http://bkmarcus.com/blog individualism for the masses Wed, 03 Mar 2010 03:29:17 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en … (Read the rest.) http://bkmarcus.com/blog/2010/03/happy-rothbard-day My clever beloved served us a Rothbardian repast last night: Manicotti and Steak (I kid you not)! And in anticipation of Scott Lahti's next question, yes I did have Hunan earlier in the weekend, and yes, you could count that as Hunan Action. (See this old post if you have no idea ... http://bkmarcus.com/blog/2010/03/austrian-food http://bkmarcus.com/blog/2010/02/featured-on-itunes-u-the-costs-of-war Neil Gaimon slightly misquoted the opening line of Douglas Adams's The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul in twitter this afternoon. Yes, the 140-character limit imposes itself in all sorts of ways, which is why blogs aren't yet obsolete. Because the line is one of the best opening lines of ... http://bkmarcus.com/blog/2010/02/the-long-dark-tea-time-of-the-soul From "Faith, Snow & Government" by Skip Oliva: It's often said that libertarians have "faith" in free markets. I don't think that's the case. What we have is an understanding of the division of labor and the law of comparative advantage. Some people mistakenly confuse that with religious fanaticism. … Government, in ... http://bkmarcus.com/blog/2010/02/faith-in-what-exactly If I were still an active programmer, I'd try to automate this: Amazon.com has thousands of public-domain books for the Kindle. They are garbage. They are poorly formatted and riddled with typos. They were all computer generated, never proofed by human beings. Project Gutenberg has most of those same titles, formatted better ... http://bkmarcus.com/blog/2010/02/new-tools-for-old-books http://bkmarcus.com/blog/2010/02/glass I lived half a year on a kibbutz back in the late 1980s, just as the intifada was starting. For most of that time, I was the "shotef sirim" — the pot scrubber. For me, it was a proud title. It was the one kitchen job they wouldn't let women do ... http://bkmarcus.com/blog/2010/02/voluntary-socialism-versus-human-nature http://bkmarcus.com/blog/2010/02/enovels-of-liberty In The War That Killed Achilles, author Caroline Alexander makes the same comparison I think of every time I read Book I of the Iliad. First she quotes Achilles's speech to Agamemnon. She quotes her favorite translation, by Richmond Lattimore. I will instead use my own favorite translation, by Stanley ... http://bkmarcus.com/blog/2010/01/when-warriors-refuse-to-fight