA’s Amazing New Panoramic Photo Of Mars
NASA’s new panoramic picture of Mars: But go to the page to see a phenomenal inline zoom.
- Where Do Jobs Come From?
Roger Pielke Jr.: Jobs come from an expansion of economic activity, which is called economic growth. Where does economic growth come from? There are only a finite number of places. Any answer to the question about where jobs come from that does not invoke resources and innovation (but also effort and luck) is incomplete. I’m pretty […]
- E.P.A. Idiocy in Action: Inventing New Technologies for a Bogus Problem
From the Captain’s Journal: A pair of new technologies could reduce the cost of capturing carbon dioxide from coal plants and help utilities comply with existing and proposed environmental regulations, including requirements to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Both involve burning coal in the presence of pure oxygen rather than air, which is mostly nitrogen. Major companies […]
