Inevitable

The Decline is dying of neglect. There were plans for a new journal built around some open source technologies. If that ever happens, I'll post a link here. In the mean time, I really have nothing to say anymore. I no longer recognize a place for myself in this world. Politics is thoroughly debased and ignorance comes only second to narcissism as society's ordering values. What can one say in or to a world such as this? "I prefer not to."

Anti-SOPA

I support the Anti-SOPA / PIPA strike.

Bill Payin'

A friend of mine is very kindly buying a Kindle Fire through my Amazon affiliate link. Thanks.

Update

Next week, I'll be starting an adjunct teaching position at the local community college. This means that my 2012 income will be 1000% larger than it was last year (even if 0 times 1000% doesn't equal $1,000, you get the idea).

Airport Security

Vanity Fair:

To a large number of security analysts, this expenditure makes no sense. The vast cost is not worth the infinitesimal benefit. Not only has the actual threat from terror been exaggerated, they say, but the great bulk of the post-9/11 measures to contain it are little more than what Schneier mocks as “security theater”: actions that accomplish nothing but are designed to make the government look like it is on the job. In fact, the continuing expenditure on security may actually have made the United States less safe.

Via Daring Fireball.

Perpetual Peace

Quotes like this happen a dozen times a century perhaps, paraphrasing a sea change in European Weltanschauung. Via Ezra Klein's Wonkbook:

"I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity."

Habermas speaks out also. I'm still trying to parse this latest version of "More Europe; Less Europe" opinion writing. But insofar as the driving force of a Kantian Europe has always been the very non-Kantian economy, an economic crisis which unevenly distributes costs to certain countries suggests serious hurdles to a stronger union.

30 min Update: And then sometimes you move up one item in your well curated must read RSS feeds in NetNewsWire to find that The Economist also has a long discussion AND ties the Kant threads together.

Confidence Men

Ezra Klein reviews Ron Suskind:

But Suskind’s reporting seems, at times, to contradict his thesis.