- What sex is your brain? Its really long and you need a ruler.
- LewRockwell.com has posted Hayek’s 1960 essay “Why I am not a Conservative”. Hayek (winner of the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics), I believe, is one of the most significant thinkers of the 20th Century and is almost totally ignored in universities. (One of the others is Eric Hoffer who will never appear on a unversity syllabus) To understand the relevance of Hayek essay today, read this quote from Matthew Yglesias:
…the era of big government being over is over. It would be a serious mistake to confuse Bush’s brand of big conservatism with liberalism, or with any kind of real concession to liberalism, but it suggests that the underlying political dynamics have shifted a great deal. If you did have a progressive president, there’s no longer a particularly large amount of popular resistance to expanding the activist state. Even most Republicans don’t especially care about small government.
He’s right. Its dark times for those who just want to be left the hell alone.
- Removed Weatherbug from my life and replaced it with WeatherPulse. I get the temperature in my toolbar and none of the bullshit that comes along with Weatherbug.
- I’ve been goofing around with greasemonkey on Flock. Greasemonkey lets you run scripts to modify webpages on the client side. If a site has a bad interface, you can change what can be seen. There is a pretty big collection of scripts you can download.
- Is it me, or has Microsoft become irrevelant? The only non-Windows MS app I use anymore is Media Player, and that has been replaced by iTunes for most stuff. Vista is completely a non-event for me as there is nothing I really need in a new OS. I use OpenOffice/Abiword almost exclusively. The only thing I can think of where they might be doing something that interests me is Xbox360. All they can do is play catch-up Google and try to do half-assed copies of whatever they do, but they’ll never be able to beat them because they have a corporate culture that requires them to try to milk a dime out of everything they do and push every other MS product down your throat.
- I went through my Sony Vaio laptop today and cleaned out a load of programs and cleaned up the registry. Its running way faster. I install more crap on here than I do on my desktop computer.
- 43 Things is a really interesting site. I’ll post my list when I finish it.
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Hump day dump
4 replies on “Hump day dump”
Hoffer was on my syllabus for “Repression and Democracy” at the U.
I stand corrected and rather suprised.
Well, Macalester would never have taught Hoffer in a billion years. Mass movements can be evil? Never! Oh, and you’ve just been shot by the South African security forces, and please don’t step on the kids having a one-day campout on the lawn to protest homelessness.
Yeah, well, Macalester also “teaches” the worst movie ever made – “Salo” and required my afro-Canadian friend to attend a skinhead concert for a counterculture class. Granted the concert was in Eden Prairie, but still…