The following is an abridged text of an open letter [PDF] by John Maynard Keynes to the US president.
Dear Mr President,
You have made yourself the trustee for those in every country who seek to mend the evils of our condition by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system. If you fail, rational [...]
We have here, courtesy of Jonathan Hoefler, a sample of a pixel font from 1567.
The struggle to adequately render letterforms on a pixel grid is a familiar one, and an ancient one as well: this bitmap alphabet is from La Vera Perfettione del Disegno di varie sorte di ricami, an embroidery guide by Giovanni Ostaus [...]
Great stuff.
Well, in charts, anyway. Barry Ritholtz collects some very nice examples, of which this is only one. Have a look.
Rob Kapilow talks about the Harburg/Gorney 1932 classic on NPR. It sounds alarmingly up to date, adjusted for inflation.
The article has links to several renditions of the song, of which Harburg’s is my favorite (though Daniel Schorr’s version, at the end of the audio version, is quite fine). YouTube has a perfectly awful version by [...]
Dean Baker, posting at TPMCafe.
The High Priests of the Bubble Economy
Those following the meeting of Barack Obama’s economic advisory committee could not have been very reassured by the presence of Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, both former Treasury secretaries in the Clinton administration. Along with former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, Rubin and Summers [...]
DULCE ET DECORUM EST
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, [...]
Paul Krugman, on economic lessons to be learned from the Great Depression.
Franklin Delano Obama?
Suddenly, everything old is New Deal again. Reagan is out; F.D.R. is in. Still, how much guidance does the Roosevelt era really offer for today’s world?
The answer is, a lot. But Barack Obama should learn from F.D.R.’s failures as well as from [...]
Mr Fish
Rachel Cooke in the Guardian.
The man who knows too much
After we finish breakfast, he takes me to the office. He is eager to put off the moment when he must get on with his Syria piece. The more time he wastes with me… well, the morning will soon be over. Inside he points [...]
Recent history, that is. That’s an awfully consistent trend for the Democrats, regardless of how well or poorly the Republicans are doing. Curious.
via DKos
A meditation by David Kaiser.
A new era?
Obama, however, will if he wins take over the government of the most divided country since 1860—in some ways, more polarized even than at that time.
…
The Republican Party will remain after November perhaps the most rigidly disciplined and narrowly based party in American history. Even the opposition crises in [...]
Paul Krugman.
Unbelievable. Sarah Palin finished her closing remarks by quoting Ronald Reagan:
It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they [...]
Wednesday is Constitution Day; here’s Sandy Levinson (Our Undemocratic Constitution).
Faux Originalism and “Constitution Day”
Many originalists claim to feel bound not only by the text of the Constitution (which would make them only textualists, but also by the values, aims, and aspirations of the Founders). But surely one of the central values of the Founders is [...]
From Barista:
Here is a television schedule for a certain Tuesday, 28 March:
“2000: News
2030: Newsreel clips
2045: “Etiquette for those in Love”: Seasonal tips for those in love, or who want to be
2130-2200: “Spring Showers”: Performance by the White Ravens”
The program started with the words (as translated by some computer on the internet),
“Attention, attention! Paul Nipkow television. We welcome [...]
The line is from Gottlob Frege, I gather, though I just now came across it while reading David Chalmers. It’s new to me, though my brief career in academic philosophy centered on Wittgenstein, an admirer of Herr Frege.
Hesperus and Phosphorus are the latinized forms of the Greek personifications of the Evening and Morning Stars, respectively. [...]
Starting today, George Orwell’s diaries start appearing as a blog, 70 years after they were written (you may recall a similar project some time back blogging the diaries of Samuel Pepys). By way of introduction:
From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual [...]
Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke.
Helmuth von Moltke was at a meeting at the Foreign Minstry in Berlin with twenty-four men. They discussed a legal decree that would expropriate the property of deported Jews. Twenty-four of the twenty-five wanted to approve the decree; Moltke opposed it.
The men were chameleons, Moltke wrote his wife: “In a healthy [...]
Wired notes the Honda Super Cub’s 50th anniversary and 60-millionth unit sold. That places the first sales in 1958, which also happens to be the year I moved (with my family) to Tokyo.
The Cub must have been an immediate hit, because I remember them as ubiquitous. Years later, attending New College in Sarasota Florida in [...]