Monday links
Monday, November 12th, 2012- Tribes. (Aka help Tam, Queen of Snark, and maybe win some cool gunstuff.)
- Hm. Happy life? Meaningful life? Choices … choices …
- How to devise more secure passwords. (Yeah, we’ve been here before; always a good reminder, though.)
- I know some cynics think Obama and Eric Holder will kill recreational cannabis in Washington and Colorado. They’ll try. But this is a battle they’re going to lose. The new legalization is already making waves in Mexico. And having a very, very real effect on prosecutions in Washington state.
- Hey, look! Europe has turned the corner and is headed for financial stability! Yeahhhh. If you “turn the corner” every three months (as pundits are wont to proclaim), how long before you get hopelessly lost in the maze? (H/T. JS)
- I’m seeing so many stories like this I’m beginning to think Occupy Wall Street is turning into the old Diggers. Or rather the newer old Diggers. (Like ‘em or not, they’re doing something good and on a strictly voluntary, spontaneous-order basis.)
- Unlike FEMA, for instance.
- And while you’re contemplating those happy/meaningful choices, here’s a lesson in perspective. Linds Redding wrote this while dying of cancer. Linds Redding was a creative type who left the ad business. So was I. Lucky for me, I reached the same conclusions for similar reasons 20 years younger than he did and without the fatal reality check. (Yes, of course, you can have both happiness and meaning.)
- Oh yeah. Now he regrets having been a member and builder of the Petraeus cult. But pal, wasn’t it your job as a journalist to be skeptical all along?
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November 12th, 2012
About Europe; does it count if you keep turning the same corner? Today Yahoo’s headline is kinda Doom N Gloom.
November 12th, 2012
Europe has turned so many corners now that should you join them all together you would end up with a hexadecagon. The debt is still there and until the Euro dies the financial straightjacket impoverishing southern Europe will never go away. Mind you Germany will not allow that as the euro is the only thing that makes german products affordable. If they went back to the Mark or expelled the PIIGS Germany would be in recession in less than a month.
November 12th, 2012
On secure passwords: http://xkcd.com/936/
November 12th, 2012
If you keep turning corners, eventually you’ll run out of gas circling the same block.
November 12th, 2012
To me, a happy and meaningful life are intertwined,and can’t be separated, but maybe that’s just my way of looking at it. If I had to choose one, I’d go with “meaningful”-at least then, when you reach the end of your personal road, you can say you did something….
November 12th, 2012
“If you keep turning corners, eventually you’ll run out of gas circling the same block.”
Kind of reminds you of the U.S. every election year, doesn’t it?
November 12th, 2012
Having known a thing or two about Patraeus for over two decades I’ve always considered the acceptance of his mouthings to be an intelligence test. The press, and most politicians bought in PDQ, which should tell you a lot about the intellectual capacity of our leaders. At the time I figured it was just the Bush Administration, which didn’t exactly put a premium on smarts. But oh lord, did the good general go far with his dog and pony show. This guy didn’t know a thing about COIN that he didn’t pick up from Andrew Krepinevich’s writings. And that was always his trick. He read the more obscure writings of the brilliant and even if he didn’t understand how to use them in real life is was great for Impressing Thomas Ricks. Let’s not forget that the good general was responsible for the “Operational Pause” during the invasion of Iraq, a dangerous “pause” that did nothing but allow the infamous “deck of cards” to escape and Sunni soldiers to dissolve into the mist and reassert themselves as insurgents. It destroyed the entire intent of the invasion. What really happened is Patraeus the Brave lost his nerve over the lack of opposition, of which there wasn’t any to speak of. As for his success in Iraq, STOLEN from Doug MacGregor and various articles he has written over the years. That said, he was very honorable about not letting the CIA take the fall for Obama incompetence in Libya (this caused our overlords to come up with yet another story as to what happened). Doesn’t anyone find it odd that Patraeus should be cast out for having an affair when it’s certainly OK for a Democratic president?
November 12th, 2012
So OWS, people who couldn’t manage a decent campground but wanted to lecture folks on how to run the world, and who advocated moar regulation and moar bigger government, (except for themselves) is doing good “on a strictly voluntary, spontaneous-order basis.”
Cognitive dissonance much?
November 12th, 2012
“I know some cynics think Obama and Eric Holder will kill recreational cannabis in Washington and Colorado. They’ll try.”
Quibble: I think Holder will be gone.
If the president was smart he’d jump on the legalization bandwagon and set up the D’s for a 2016 win. Unfortunately…
November 12th, 2012
The cannabis issue may well turn into a tenth amendment issue. For those tenthets out there. We can ignore any individual sovereignty issue because that was crushed a long time ago. But truthfully they just may let it go if they can get a piece of the action. After all they didn’t spend all that money arming the Mexican Cartels, sorry I meant “farmers”, if they weren’t expecting payback
:)
November 12th, 2012
I’m with Scott.
That whole “happy vs. meaningful life” is nothing but a restatement of the basic statist concept of sacrifice: that the only moral thing for you to do is give up your selfish interests in order to serve mine.
Suffering of some kind is inevitable and therefore must be endured. When it can’t reasonably be avoided.
Those who tell you to embrace suffering are telling you to embrace servitude.
November 12th, 2012
Don’t let someone else define what makes you happy or what a meaningful life is for you.
November 13th, 2012
What Matt, another said…..there’s probably as many different definitions of those as there are for freedom……