Translation

It is popularly reported that the President of Iran has declared an intent to wipe Israel off the map. Juan Cole argues that this just isn't true.

I object to the characterization of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as having "threatened to wipe Israel off the map." I object to this translation of what he said on two grounds. First, it gives the impression that he wants to play Hitler to Israel's Poland, mobilizing an armored corps to move in and kill people.

But the actual quote, which comes from an old speech of Khomeini, does not imply military action, or killing anyone at all. The second reason is that it is just an inexact translation. The phrase is almost metaphysical. He quoted Khomeini that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time." It is in fact probably a reference to some phrase in a medieval Persian poem. It is not about tanks.

As usual, Cole further explicates at great length. He is meticulous, thoughtful, and very illuminating about how Iran's supposed anti-Israeli and anti-American belligerency is utter nonsense.

Then he goes from there into a series of body blows against Christopher Hitchens and a brilliant rant against a war on Iran. Check it out if you like that sort of thing. (And if you're an addict, then the Hitchens thing is turning into a soap opera.) But the key thing is that the "wipe Israel off the map" quote is BS.

Shorter Richard Cohen

Shorter Richard Cohen
So Not Funny

• It's rude to satirize the news media by alluding to real news items if the President is in the room.

("Shorter" invented at D-Squared Digest and brought to fullness at Busy Busy Busy.)

Immigration

Brad DeLong, economist and Internet Hero First Class, stacks up a bunch of great resources on immigration.

Net neutrality

Via Wil Wheaton, a great Huffington Post article on net neutrality.

If Net Neutrality is gutted, Google, eBay, and YouTube either pay protection money to companies like AT&T or risk that their sites process slowly on your computer. Comcast could intentionally slow access to iTunes, steering Internet customers its own music service.
....
This isn't just speculation -- it's already happened in places without Net Neutrality. Heck, AT&T's CEO blatantly announced, "The Internet can't be free."

Again, check out SaveTheInternet.com to see what you can do.

Green card

Fareed Zakaria explains why proposed "guest worker" programs are pernicious, dumb, and bad for America by pointing to how this has failed in Germany.

The German Green Card was misnamed, I argued, because it never, under any circumstances, translated into German citizenship. The U.S. green card, by contrast, is an almost automatic path to becoming American (after five years and a clean record).

The official dismissed my objection, saying that there was no way Germany was going to offer these people citizenship. "We need young tech workers," he said. "That's what this program is all about." So Germany was asking bright young professionals to leave their country, culture and families; move thousands of miles away; learn a new language; and work in a strange land -- but without any prospect of ever being part of their new home. Germany was sending a signal, one that was accurately received in India and other countries, and also by Germany's own immigrant community.

What's true for bright young Indian tech workers is no less true for hardworking middle aged Latino service industry workers, or anyone else coming to America for a new life. There are places where I think reasonable people may differ about immigration policy, but the guest worker programs many folks—including the Bush administration—have proposed are just a bad idea, period.

United 93

Ron Rosenbaum at Slate has some interesting, pessimistic observations about United 93, the new film about the events on the 9/11 flight that didn't make it to its intended target.

Nothing can take away from that collective act of heroism, but something makes me wonder: Why is this the third film made about Flight 93?
....
The conjectural response to the hijacking has become (even more than the courage of the rescuers in the rubble) the redemptive fable we cling to, the fragment we shore against our ruin. Or so it is as envisioned in The Flight That Fought Back and Flight 93 and now United 93. A film in which, we are told by its production notes, we see "the courage that was born from ... the crucible" of 9/11. A story of "something much larger than the event itself," Greengrass tells us, a story in which "we ... find wisdom." One almost hears the subtext: This is "the feel-good film about 9/11."

There is that source of fascination with Flight 93, yes, but I don't think that's all there is to it. I think there's something else folks feel happening in the Flight 93 story that they haven't heard articulated, and can't quite put their finger on, that brings us all back to it because we have some unfinished business in understanding it.

Contemporary terrorist networks are made possible, in part, by advanced communication and information technologies that enable them to plan and coördinate "asymmetric" attacks like 9/11. This is very scary, but I've pointed out before that those same communication and information technologies make it easier to adapt and respond to these inventive attacks, as demonstrated by Flight 93. The 9/11 attack worked by taking advantage of passengers' assumption that the hijackers wanted to survive their own attack, and would regard the passengers as valuable hostages ... but cellphones and airphones ensured that this trick only worked for about an hour before the Flight 93 passengers got wise.

Think about that.

This is simultaneously harrowing and reassuring, and one of the key lessons of 9/11. Knowledge, not fear, is security. We could eliminate all of the gate security at airports. Heck, we could let you bring a revolver onto an airplane if we wanted to, now. The 9/11 trick just won't work again.

93

One other thing about that Ron Rosenbaum article, for folks who raise an eyebrow whenever they see the Spooky Number of the Æon. (For those who don't, let me summarize a great deal of esoteric weirdness by just saying that there's an occult idea that the number 93 represents the fierce zietgiest of our time and thus a road to enlightenment.)

If you eliminate the words "United" and "flight" from the article, you get something ... interesting.

But is the fable of 93 the recompense that it's been built up to be? Does what happened on 93 represent a triumph of the human spirit, a microcosmic model and portent of the ultimate victory of enlightenment civilization over theocratic savagery, as the prerelease publicity about the new film insists? Or is the story of 93 a different kind of portent, not "the DNA of our times," but rather the RIP?
....
Both pro- and anti-war camps have seized upon 93 in one way or another.
....
a Navy Seabee Iraq support base in Kuwait was called "Camp 93"
....
And what seems central to both the 93 conspiracy theories and the new 93 movie is the imagery of control and loss of control.
....
93 is a film that, we're told, will give us inspiration, courage, and wisdom.
....
No one wants to admit it, but no 93 fable of heroism can mask the fact that we now live in a world we are utterly unprepared for, a world out of control.
....
I did not come away from watching 93 feeling optimistic about the triumph of the human spirit and the superior resilience of enlightenment values. Quite the opposite. I came away with a feeling that history has been hijacked by a cult of the undead, or the wannabe dead, suicidal mass murderers driven by theocratic savagery. That, if you want a metaphoric fable, we're all on 93, we're all doomed to crash and burn; whatever we do, the best we can hope for is that the existential rewards of local acts of courage will help us hold on a little longer before the end of enlightenment civilization and the dawn of the dead.

Sorry, I know I sound a bit batty, but it just lept out at me.

May 1

Yezida has a beautiful thought in honour of the day. Though it occurs to me that really it's traditional to say "&#@!! The Man" in honour of May Day.

May Day

Oui, je suis Marxiste, tendance Groucho.

Not your monkey

The White House Correspondents' Dinner is a who's who of Washington—the President is always the guest of honour—and it's traditionally a funny, good natured roast of the President. The legendary, very funny little video "Bill Clinton: The Final Days" was made for the Dinner.

This year, they invited Stephen Colbert to speak. He's funny and does The Colbert Report, which is a goof on journalism and politics, right?

But this represents a failure to learn the lesson of Jon Stewart's super-cool appearance as a guest on Crossfire. As Atrios said about that:

[The journalists] seem under the impression that the Daily Show is a satirical take on politics and politicians. It is that, a bit, but mostly it's a parody of the news media.

Colbert's speech did not go over well. The satire was actual satire, which was a little too sharp for them. By the middle of Colbert's talk, most of the laughter had died. Kos has a transcript. Colbert went after the President ...

I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound—with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.

... but then he also went after the press ...

As excited as I am to be here with the president, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of Fox News. Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the president's side, and the vice president's side.

But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason: they're super-depressing. And if that's your goal, well, misery accomplished. Over the last five years you people were so good—over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.

... and boy, there wasn't a lot of laughter in that room. Not even when Colbert showed a video of a little thriller with himself as White House Press Secretary being stalked by Helen Thomas asking him again and again, "why did we go to war with Iraq?"

YouTube has video AOL (!) has video, Peter Daou observes that you cannot expect the media to cover its own embarassment, and Shakespeare's Sister concludes some spicy comments with a well-deserved award for Mr. Colbert:

Social democrat

John Kenneth Galbraith
1908 - 2006

Economist

I'll let Brad DeLong say it better than I could.

If there were justice in the world, John Kenneth Galbraith would rank as the twentieth century's most influential American economist. He has published several books that are among the best analyses of modern U.S. history, played a key role in midcentury policymaking, and advised more presidents and senators than would seem possible in three lifetimes.

A helpful reader informs me that the New York Times also has a long obit.

Jane Jacobs and Galbraith in one week. They say these things come in threes. We don't have many other public intellectuals of that stature to spare.

Dark comic strips

They're gloomy, dirty, and cruel. But most of them are very clever. Have fun!

Conundrum

Via Gary Farber's Amygdala, I learn of a survey of intellectual property weirdness that includes this gem:

For including a 60-second piece of silence on their album, the Planets were threatened with a lawsuit by the estate of composer John Cage, which said they'd ripped off his silent work 4'33". The Planets countered that the estate failed to specify which 60 of the 273 seconds in Cage's piece had been pilfered.

Intellectual property law has gone mad.

Logic

Zellweger

A rogue mathematician named Shea Zellweger has created a notation he calls the logic alphabet.

We need a better set of signs for and, or, if
[⋯]
These three are themselves only a small part of the 16 binary connectives.

As a big math nerd and symbol nerd, I fell in love after looking at this for all of five minutes. The fundamental structure of the system is immediately apparent — as are its advantages over ordinary logical notation.

The 3-d “chessboard” above is a kind of diagram of the relationships of the different symbols, which should properly be rendered in 4-dimensional space. I could not resist doing a mapping of my own, taking advantage of an orthographic hypercube projection that I learned in high school and have been obsessed with ever since. I think it makes the patterns in Zellweger’s notation even more apparent.

Since Zellweger is a maverick, with no academic math credentials, his system has had almost no impact on the world of mathematics. But the art world has taken a little interest, because some of the artifacts of his work are so beautiful. So I discovered him through a science-art museum that Indri of Waterbones turned me on to, and they in turn point to a fascinating interview with Zellweger in the art and culture magazine Cabinet.

his notebooks (made between 1953 and 1975) have remarkable visual appeal, passing through phases reminiscent of Russian Constructivism, outsider art, concrete poetry and pop

In the Cabinet interview, Zellweger asserts a kind of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of mathematics ...

Yes, you only see the symmetric patterns in the system when you look at the whole thing with all 16 elements together. When you use only a few, you don’t see the beautiful crystalline structures. My notation is designed to highlight these wonderful patterns, not obscure them, as most notations do.

... and goes on to make interesting comparisons with the cool math manipulatives used in Montessori education.

Frege

a much later addition

In 1879, the mathematician Gottlob Frege proposed his notation Begriffsschrift, “logicwriting”, which has a delicious two-dimensional quality a bit like diagrammed sentences.

It did not stick.

I discovered it through Matthew Attoparsec Dockrey, a nerd’s nerd who created a programming language based on it. A daring step far beyond fonts with ligatures for common programming operators!

Today's question

Jeanne at Body and Soul asks

Do you ever get the feeling Jimmy Carter just took the stupid little job of being president for a few years as a stopgap on his way to a real job?

Yeah, actually, I get that feeling all the time. Jeanne was asking in reference to a New York Times story that could make you cry.

Guinea worm, a plague so ancient that it is found in Egyptian mummies and is thought to be the "fiery serpent" described in the Old Testament as torturing the Israelites in the desert.
...
Now, thanks to a relentless 20-year campaign led by former President Jimmy Carter, Guinea worm is poised to become the first disease since smallpox to be pushed into oblivion.

Mind you, this is the guy that, as I observed recently, made it to many conservatives' Ten Worst Americans lists.

Carter isn't the only President for whom the Presidency is arguably a second-string résumé item. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote his own epitaph, which doesn't bother to mention the Presidency among the three achievements for which he wanted to be remembered. And as I've commented before, I think we're currently grooming a commissioner of baseball.

B. D.'s recovery

I posted a while ago about the turn Doonesbury has taken with B. D. injured in the Iraq war. It's remained a recurring element of the strip, and in recent months, he's been wrestling with post-traumatic stress, grudginly seeing a counselor at the VA hospital.

If you have an interest in the strip but haven't looked at it lately, now would be a good time to catch up. In the last couple of weeks Trudeau has obviously chosen to try to take a four-panel strip as far as it can possibly go.

Paper Buddha

From an origami "life of Buddha" series on an amazing origami site, via Apostropher.

Today's quote

J.A.C.Brown, from Social Psychology of Industry:

If managers' orders were completely obeyed, confusion would result and production and morale would be lowered. In order to achieve the goals of the organisation workers must often violate orders, resort to their own techniques of doing things, and disregard lines of authority. Without this kind of systematic sabotage much work could not be done. This unsolicited sabotage in the form of disobedience and subterfuge is especially necessary to enable large bureaucracies to function effectively.

Found as the header in a delightful discussion of work-to-rule strikes, via Jim Henley.

A giant passes

Jane Jacobs
1916-2006

Urbanist
Dilettante

We just lost Jane Jacobs. Ninety years old, and working on yet another book.

She didn't need to be. She secured her claim to greatness for having written The Death and Life of Great American Cities forty-five years ago. To my mind—and many others'—it's the most important book about urban design ever. And, dear to my heart, she was a great dilettante. She was smart about subjects that defy categorization and demand synthesis, and she got there by virtue of paying attention and doing her own homework, rather than by virtue of any formal qualifications.

I blogged a link to a terrific web post about her a while back. If you didn't check it out then, you missed out. Now might be a good time; you'll see why I mourn her passing.

Genocide

Today is Yom Ha'Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

I presume that you've heard of the Holocaust already. Let me offer you a thing about the Holocaust you may not know, and a few other things about genocide worthy of reflection.

First is that you may know the figure of 6 million dead in the Holocaust. That's actually a misleading figure. The Nazis killed 6 million Jews plus, in the same processes of concentration camps and mass executions, at least 4 million other folks they didn't like. That includes: Poles, Russians, and other Slavs ... Roma ("Gypsies") ... communists and other political dissidents ... Jehovah's Witnesses, Freemasons, and other religious minorities, as well as antifascist Christian clergy ... lesbians and gay men ... and on and on. About ten million total, maybe more depending on how you count.

Second, there's this observation about the Nazi concentration camps from Hannah Arendt, writing in The Origins of Totalitarianism. (Chapter 12, Part III)

Torture, to be sure, is an essential feature of the whole totalitarian police and judiciary apparatus; it is used every day to make people talk. This type of torture, since it pursues a definite, rational aim, has certain limitations: either the prisoner talks within a certain time, or he is killed. To this rationally conducted torture another, irrational, sadistic type was added in the first Nazi concentration camps and in the cellars of the Gestapo. Carried on for the most part by the SA, it pursued no aims and was not systematic, but depended on the initiative of largely abnormal elements. The mortality rate was so high that only a few concentration-camp inmates of 1933 survived these first years. This type of torture seemed to be not so much a calculated political institution as a concession of the regime to its criminal and abnormal elements, who were thus rewarded for services rendered. Behind the blind bestiality of the SA, there often lay a deep hatred and resentment against all those who were socially, intellectually, or physically better off than themselves, and who now, as if in fulfillment of their wildest dreams, were in their power. This resentment, which never died out entirely in the camps, strikes us as a last remnant of humanly understandable feeling.

The real horror began, however, when the SS took over the administration of the camps. The old spontaneous bestiality gave way to an absolutely cold and systematic destruction of human bodies, calculated to destroy human dignity; death was avoided or postponed indefinitely. The camps were no longer amusement parks for beasts in human form, that is, for men who really belonged in mental institutions and prisons; the reverse became true: they were turned into "drill grounds," on which perfectly normal men were trained to be full-fledged members of the SS.

That quote comes from a brilliant Arthur Silber essay cycle on torture as a tool of state violence in which he plumbs the unwholesome depths of our current American madness on the subject.

Third, via Dionysus Devotee, a poignaint reminder about the Armenian genocide. According to legend, Hitler exhorted his commanders on the Eastern Front to ruthlessness by asking, "Who remembers the Armenians?" If you don't, you ought to follow the link and find out.

Fourth, if that isn't bad enough for you, I have an old post about Rwanda and Iraq for you which I think really is worth your time if you didn't read it the first time around.

Film school

Okay, remaking trailers we've done soundtrack, editing, and voiceovers; now let's look at transitions in Sleepless.

In case you were wondering

Some of you may recall the "Alien Autopsy" footage, supposedly of the pilots of the spacecraft which crashed at Roswell. There was a hokey but cunningly executed "documentary" done about it about ten years ago.

Some of the creators have at last stepped forward and admitted that it's a hoax. So you know.

(Of course, the Men in Black probably made 'em do it ...)

MUNI haiku

There's a website devoted to haiku about San Francisco MUNI buses and streetcars. Of course.

There are classic tropes of public transit ...

Waited forever
And then you showed up for me
Seven in a row

... some San Francisco lore ...

At Castro Station
expensively dressed men all
exit the Muni

... some teasing of tourists ...

the smug pleasure of
boarding a cable car and
flashing a Fastpass

... and more. My own offering is about the ^#15 bus:

Chickens cluck in bags
En route to the sizzling wok
And look! A live pig!

For, oh, how I love the ^#15 as it winds through Chinatown!

It reminds you that Chinatown is more than an artifact of the San Francisco Department of Tourist Propaganda, but a real, functioning Chinese city since before the time of Emperor Norton I. There have been times when I've been the only person on a crowded bus who wasn't having a conversation in rapidfire Chinese. I can't count the number of times I have seen Chinese women who look to be a spry 650 years old boarding the ^#15 with weird vegetables and live chickens in big brown paper bags. I've daydreamed that if you just know the trick to doing it, you can step out the back door at the right stop on the ^#15 and find yourself walking along the banks of the Yangtze. And yes, I really have seen a live pig on the ^#15 ... only the once ... but I swear, the driver didn't even shrug when he saw it.

Abortion

A couple of weeks ago, The New York Times Magazine ran a long, fascinating, horrifying article about abortion laws, and their enforcement, in El Salvador. It's like a dystopian feminist science fiction novel.

El Salvador, however, has not only a total ban on abortion but also an active law-enforcement apparatus — the police, investigators, medical spies, forensic vagina inspectors and a special division of the prosecutor's office responsible for Crimes Against Minors and Women ...

Medical spies. Forensic vagina inspectors.

It's stirred up a lot of talk in the lefty blogosphere, as you might expect. Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings used it as the touchstone for a tour de force defense of the logic of abortion rights. Hilzoy observes, importantly, that the law in El Salvador has a lot more logical and moral consistency than the rhetoric of pro-lifers do in the US. If "abortion is murder," as pro-lifers commonly assert, won't we need to throw women receiving abortions in jail for life for committing first degree murder? And thus have law enforcement apparatus devoted to catching these women, including medical spies and forensic vagina inspectors? Few pro-lifers, in my experience, have even thought about these questions, much less composed answers to them.

I particularly want to point to the way Hilzoy debunks the "pro-life" rhetoric that makes me most angry, the nonsense about objecting to "abortions of convenience."

Sometimes the reason for an abortion is simply that the woman recognizes the enormous responsibilities that motherhood entails, and does not want to accept them at a given point in her life. As I said earlier, this is not a matter of "convenience". When you have worked towards a given career for years, and having a child and raising it responsibly would force you to give it up, for instance, that is not "convenience"; that's the entire shape of your life. When you are not married, and you cannot raise a child alone, that is not "convenience". When you already have more children than you can really afford, and having another would place an enormous strain on your limited resources and perhaps on your marriage itself, that's not "convenience". When you are fifteen years old and not remotely ready for parenthood, that's not "convenience".

I would take that a step further, and assert that in all but the first case that Hilzoy cites there, these examples reflect a truly adult sense of moral responsibility. As an adult, one forsees what it really means to accept a new duty, chooses only to take on those duties which one can truly fulfill, and then commits fully to those duties which one has chosen. To simply accept a duty without regard to whther or not you can truly fulfill it is not morally responsibile or adult—it's adolescent. When I reflect on women going for back alley abortions in El Salvador today or in the US two generations ago, accepting terrifying personal risk rather than take on the duties of raising a child they're not prepared to care for, I see these women as being deeply responsible. What could possibly be more responsible than risking your own safety to avoid bringing a baby into the world whom you cannot care for? How could one possibly see that act of courage and responsibility as a matter of selfish "convenience?"

I strongly recommend taking a little time to read both Hilzoy and The New York Times Magazine; if you only have time for one, go for Hilzoy, who quotes many of the key passages from the El Salvador piece.

Then, after all that philosophy, consider this point about the actual pragmatics of abortion policy from the essay on Lawyers, Guns, and Money about the El Salvador story: "Should We Ban Abortion For Non-Affluent Women? That Is The Only Question." Because of course, even in El Salvador, in practice affluent women can get abortions if they wish.

(And I just can not bring up this topic without also pointing to Joe Bob Briggs' immortal response to pro-lifers.)

Internet neutrality

Consider this headline:

Gunowners, Moveon, Instapundit, and Vint Cerf Unite

If you know who MoveOn and Instapundit are, then you know that they don't have a lot of philosophical overlap—you might get them to agree that kittens are cute, and that's about all. So what has them sharing the love in this headline? The issue of network neutrality on the internet, which is currently up for regulatory legislation, and the most important thing that has faced the development of the 'net since some very smart folks got together to invent it in the first place.

The headline is from a page with a cool little two minute video explaining the issue. SaveTheInternet.com and Matt Stoller have more. I know this sounds geeky, but this is a tech question that ultimately has deep political implications. 'Net neutrality is the technological underpinning that helps make the 'net an engine for both technical innovation and free speech. It's a big deal.

I love science

I determined the mass of the Earth once in the lab. Um, assuming Newton was right about gravitation, that is. Which Einstein showed he wasn't. But close enough.

This is cooler than that. I learn that the internet teaches us how to determine the speed of light using a microwave oven, an ordinary ruler, and chocolate. I'm in favour of any science that in which you can eat the experimental apparatus afterward, or any example of chocolate-based technology.

John Locke, Marxist?

Last year I was looking for the context in which John Locke first used the description of the fundmental rights being “life, liberty, and property”. I failed. It’s a little baffling — he did say it, right?

I can tell you that it’s certainly not in Two Treatises on Government, because I’ve searched it. I did, however, stumble across this little shocker. Libertarians and conservatives often talk about property rights being absolute, but Locke points to at least one major exception here.

But we know God hath not left one man so to the mercy of another, that he may starve him if he please: God the Lord and Father of all has given no one of his children such a property in his peculiar portion of the things of this world, but that he has given his needy brother a right to the surplusage of his goods; so that it cannot justly be denied him, when his pressing wants call for it: and therefore no man could ever have a just power over the life of another by right of property in land or possessions; since it would always be a sin, in any man of estate, to let his brother perish for want of affording him relief out of his plenty. As justice gives every man a title to the product of his honest industry, and the fair acquisitions of his ancestors descended to him; so charity gives every man a title to so much out of another’s plenty, as will keep him from extreme want, where he has no means to subsist otherwise: and a man can no more justly make use of another’s necessity, to force him to become his vassal, by with-holding that relief, God requires him to afford to the wants of his brother, than he that has more strength can seize upon a weaker, master him to his obedience, and with a dagger at his throat offer him death or slavery.

That’s Book I, Chapter IV, Paragraph 42; the emphasis is mine. How far is that, really, from “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”? Take that, libertarians!

And while we’re at it, Infinite Perplexity tells me that Adam Smith favours progressive taxation!

What’s a conservative to do?

Updates

Digby catches Thomas Paine talking like a Marxist.

Corey Robin catches Adam Smith talking like a Marxist.

Imagine that.

The page from Corey Robin is linkrotted, so here it is rescused from the archives. The emphasis is Robin’s.

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations:

Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters. Thus the law which obliges the masters in several different trades to pay their workmen in money and not in goods, is quite just and equitable.

Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence:

The rich and opulent merchant who does nothing but give a few directions, lives in far greater state and luxury and ease and plenty of all the conveniencies and delicacies of life than his clerks, who do all the business. They too, excepting their confinement, are in a state of ease and plenty far superior to that of the artizan by whose labour these commodities were furnished. The labour of this man too is pretty tollerable; he works under cover protected from the inclemency in the weather, and has his livelyhood in no uncomfortable way if we compare him with the poor labourer. He has all the inconveniencies of the soil and the season to struggle with, is continually exposed to the inclemency of the weather and the most severe labour at the same time. Thus he who as it were supports the whole frame of society and furnishes the means of the convenience and ease of all the rest is himself possessed of a very small share and is buried in obscurity. He bears on his shoulders the whole of mankind, and unable to sustain the load is buried by the weight of it and thrust down into the lowest parts of the earth, from whence he supports all the rest.

33

President Bush's approval rating is 33% according to the latest poll.

From Fox News.

Via Mark A R Kleiman, who has a few choice words.

Metablog

Jim Henley makes a one-word post ... and the comment thread gets out of hand.

Nerdy good fun

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: I need a web comic adapting transcripts of writers speaking at bookstores into comic book form published on the web. Well, via Scott Kurtz of PvP, I've got you covered with Stripped Books.

Mmmm.