One of the most thoughtfully written and nicely illustrated "how to" books I've seen in a long time, "The Stick And Cane In Close Combat: Jointlocks, Takedowns and Surprise Attacks
Related links:
27 February 2010
Reviewed briefly: "The Stick and Cane in Close Combat" (Tom Lang, 2006)
26 February 2010
Reviewed briefly: "I'm New Here," Gil Scott-Heron (2010)
4 out of 5 stars (* * * *)
\He sounds like forty miles of bad road, but Gil Scott-Heron, the hard-living New York Poet who once taught us that The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, is back with a recording that poignantly examines rebuilding your life, even if you have to start from scratch.
Audio and video here:
19 February 2010
15 February 2010
Americana/alt.country playlist for Bunny
And anyone else who's interested.
Lyle Lovett: "Lyle Lovett" (debut album), "Pontiac," "It's Not Big It's Large" (with the Large Band) - a good introduction is "Anthology Vol 1, Cowboy Man", but there are no bad songs on the early albums and damn few on the later ones; it's worth buying the full albums in my view.
Steve Earle: God, anything really. But especially "Guitar Town" and "Transcendental Blues."
Townes van Zandt: Anything and everything. A good introduction is "Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, TX" - there are some compilations but I don't like the looks of them.
Willie Nelson: Anything and everything. A good introduction is the recent comprehensive box set. Just buy it. :-)
Guy Clark. The alt.country singer-songwriter's singer-songwriter. Anything. His last couple of records ("Dublin Blues," "Some Days The Song Writes You") are solid as they come.
Joe Ely - both as a solo artist and with The Flatlanders. Look for an anthology.
Robert Earl Keen - another member of the Texas smart-country set. "The Party Never Ends" is canonical.
Buddy and Julie Miller: If you buy just one record, buy this one: "Written In Chalk".
T-Bone Burnett: Producing more than performing these days, but proves that Christian Rock does not have to be "I found God and lost my talent." He writes heartbreakingly beautiful songs.
John Prine - all of it.
Emmylou Harris - all of it pretty much.
Lucinda Williams - all of it, but especially "Car Wheels On A Gravel Road."
Tift Merritt - a good introduction is "Live in Birmingham" (England, not Alabama)
02 February 2010
Eisenhower Interstate System in the style of H.C. Beck's London Underground Diagram
Eisenhower Interstate System in the style of H.C. Beck's London Underground Diagram
Originally uploaded by Senex Prime.
30 January 2010
Quants and wealth destruction
On Wall Street, they were all known as "quants," traders and financial engineers who used brain-twisting math and superpowered computers to pluck billions in fleeting dollars out of the market. Instead of looking at individual companies and their performance, management and competitors, they use math formulas to make bets on which stocks were going up or down. By the early 2000s, such tech-savvy investors had come to dominate Wall Street, helped by theoretical breakthroughs in the application of mathematics to financial markets, advances that had earned their discoverers several shelves of Nobel Prizes.
PDT, one of the most secretive quant funds around, was now a global powerhouse, with offices in London and Tokyo and about $6 billion in assets (the amount could change daily depending on how much money Morgan funneled its way). It was a well-oiled machine that did little but print money, day after day.
That week, however, PDT wouldn't print money--it would destroy it like an industrial shredder.
29 January 2010
27 January 2010
26 January 2010
Why *would* Edmund Burke support it?
You may not know this. But all the smartest people on the Right are basically ashamed to be associated with you. Your “success” in building a set of near-permanent institutions, think-tanks, and magazines to promote your ideals in an uncontaminated environment leaves us with two choices:
1) Sell out to the movement. That is, we may occupy ourselves by explaining that whatever the GOP is promoting--whether it be torture, pre-emptive war, Mutually Assured Destruction, or supply-side economics--is an enduring Western value. If John Boehner is doing it, we're supposed to figure out why Edmund Burke would support it.
Or:
2) Sell out the movement. That is, pitch our articles to liberal audiences. Trash the movement (like I’m doing), and trade our actual conservative convictions for the ephemeral respect of our peers.
[...]
Don’t get me started on foreign policy. There we were always at odds. I was a kind of isolationist. Your two unwinnable wars did little to dissuade me on that point.
But then this free market stuff. Live within your means. Fend for yourself. Be responsible. I believed that. But the people you elected didn’t. Bankers, GE, Archers Daniels Midland, military contractors, really all sorts of speculators--they deserved wealth transfers, cheap credit, debt cancellation. These are your welfare queens, conservative movement. Do you know how bad this makes us look, after having attacked poor people and minorities as free-riders?
Dear Conservative Movement: Stop Ruining My Life, by Michael Brendan Dougherty
24 January 2010
Silver Star
16 January 2010
14 January 2010
"We aren't at all entitled to use our moral instincts in the correct way."
Michael J. Totten interviews Christopher Hitchens (Part I, Part II).
Here's the opener to Part I:
MJT: Ireland has a new anti-blasphemy law.
Hitchens: Yes.
MJT: At the same time, Kurt Westergaard was just attacked in Denmark by a Somali nutcase with an axe for offending Muslims with his Mohammad bomb head cartoon. How is it that supposedly liberal Europeans have come to agree with Islamist fascists that people like Westergaard ought to be punished, even if they think he should be punished less severely?
Hitchens: Let's do a brief thought experiment. I tell you the following: On New Year's Eve, a man in his mid-seventies is having his granddaughter over for a sleep-over, his five-year old granddaughter. He is attacked in his own home by an axe-wielding maniac with homicidal intent. Your mammalian reaction, your reaction as a primate, is one of revulsion. I'm trusting you on this. [Laughs.]
MJT: Oh, yes. You are correct.
Hitchens: Then you pick up yesterday's Guardian, one of the most liberal newspapers in the Western world, and there's a long article that says, ah, that picture, that moral picture, that instinct to protect the old and the young doesn't apply in this case. The man asked for it. He drew a cartoon that upset some people. We aren't at all entitled to use our moral instincts in the correct way.
This is a sort of cultural and moral suicide, in my opinion. It's not exactly comparable to the reaction of the church in Ireland which wants to make it illegal to criticize any religion, which in Ireland doesn't really mean much more than one. Many Irish people I know are already publicly planning to break this law.
There you see, I have to say, a different phenomenon, maybe a different version of the same one, a claim of the right to protection against offense from a church that just lost at least two senior bishops who had to resign not because they had not thoroughly enough made themselves aware of the child abuse—why do we call it abuse? The rape and torture of children—where it seems from the Irish government's report that only a minority of children were not made victims of this hideous iniquitous predation.
The same absurdity is present in both cases. These two religions make very large claims for themselves, that "without us you cannot get to heaven, and without us you will go to hell." They claim the right to high, middle, and low justice over everything from public affairs to private morals. They make these immense claims for themselves and further say they should be immune from criticism. It's not enough to be an absolutist party, but you're not allowed to disagree. This is totalitarianism.
11 January 2010
Thinking clearly v. thinking deeply
"The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane." - Nikola Tesla
