Occupation of Independence

Before this, I had only heard an adult woman scream -- really scream -- once in my life. It was a college girl having an argument with her boyfriend. Then she started running down the sidewalk, with him chasing her. As luck would have it, I was the first person on the sidewalk for them to encounter. "Pass" would be a better word than "encounter", since the latter implies a confrontation. I had decided, with only a second or two to think about it, that I wasn't going to confront the boyfriend, despite being a young man at the time, and therefore, a bit of a fool. But I always wondered how I decided to keep out of it. Was there something about their body language or her scream that suggested a harmless lover's quarrel? Can a woman's scream be broken down into a language as a dog's barking can?  Dog owners learn the language of their dog's barks (plural) after a couple years of practice. There is something charming and Saturday morning cartoon-l

If only I had a nickel for every time somebody said, "Buying a DVD doesn't make much sense, because once I've seen the movie, it isn't interesting anymore." They are correct of course if they are thinking purely in terms of how the story turns out. But I prefer to ignore that issue and focus on identifying classic lines from classic movies. These become philosophical building blocks, comparable to Aesop's Fables, famous quotes and speeches from Shakespeare and the Bible, and the proverbs of folk wisdom. The same thing can be said of classic jokes. For example, consider one of Jack Benny's, from the days of Radio: menacing footprints are heard approaching, as he is walking down the sidewalk at night. It  turns out to be a mugger. The mugger tells Benny, "Your money or your life." There is a long pause after that. Benny finally blurts out, "I'm thinking about it!" There was a joke similar in spirit in Sydney Pollack's mid-19

We all get into ruts on the internet, reading blogs that talk about the same thing every time, or are thinly disguised infomercials, or are mere boob-toob level entertainment.  I just found a great blog on consumer culture, money, and financial independence called Living Stingy. It is intelligent, acerbic, and full of common sense. Why did it take so long to find this blog? The title of the blog is unfortunate. The writer really doesn't allow comments, which I think is a mistake. Well too bad, it is fun to read and written with mordant wit. Admittedly I am a bit prejudiced when it comes to style. I like to see a writer observe concrete things that seem bizarre to him. Then he must try to explain those things, and in the process of doing that, the blog post moves towards more general and universal principles. At any rate, give this blog a try and tell me what you think of it.

If you are interested in the centenary of the Great War but don't know where to get started, consider this brief article by Eric Margolis. Recall the old quote by the Latin poet, Horace, that "fleeing vice is the beginning of virtue." In studying the origins of the Great War, the first mistake you must avoid is the British bias, which is also the bias of Anglophiles in the power establishment of the American Northeast. Many people see diplomats as empty talk, talk, talkers, as well as duplicitous scoundrels. But the diplomats at the end of the Napoleonic wars crafted a peace that lasted a hundred years in Europe -- not complete peace of course, but there were no general European-wide wars for a hundred years after their peace treaty. But halfway through that remarkable century of progress, something new happened: Germany became a united country, and started industrializing and arming itself at a rate that soon threatened to make it the Big Cheese of Europe. The former

The Great War started 100 years ago. Besides being of enormous importance to the world over this past century, it is an uncanny illustration of the old adage, 'the more things change, the more they stay the same.' An incident -- the assassination in Sarajevo -- was turned into the opportunity to kill millions by the blundering politicians and emperors that the sheeple stayed loyal to. A couple years later a suspicious or misinterpreted incident, the sinking of the Lusitania, was used to suck the USA into an unnecessary war. Consider such things in light of what has been going on in Ukraine the last week. And yet the general public learns nothing about how politicians use incidents to start wars. It is not easy finding good histories of the Great War. Oh sure, I've read Barbara Tuchman, Niall Ferguson, and Martin Gilbert. The difficulty is in finding a book not written from the British or American-interventionist angle. I had almost lost hope until Thomas Fleming's