William Niskanen, 1933-2011
Posted by Jay Manifold on 26th October 2011 (All posts by Jay Manifold)
Cato obituary here. Requiescat in pace.
Posted in Libertarianism, Obits | 1 Comment »
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Posted by Jay Manifold on 26th October 2011 (All posts by Jay Manifold)
Cato obituary here. Requiescat in pace.
Posted in Libertarianism, Obits | 1 Comment »
Posted by Jay Manifold on 2nd July 2011 (All posts by Jay Manifold)
Warning: spoilers, I guess, though with a film like this it’s hard to give anything away so as to really detract from the experience. Maybe a few autobiographical spoilers of my own.
Having only seen it once so far, I am aware of having gotten at most glimpses of its full intent. I cannot easily describe Terrence Malick’s oeuvre except in superficial ways: mostly out-of-doors, with nature as a significant element; spectacular cinematography; more or less nonlinear storyline; voice-over narrations. I have not seen Badlands but have seen everything from Days of Heaven on.
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Posted in Arts & Letters, Biography, Christianity, Diversions, Film, History, Human Behavior, Judaism, Morality and Philosphy, Music, Personal Narrative, Philosophy, Religion, Science, Space, USA, Vietnam | 8 Comments »
Posted by Jay Manifold on 16th April 2011 (All posts by Jay Manifold)
Commenters on the earlier post having raised several good points, I decided to write a follow-up rather than attempt to provide individual responses.
I should first say something general about technological advance and prediction horizons. Due to the immense effects of nanomachinery, as hazardous as near-future speculation may be, it becomes extraordinarily difficult more than about 20 years out. What interests me in this context is what can be done with “bulk technology” before the transition to nanotech, and how many of the developments forecast by Drexler et al may occur relatively gradually and in unlikely places, rather than swiftly and obviously emanating from North America or some other high-technology region. Jim notes the potential of the combination of desktop fabricators and satellite links. I believe that few people on Earth will see more change in the next generation than young Haitians.
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Posted in Americas, Civil Society, Economics & Finance, Energy & Power Generation, Entrepreneurship, Environment, International Affairs, Latin America, North America, Personal Narrative, Tech, USA | 7 Comments »
Posted by Jay Manifold on 13th April 2011 (All posts by Jay Manifold)
Last month I went to Haiti to help out with an IT project in Petit-Goâve, a medium-sized town about seventy kilometers west-southwest of Port-au-Prince, on the northern shore of the Tiburon Peninsula, opposite Île de la Gonâve on the Canal de Sud. The project’s objective is to create, or rather restore, a computer lab at “College” Harry Brakeman (actually a primary and secondary school, hereafter “CHB”), and provide greatly improved internet access, via wireless links, at five sites (including CHB) in Petit-Goâve owned by L’Eglise Methodiste d’Haiti (EMH). The epicenter of one of the larger aftershocks of the January 2010 earthquake was directly beneath Petit-Goâve.
Numerous ongoing projects for the EMH throughout Haiti are being funded by United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) and staffed by United Methodist Volunteers in Mission (UMVIM), but my personal involvement is not occurring as a result of direct involvement with any of those organizations. I have for many years been attending an informal Friday lunch group that for the past decade or so has included Clif Guy, who is the CIO of United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, generally known as “COR” throughout the Kansas City metropolitan area, in which it is by several measures the largest single church – big enough to have its own IT department (larger than most church staffs altogether) and a CIO.
In mid-January I returned from a solitary and somewhat monastic sojourn in New Mexico and the trans-Pecos region of Texas to 1) get back to work at Sprint; 2) bury my just-deceased 18-year-old cat; and 3) talk to Clif about opportunities in Haiti, which he had mentioned several times over the previous year. Two months of frantic preparation later, which included among many other tasks the filling out of a “Mission Trip Notification of Death” to specify the disposition of my corpse, I was landing at Toussaint Louverture International Airport.
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Posted in Americas, Civil Society, Economics & Finance, Energy & Power Generation, Entrepreneurship, Environment, History, International Affairs, Latin America, North America, Personal Narrative, Religion, Tech, Transportation, USA | 8 Comments »
Posted by Jay Manifold on 5th January 2010 (All posts by Jay Manifold)
– which is here (h/t Instapundit):

There will be no trucks after the singularity. Plenty of delicious lunches and really great furniture, though.
Posted in Humor, Photos, Predictions | 3 Comments »
Posted by Jay Manifold on 4th January 2010 (All posts by Jay Manifold)
Posted in Holidays, Humor, Photos | 6 Comments »
Posted by Jay Manifold on 2nd December 2009 (All posts by Jay Manifold)

We are great and we are grand; we make bombs beneath our stands!
Posted in Academia, Chicagoania, Diversions, Energy & Power Generation, History, Humor, International Affairs, Japan, Military Affairs, National Security, Quotations, Science, Tech, USA, War and Peace | 5 Comments »
Posted by Jay Manifold on 11th November 2009 (All posts by Jay Manifold)
Posted in Britain, Education, Europe, France, Germany, History, Holidays, International Affairs, Military Affairs, National Security, Photos, Russia, USA, War and Peace | 7 Comments »
Posted by Jay Manifold on 9th November 2009 (All posts by Jay Manifold)
Amazon search on “revolution 1848“: 17,292 results
Amazon search on “revolution 1989“: 7,972 results
Posted in Academia, Anti-Americanism, Europe, History, Leftism, Political Philosophy, Statistics | 2 Comments »
Posted by Jay Manifold on 13th September 2009 (All posts by Jay Manifold)
Via Pejman Yousefzadeh, I hear that Norman Borlaug has passed; NYT obit.
In the face of caviling from scarcity-mentality “environmentalists,” he saved a billion lives. Requiescat in pace.
Posted in Bioethics, Environment, India, Latin America, Obits | 5 Comments »
Posted by Jay Manifold on 18th August 2009 (All posts by Jay Manifold)
Via Brian Doherty and Pejman Yousefzadeh, I learn that Rose Friedman has died. Requiescat in pace.
Posted in Obits | Comments Off
Posted by Jay Manifold on 22nd July 2009 (All posts by Jay Manifold)
Apologies if this is a repeat; I just heard about it from Pejman Yousefzadeh.
Posted in Academia, Chicagoania, Education | 6 Comments »
Posted by Jay Manifold on 20th July 2009 (All posts by Jay Manifold)
Posted in History, Science, Space | 1 Comment »
Posted by Jay Manifold on 17th July 2009 (All posts by Jay Manifold)
A bit of a Chicago Boy, as it turns out. Thanks to Pejman for the tip. Requiescat in pace.
Posted in Academia, Arts & Letters, Chicagoania, Christianity, Civil Society, History, Morality and Philosphy, Obits, Political Philosophy | 6 Comments »
Posted by Jay Manifold on 28th June 2009 (All posts by Jay Manifold)
Background is at Facebook, Twitter and peers for sale – privately.
My initial impression is that this could be an ingenious adaptation to an obnoxiously overregulated environment. Or it could be crushed by regulators and their enablers; given that a Republican Congress and President were willing to saddle us with Sarbanes-Oxley seven years ago, it is not easy to imagine our current complement of parasites reacting dispassionately to private stock exchanges.
Note that I do not meet the minimum qualifications (net worth $1M, annual income $200k for past 2 years); this is just to elicit discussion by knowledgeable people (the minimum qualifications for which I also do not meet).
Posted in Business, Economics & Finance, Entrepreneurship, Investment Journal, Markets and Trading, Politics | 3 Comments »
Posted by Jay Manifold on 16th June 2009 (All posts by Jay Manifold)
I just received the appended message in e-mail from a friend in Europe. I have left it entirely unedited. Right now I feel so grateful that we don’t have to do things like this here. Never forget those who died for your freedom.
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Posted in Civil Liberties, Civil Society, Elections, History, International Affairs, Iran, Middle East, Personal Narrative, Politics | 1 Comment »
Posted by Jay Manifold on 23rd May 2009 (All posts by Jay Manifold)
“A recollection touched him, booklegged stuff from the forties and fifties of the last century which he had read: French, German, British, Italian. The intellectuals had been fretful about the Americanization of Europe, the crumbling of old culture before the mechanized barbarism of soft drinks, hard sells, enormous chrome-plated automobiles (dollar grins, the Danes had called them), chewing gum, plastics … None of them had protested the simultaneous Europeanization of America: bloated government, unlimited armament, official nosiness, censors, secret police, chauvinism … Well, for a while there had been objectors, but first their own excesses and sillinesses discredited them, then later …”
– Poul Anderson, Sam Hall
Posted in Europe, Political Philosophy, Quotations | 3 Comments »
Posted by Jay Manifold on 11th May 2009 (All posts by Jay Manifold)
A recurring theme in this forum … David Baron, call your office: Deer enters, runs around KCI’s Terminal A (Kansas City Star).
Maybe it was running from a mountain lion (“Mountain lions are now fairly common in suburban areas of California and have recently been sighted as far east as urban Kansas City, Missouri, where several have been hit by cars.”).
I could live well on the venison from deer that have wandered through my yard if I could 1) dispatch them quietly and 2) field-dress them without attracting attention.
Posted in Diversions, Environment, Humor, North America | 3 Comments »
Posted by Jay Manifold on 15th January 2009 (All posts by Jay Manifold)
(UPDATE: beaten like a rented mule by Cheryl Rofer; see http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/6619.html)
Apologies in advance for exceeding the recommended “above-the-fold” limit:
If war consisted of one decisive act, or a set of simultaneous decisions, preparations would tend toward totality, for no omission could ever be rectified. The sole criterion for preparations which the world of reality could provide would be the measures taken by the adversary — so far as they are known; the rest would once more be reduced to abstract calculations.
… if all the means available were, or could be, simultaneously employed, all wars would automatically be confined to a single decisive act or a set of simultaneous ones — the reason being that any adverse decision must reduce the sum of the means available, and if all had been committed in the first act there could really be no question of a second.
– Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Book I [On the Nature of War], Chapter 1 [What is War?], section 8 [War Does Not Consist of a Single Short Blow]), 1832
At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? — Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! — All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
– Abraham Lincoln, Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, 27 January 1838
Time-of-flight equation for a ballistic missile:
t – t0 = √a3/µ [2π + (E - e sin E) - (E0 - e sin E0)]
– Bate/Mueller/White, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics (Dover, 1971)
Having deliberately refrained from reading any of the other roundtable contributions so far, lest I become overwhelmingly intimidated, resign from my contributor status, and tell Lex to forget he ever heard of me, I have decided to comment on one very small portion of Book I, specifically Chapter 1, section 8 (page 79 in the edition we are reading). Because, of course, for an American baby boomer, no war that directly affected the entire population was, prior to the late 1980s, expected to be anything other than a single short blow.
So, with the sure knowledge of my limited qualifications ever before me, and the entirely unmanaged risk of merely restating, and poorly, what someone else has already said, I begin …
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Posted in Clausewitz Roundtable | 2 Comments »
Posted by Jay Manifold on 2nd December 2008 (All posts by Jay Manifold)
Posted in Chicagoania, History, Humor, War and Peace | 7 Comments »