What a disaster: the USA is about to lose another costly, protracted, and unpopular war! Via this report in The Wall Street Journal: “After 20 years of war, much of what the U.S. sought to accomplish in Afghanistan crumbled in just one week. The insurgent movement controlled none of Afghanistan’s provincial capitals until it seized the remote city of Zaranj just a week earlier, Aug. 6.” (More details here and here. Also, below the fold, in chronological order, are a few of my previous posts relating to Afghanistan.)
Five-hundred years ago today (August 13), in the year 1521 A.D., the darkest day in Mexican history occurred: Spanish forces led by conquistador Hernán Cortés captured the Aztec Emperor Cuauhtémoc and conquered the capital of Tenochtitlan, a map of which is pictured below. More details here and here. (Updated on 8/15.)
I had to suspend my reading of Samuel Fleischacker’s new book on Adam Smith when my copy of Michael Lewis’s latest book The Premonition arrived in Tuesday’s mail. Suffice it to say that Lewis is a great storyteller (it took me less than two full days to read all 304 pp. of his fascinating book), but at the same he also tends to over-generalize on the basis of flimsy or anecdotal evidence. On pp. 288-291 of The Premonition, for example, Lewis draws a distinction between political appointees, who serve at the pleasure of the president, and career civil servants, who for all intents and purposes can’t be fired (see the footnote on p. 290) and concludes that political appointees are more likely than career civil servants to be risk-averse “Chamberlains” (unwilling to make hard choices or make risky decisions) instead of risk-loving “Churchills” (willing to take risky actions early to minimize the risk of dangers in the future). Although the distinction between risk-averse Chamberlains and risk-loving Churchills is a memorable one, is this observation really true? What about Article III judges, i.e. federal trial and appellate court judges who have lifetime tenure?
According to Wikipedia (footnotes omitted), the question of which of these two characters on the 1960s sitcom “Gilligan’s Island” fans of the show prefer — the glamorous movie-star Ginger or the wholesome country girl Mary Ann — has endured long after the end of the series: “This question has inspired commercials, essays, videos, and a sermon.”
Via Kottke (links in the original): “The Cornell Lab of Ornithology recently added the ability to identify birds from hearing their birdsong to their Merlin Bird ID app — a “Shazam for bird songs” as Fast Company says. You just start recording with your phone and the app starts telling you the birds it’s hearing.” You can download the bird-song app here.
