What an amazing resource from LearnOutLoud.com, gratis:

LearnOutLoud's Art Masterpieces is a collection of essays on some of the most important works of art ever created. These carefully selected writings provide exciting commentary on the work of such masters as Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael, Michaelangelo, Titian, Sandro Botticelli, Rembrandt and many more. If you've ever wanted to gain a deeper appreciation of the great works of Western painting, then this audio series will be an invaluable compliment to your exploration.

Twenty-two paintings are covered in this collection and each MP3 file covers a different painting and has a high quality image of the art work embedded into it (which can be viewed in iTunes). Also included in this collection is a supplemental PDF which features images of all 22 paintings.

[Read the rest »]

From The Independent via LRC:

The bra was invented by an engineer of German extraction called Onto Titzling in 1912. He was living in a New York boarding house, and one of his neighbours, a voluptuous opera singer called Swanhilda Olafson, complained that she needed a garment to hoist her vast bosom aloft every evening — so Titzling obliged, using some cotton, elastic and metal struts. Unfortunately, he failed to patent the device and, in the early 1930s, a Frenchman named Philippe de Brassière began making a suspiciously similar object. Titzling took him to court, but the unscrupulous Frenchman won the day. And that's why the garment all the ladies are wearing is called a brassiere, not a titzling.

Bette Midler sang about this court case in the film Beaches, so obviously it's true, isn't it? Don't be ridiculous. It's a total fabrication, based on a spoof 1971 history by Wallace Reyburn, and is just one of a thousand tales and myths that punctuate the history of the small double-dome of cloth that encases the female chest.

[Keep reading…]

Today we remember the victims of Katrina, but we should not forget that government levees have been failing in minor and major disasters throughout their history. Recall, for example, the Great Flood of 1927. The similarities are startling. A known threat was approaching and yet all the government spending and planning completely failed. In fact, in both cases the government turned a normal problem into a major disaster. The African American population was hurt disproportionately in both cases. In 1927 Herbert Hoover promised aid and assistance that failed to materialize (this was a major reason for the black exodus from the Republican to the Democrat party). In both cases it was individuals and organizations — both commercial and charitable — that did the real work of reconstruction. FULL ARTICLE

More from History Magazine:

In early-1900s North America, infant and young child mortality was commonplace. Children seemed to have very little resistance to disease, dying of illnesses such as rickets, typhoid and diphtheria. Doctors recognized malnutrition as a prime culprit for much of this heartache.

How to solve the problem eluded the medical profession until 1930 with the invention of Pablum, a pre-cooked, chock-full-of-vitamins, infant cereal that generations of children around the world have loved and eagerly devoured. Adults, on the other hand, have turned up their noses at the mush, likening its taste to that of boiled Kleenex. Pablum and its companion, Sunwheat Biscuits for toddlers, were the brainchild of a dedicated team of doctors and researchers under the leadership of Dr. Alan Brown.

[Read the rest »]

On our honeymoon, we were surprised to find a bottle of absinthe available in a whisky shop in Scotland. Now I know how it compared to the genuine stuff of the 19th century:

The liquor absinthe is believed to have been created in 1792 by Pierre Ordinaire, a French doctor. Henry-Louis Pernod of Pontarlier in France first commercially produced absinthe in 1797. The name absinthe is derived from the Latin absinthium and from the Greek apsinthion, both words meaning wormwood (Artemisia absinthium), which is the drink's chief ingredient. Also made with angelica root, aniseed, fennel, hyssop, licorice and star aniseed, the liquor has a high alcohol content and a harsh taste. Thujone, which is present in wormwood, is the chemical that is responsible for the hallucinogenic effects of the liquor.

[Read the rest »]

I could do without the vast majority of "funny" material circulating in email, but this one had me in stitches. Read it aloud. Or better yet, ask my wife to read it aloud to you:

Room Service (RS): "Morny. Ruin sorbees."

Guest (G): "Sorry, I thought I dialed room-service."

RS: "Rye… Ruin sorbees… morny! Djewish to odor sunteen??"

[Read the rest »]

When I was new to economics (a few years ago) I read the Austrians and the popularizers of the Chicagoite mainstream in about equal portions. I was unclear at first about the differences between Austrian and mainstream neoclassical theory, but there were 2 things that struck me as wrong with what turned out to be the mainstreamers:

1. intersubjective utility comparisons — see in particular The Armchair Economist by Steven Landsburg, who argues that he might want to see movie X quantitatively more than his wife wants to see movie Y (or vice versa);

2. objections to Austrian Business Cycle Theory — namely, the counterargument that successful entrepreneurs are, almost by definition, good at predicting future market conditions and therefore should not, as the Austrians contend, be fooled by "false" interest rates into making malinvestments.

I spent about a year struggling with #1, but concerning #2, what seemed clear to me from the beginning is the Austrian counter-counterargument, which is nicely reviewed and summarized in today's daily article at Mises.org, "Why Don't Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Business Cycle?" by Brian Stanley.

Sound familiar?

It was not these contributions that deprived Viennese journalists of their independence; it was their ignorance that fettered them; the great age of Viennese economic journalism had long passed away. The excellent economists who had collaborated with the press — among them Carl Menger — had found no worthy successors. […] When a government regulation was passed or an important business transaction took place, the journalists would rush to the pertinent government official or to the businessman concerned. The information the journalists received from him was then presented to the public. The government did not need to corrupt journalists; it was enough to inform them. Journalists feared nothing more than their being informed a few days later than others in their profession. To avoid such a penalty they were always prepared to represent the government's point of view. Their economic ignorance then afforded the advantage that they could plead the government case without independent mental reservations.

– Ludwig von Mises, Notes and Reflections

One of the gentler disagreements among libertarians is the question of ignorance versus malice on the part of the bad guys.

The policy of FEE throughout its half-century existence has been to assume the best possible intentions from socialists and economic interventionists who merely lack a proper understanding of economic cause and effect.

This same position was taken by Mises, Hayek, and Hazlitt: assume good faith and educate the wayward statists.

Mises wrote in his memoirs,

An economist must deal with doctrines, not with men. He must criticize erroneous thought. It is not his function to reveal personal motives for protecting fallacies.

On the subject of his break from this gentlemanly "good faith" strategy, Murray Rothbard wrote, [Read the rest »]

FINALLY … finally, someone has the courage to speak the obvious out loud and reveal the textbook "history" of Julius Caesar's assassination to be the conspiracy theory that it is:

From History Magazine:

Eclipses, which occur whenever the moon is directly aligned with the sun and the earth, happen with some frequency. Lunar eclipses (when the moon passes through the shadow of the earth) happen several times a year, and solar eclipses (when the moon blocks the light of the sun) happen with some regularity.

The first recorded mention of an eclipse comes from ancient China sometime around 2100bc. The Chinese believed eclipses were caused by a dragon eating the sun, and that the dragon had to be frightened away by making loud noises and shooting arrows into the sky. On this occasion, goes the story, the royal astronomers, Hsi and Ho, neglected their duties and failed to warn the emperor of the upcoming eclipse, so the proper rituals could not be observed. Although everything turned out alright, the emperor had the astronomers beheaded just to be on the safe side.

Though most astronomers have understood the basic mechanics of solar eclipses for quite some time, common people have been less enlightened about the darkness. Describing the total solar eclipse that occurred on the morning of 14 May 1230, medieval historian Roger of Wendover wrote: "it became so dark that the labourers, who had commenced their morning's work, were obliged to leave it, and returned again to their beds to sleep; but in about an hour's time, to the astonishment of many, the Sun regained its usual brightness."

Christopher Columbus was able to exploit ignorance of eclipses to his advantage during his early explorations of the New World. In 1504, Columbus was having difficulties convincing the natives of Jamaica to trade him food in exchange for European trinkets. When he stumbled upon a copy of Johannes Muller's Calendarium (1474) aboard his ship, he devised a plan to trick the Indians into being more favorably inclined towards the trades he suggested. Armed with the Calendarium's prediction of a lunar eclipse on the evening on 29 February 1504, Columbus arranged a meeting with the native chief for that evening. At the meeting, Columbus announced that God would demonstrate his anger with the natives by taking away the moon. Surely enough, shortly after Columbus issued his warning, the moon began to be swallowed up by the earth's shadow. The frightened natives pleaded with Columbus to intervene with God on their behalf, and, upon securing his crew a supply of food until they were able to leave the island, Columbus obliged. The moon was returned later that evening.

-JEFF CHAPMAN

Columbus established that omens are more reliable when manipulated by those who don't believe in them. See "the reliability of omens" for a less propitious prognostication…

As Brad Spangler points out, the Mises Institute has made A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State available as a free PDF download.

In 1972, as the Old Right and the New Left briefly overlapped on questions of America's corporatism at home and imperialism abroad, then–New Left historian Ronald Radosh collaborated with "right libertarian" Murray Rothbard on this collection of historical essays on what is very unhelpfully labeled "corporate liberalism" (more accurately described by British Leninist theoretician, R. Palme Dutt, as "social fascism") a.k.a. the broad mainstream of establishment American politics in the 20th century:

One unusual aspect of the book is that the selections were made by, and three of the essays written by, two editors, each of whom launch their joint critique from widely differing perspectives. [Read the rest »]

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1944) was an outstanding representative of early twentieth century libertarian thought and advocacy. Even today the libertarian movement, impacted though it is by the subsequent thought of Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), Murray Rothbard (1926–1995), Ayn Rand (1905–1982) and others, pays a nostalgic tribute to Nock as an early advocate and belletrist.

This paper by Mark Sunwall is an inquiry into whether and to what extent Nock may be considered more than just a brilliant writer and journalist. To what extent may we consider Nock a social scientist? The question probably would not have bothered Nock himself in the least, but it is important to raise in the light of contemporary libertarian theory. FULL ARTICLE

When I was a freshman in college, some commies knocked at the door of my dorm room. These weren't fellow Haverford students; these were activists from Philadelphia, come to sell subscriptions to their red rag, The Somethingorother Worker or The Revolutionary Somethingorother … I can't remember the title. I was already subscribed to The Truth, a glossy magazine put out by some evangelical Christian group, so I figured a Communist "newspaper" was just fair and balanced, as it were.

(Of course, the Christian glossy rag was free, whereas the commie pulpy rag cost me some nominal subscription fee, so it wasn't exactly fair and balanced, was it.)

While these commies were at the door, pitching their pulp, I must have said something disparaging about communists I'd already encountered growing up in New York, because they were quick to point out that they weren't like the commies I might have met.

How so?

[Read the rest »]

(Click image for Tony Flood's comments.)

Via Kinsella at blog.Mises.

I won't take the time now to talk about my own history with Buddhism, but I do want to grab the opportunity to quote my brilliant friend, Evan Shore, who, after we'd spent a weekend at a silent meditation retreat practicing our transcendence of the ego and its first-person narrative, told me,

"It's all fun and games until someone loses an I."

This is from Albert Jay Nock's Memoirs of a Superfluous Man:

When I was eight years old I began to study Latin and Greek under — what shall I say? Should I say under my father's teaching, instruction, direction, supervision, tutorship? No, I have precisely the right word in mind, but unfortunately the dictionaries say it is not a good word; that is, they say so by implication, for they do not mention it at all. My able and distinguished friend Mr. Charles A. Beard long ago remarked to me how sorry he was that the word l'arn, so well and truly seasoned by hard service in New England, should have gone completely out of currency as a transitive verb. "You can't teach a. person anything," he said, "and certainly you can't learn him anything, but maybe you can l'arn him something." There is a nice distinction here, and one so highly valuable as to seem especially well worth preserving for the sake of those whose concern with pedagogy is professional; and yet I suppose it is a dynasty of doctrinaire schoolmarms of both sexes which has done most to wipe it out.

[Read the rest »]

The mouthpiece for the war department reminded me of Stalin's apologist at the New York Times, Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer for denying the existence of the the Ukrainian famine in 1933 — a famine created by Soviet collectivization, which Duranty supported.

Here's the relevant snippet from Wikipedia:

Criticisms

Scholars such as Robert Conquest and Sally J. Taylor, have criticized Duranty for his deference to Joseph Stalin's and the Soviet Union's official propaganda in Duranty's news stories. Conquest has written several books, starting in the 1970s including The Great Terror and Harvest of Sorrows which have been critical of Duranty's reporting from the Soviet Union. Taylor wrote a book in 1990 called Stalin's Apologist : Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow (ISBN 0-19-505700-7).

Political commentators such as Joe Alsop and Andrew Stuttaford have also been critical of Duranty. [1]

The New York Times hired a professor of Russian history to review Duranty's work. That professor, Mark Von Hagen of Columbia University, concluded Mr. Duranty's reports to be unbalanced and uncritical, and they far too often gave voice to Stalinist propaganda. He also said in comments to the press, "For the sake of The New York Times' honor, they should take the prize away". [2] The New York Times sent Von Hagen's report to the Pulitzer Board and left it to the board to take whatever action they considered appropriate. [3]

In his New York Times articles (including one published on March 31, 1933), Duranty repeatedly denied the existence of a Ukrainian famine in 1932–33. In a August 24, 1933 article in NYT, he claimed "any report of a famine is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda", but admitted privately to William Strang (in the British Embassy in Moscow on September 26, 1933) that "it is quite possible that as many as ten million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year." [4]

American engineer Zara Witkin and UK intelligence have shown that Duranty knowingly misrepresented this well-documented event, known as the Holodomor in Ukraine. Several organizations have called on the Pulitzer Board to revoke his prize, but in 2003 the Board issued a statement announcing its decision not to revoke the prize, although it did state that "Mr. Duranty's 1931 work, measured by today's standards for foreign reporting, falls seriously short". Duranty was also criticized for defending Stalin's notorious show trials.

Via LRC:

The Hiroshima Cover-Up

by Amy Goodman and David Goodman

A story that the U.S. government hoped would never see the light of day finally has been published, 60 years after it was spiked by military censors. The discovery of reporter George Weller's firsthand account of conditions in post-nuclear Nagasaki sheds light on one of the great journalistic betrayals of the last century: the cover-up of the effects of the atomic bombing on Japan.

Keep reading…

My friend and I subscribe to different word-a-day lists. I think his might be cooler.

Here's today's "word":

JEECHET

Pronunciation: ['jee-chet?]

Definition: "Did you eat yet?" in hurried US English.

Usage: It is easy to believe that each word we say comprises one sound that conveys a meaning. Today's 'word,' however, is a single phonological word (linguistic sound) that corresponds to an entire sentence. This is not the result of random slurring; it is the result of regular English sound change rules:

1. Since "did" is not ordinarily accented, the vowel tends to disappear, so that the two [d]s combine into one, just as "probably" becomes "probly," "suppose" becomes "s'pose," and "police" becomes "p'lice."
2. [t] and [d] combine with [y] to become [j] and [ch], so "did you" reduces to [jê](elsewhere [dijê]) and "eat yet" become [eechet]. The same thing happens with "mature" [mêchur] and "verdure" [vêrjur] where a [y] sound follows the [t] and [d].

Suggested Usage: One reason we can't determine the number of words in a language is because a phonological word (the sound part) does not always directly correspond to a semantic word (the meaning). "I would have" comprises 3 distinct sounds and meanings but "I'd've" is a single two-syllable phonological word that matches the same three meanings—one word or three? Speaking a language involves a complex set of mental activities in different parts of the brain that follow rules that allow us to plot the output of one onto that of another in a surprising variety of ways.

Etymology: The etymological point of today's 'word' is that the sound changes you see in it are one of the sources of the historical changes in language. However, the central word in "jeechet?" is "eat," which shares a source with German "essen," Latin "edere" (whence our word "edible"), and Russian "est', ed-." The Russian word for "bear" is medved' from medu "of honey" + ed' "eat(er)."

—Dr. Language, yourDictionary.com

From iceberg:

Oddly enough, Austria is the latinized name for Ö–sterreich, deriving from the Old German term meaning "eastern realm". Similarly, the term "Orient" refers to lands located eastwards towards the direction of the rising sun, while "Occident" refers to the western world, the direction in which the sun sets.

In this light one can view Aleister Crowley and the Ordo Templi Orientis as allies against the Bavarian conspiracy, to help counter the influence of the German Historical School, the legacy of which today lives on in the mainstream endorsement of empiricist foundations for economic studies, the emblem of which brazenly displayed on every federal [fractional] reserve note of one monetary unit, originally named for a Bohemian valley, once the standard for money of good reputation.

From The Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Economics by Ludwig von Mises:

The unpopularity of economics is the result of its analysis of the effects of privileges.

It is impossible to invalidate the economists' demonstration that all privileges hurt the interests of the rest of the nation or at least of a great part of it, that those victimized will tolerate the existence of such privileges only if privileges are granted to them too, and that then, when everybody is privileged, nobody wins but everybody loses on account of the resulting general drop in the productivity of labor.[3]

[3] Cf. Mises, Human Action. 3rd Edition(1966), pp. 716-861.

By the time I finally graduated college, I had very few friends among the students (having taken time off, I found the few student friends I did have had graduated a year or two before me). I was on good terms with a handful of faculty members, all of whom seemed stunned to learn that I had no plans to go to grad school. I was perceived as a future professor.

This didn't mean they all wanted me as a colleague, mind you; the psychologists told me I was clearly a philosopher, whereas the philosophy profs said I would do better to pursue psychology. My computer science professors had given me good grades, but they knew I was never going to be a computer scientist. (Would they have been surprised to learn that I'd spend a decade or more as a computer professional before fleeing back to the world of ideas?)

I'd love to say that my rejection of graduate school was part of a savvy plan, well thought out to guide me along a less well trodden path, but the truth is that I was just sick to death of school, and I had seen that the higher you went, the more of it was politics; less and less was ideas.

Among my current friends, I am the only one who never started grad school. It was 2 of us for a while, but then the other guy decided in his 30s that it was time for a master's degree and a long-term teaching gig at a nearby college.

I am the sole survivor, the least formally educated of my immediate peers.

Even though I didn't need Gary North's advice back then — not for this one decision at least — I wish I had been able to pass some of this along to my friends, all of whom had gone on to grad school:

There are a series of mistakes in the minds of most would-be Ph.D. students. The main one is some version of the labor theory of value. They assume that if they work hard enough, and jump through enough academic hoops, some college will hire them.

They do not begin as entrepreneurs. They do not ask the key question: "What is the likely state of the market in three or four years for holders of a Ph.D. in the field that I want to earn mine in?" Why not? Because they do not see economic value as something imputed by buyers of the services supplied by holders of a Ph.D. They see consumer demand as somehow generated by the work it takes to earn a Ph.D.

The whole thing is worth reading:

"Academics Without Academia"