Links

1. Singapore's (racist?) strategy for increasing their birth rate.

2. Retire by 30?

3. 66 behind the scenes pics from the set of the The Empire Strikes Back. 

4. "Find what you love and let it kill you."

5. Fast food you can't eat in America.

6. Femivores (domestic-DIY feminists). 

Links

1. Police misconduct blog.

2. The rise of Big Data.

3. I missed this one: Karl Marx credit card. Hat tip to this Neo-Marxist round-up.

4. The best philosophy is Hume's skepticism.

5. Nobel-prize winning economist Daniel McFadden argues for an overhaul of consumer choice theory, drawing on fields such as psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology. 

Hat tips to The Browser and Arts & Letters Daily.

Muso Soseki, "People's Abuse"

People's Abuse

People's abuse
has melted what was golden
and it has gone from the world

Fortune and misfortune
both belong to the land
of dreams

Don't look back
to this world
your old hole in the cellar

From the beginning
the flying birds have left
no footprints on the blue sky

--Muso Soseki (In Stephen Addiss, Stanley Lombardo, and Judith Roitman, Zen Sourcebook, [Indianapolis: Hackett], pp. 182-183.)

Links

1. Reinhart-Rogoff controversy scorecard.

2. Competency-based education.

3. Atul Gawande on why Boston's hospitals were ready.

4. David Chan's 6,297 reviews of Chinese restaurants.

5. Mormon bishop fends off woman's attacker with a katana.

6. What is a terrorist?

7. "Sailor suit old man."

Daigu Ryokan

Sixty years have passed for this frail old monk
Living in a shrine hut, far from the world of men.
At the base of the mountain I'm nestled in during the evening rain;
The lamp flickers brightly in front of my old window.

--Daigu Ryokan. (In Stephen Addiss, Stanley Lombardo, and Judith Roitman, Zen Sourcebook [Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008], p. 259.)

Links

1. Zizek on Rand and the financial crisis.

2. Fruit flies do better when fed organic fruit.

3. The market for cupcakes crumbles. 

Virgil Henry Storr, Enterprising Slaves and Master Pirates

I have been reading Virgil Henry Storr's Enterprising Slaves and Master Pirates: Understanding Economic Life in the Bahamas. Storr is an economist at George Mason University. His book is an economic history of the Bahamas, and is of interest both in terms of its content and its methodology.

Content-wise, the Bahamas are a fascinating case; for example, slavery in the Bahamas operated differently than in other places in the West Indies, due at least in part to the poor Bahamian soil, which prevented plantations from being as profitable as elsewhere. Bahamian slaves were permitted to work for themselves on Saturdays, to relieve their owners from having to feed and clothe them. This allowed (or forced) slaves to engage in farming and crafts for their own benefit, and they had the right to sell their labor to others (though, predictably, their owners still received a cut). Storr argues that the peculiarities of slavery in the Bahamas introduced a spirit of enterprise among Bahamians, which is still a part of the culture today. Storr also argues that the Bahamian culture and economy was influenced by piracy and other piracy-like practices over the centuries, including wrecking and salvaging, blockade-running during the U.S. Civil War and bootlegging during Prohibition, all of which played a salient role in the economic life of the islands. There is thus a connection between profit and plunder (or at least, illicit activity) in the Bahamian culture.

Methodology-wise, Storr's work is a fascinating synthesis of two different research programs: Max Weber's economic sociology and Austrian economics (i.e., Mises, Hayek, and so on) on the one hand, and cultural studies and theory more generally on the other hand. Perhaps the root of this synthesis is Max Weber's own economic approach to sociology, but the later Hayek also placed great emphasis on the role of culture in the development of economic institutions. In any case, Storr makes a powerful case for the view that economists should pay more attention to culture in order to understand how economic agents and whole economies actually function. If this puts pressure on the methodological individualism of classical and neo-classical economics, it also pressures cultural and critical theorists to pay more attention to economic factors when producing their analyses of cultural and historical factors. For instance, an understanding of slavery and its legacy in the Bahamas is incomplete without an analysis of the Bahamian plantation economy, including the farming and piecework practices of the slaves there. Storr's research program is probably just beginning, but I hope it has an influence both on economists and on cultural theorists.

Touch

The ragged edge of loneliness, broken

By strangers’ gossip of sex and God.

Fertilized by dust spores of desire,

Womb’s fruit waxes tender, smooth

In the fullness of the day’s empty hours.

Sing in me, O muse,

The sound of an earthworm’s progress

The sight of a mosquito’s eye jelly

The taste of an oncoming storm

The touch of a mysterious stranger.

Invincible

The dead are mighty,
For only the living can be wounded:
Fingernails ripped off
Tongues stapled to a wall
Hearts attacked
Spirits sundered.

Neoliberal Links

1. Financial Times "Lunch with the FT" interview with philosopher Michael Sandel. 

2. Bruce Bartlett's critical assessment of Margaret Thatcher (she didn't significantly lower taxes and spending).

3. "Cognitive Biases and the Trouble with Moral Local Shopping." 

Kyong Ho

The moonlight of clear mind
Swallows the whole world;
When mind and light both go out
What is this?

--Death poem of Kyong Ho (1849-1912), Korean Son (Zen) Master.

Links

1.  Government-run raisin cartel.

2. Ghost marriages in China.

3. Global warming has "paused" but is not going away.

4. An evil Ranger?

Clifton's Cafeteria

Is it possible to eat mid-20th century style cafeteria food in downtown Los Angeles in the midst of kitschy decor inspired by the Santa Cruz region (and bearing an eerie resemblance to a live-action Yogi Bear set)?

Yes.

I ate their once, around a decade ago. A memorable experience, and I would go back (thought it's currently closed while undergoing restoration).

Links

1. Why China prefers its own political model.

2. Claims about nitrogen fertilizer (or: against organic farming).

3. China's disappearing rivers (or: the hazards of development). 

Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen."

("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.")

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 7.)

Elan Vital

Swallow your own death in the morning

Over easy with salt and pepper.

By nightfall, you'll have digested it fully

Death in every cell, a vital nutrient.

Links

1. The real Mongolian barbecue: cook an animal in its own skin. 

2. Journalistic cliches avoided at the Washington Post's Outlook section.

3. Derrida as intellectual outcast.

4. Explosives artist Cai Guo Qiang. "[H]is great influence was Chinese Taoist spirituality."

Hat tips to Arts & Letters Daily and The Browser.

Links

1. Eating zoo animals, cats, dogs, rats, and donkeys in the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war.

2. Adam Gopnik on the Mechanical Turk, a (fraudulent) 18th-century chess-playing automaton. According to Gopnik, Charles Babbage was inspired by the Turk to develop the concept of the difference engine, and Edgar Allan Poe was among those who realized the Turk had to be a fraud.

3. Myanmar gets daily newspapers (formerly banned by the government). 

Hat-tips to The Browser and Marginal Revolution.

No Human Can Fully Grasp the Complexity of Our Computers

A Google employee on the mind-boggling complexity of our computers. Corollaries include an explanation for the popularity of Steve Jobs, why computers are so frustrating, and why the patent system is broken.

Reflections

When all else is taken away, what remains is the relationship you have with being itself. If this relationship is sound, though you lose everything, at bottom you will be well. If this relationship is not sound, though you gain the entire world, you will not be well. Your relationship with being unfolds each moment, in ways you may not even be aware of. The magic power of attention can transform your relationship with being. In addition to the clear, well-lit parts of the mind, this attention must be applied to the dark, the silent, the hidden parts.