Like many intellectuals at the turn of the 19th century, Oscar Wilde was both interested in the problems of society and a proponent of socialism.
Though Wilde was more concerned with criticizing Victorian society via his satirical works than puzzling over the problems of social organization, he did briefly examine social philosophy in his little-known essay, The Soul of Man Under Socialism.
It took twice through, but I’m finally convinced; Beowulf is a wonderful film. There is plenty to recommend it, even if it had stuck to the original plot line.
Nearly every frame is beautiful and riveting. The visuals seemed to have borrowed from the field of gaming, so you can never quite tell if what you are looking at is real or animated. The music is a kick. Beowulf is himself thrilling to watch, as are the monsters, dragons, swords, and, above all, the time: it is set in the 6th century Scandinavia. The viewer is convinced that it must have been something like this.
Environmentalism, it’s been said, is the ideological luxury of city dwellers in modern life, for anyone who lives just outside an urban or suburban environment knows the truth: nature is vicious and cruel and work relentlessly to make the life of man a living Hell.
After the death of Taft and as the Eisenhower foreign policy began to take on the frozen Dullesian lineaments of permanent mass armament and the threat of “massive nuclear retaliation” throughout the globe, isolationist sentiment starting to fade away, even among old libertarian and isolationist compatriots who should have known better.
Old friends who used to scoff at the “Russian threat” and had declared The Enemy to be Washington, DC now began to mutter about the “international Communist conspiracy.”
It appears that the government of Zimbabwe is giving the Hungarian pengo, a run for its money (literally): Cash runs out in land where the bus fare is 1.6 m dollars Some sobering points: - October’s annualized inflation was 14,840%, up nearly double from September - The highest paper currency, the Z$200,000 note, has almost disappeared - Cash machines don’t wor
Peter Klein recently observed that the majority of popular tourist attractions in Paris were financed by coerced philanthropy (i.e., taxation). While there are exceptions to this rule, the same hold true for most of the state edifying temples in the DC/Kremlin areas as well. In addition, Peter linked to an interesting story from of all places, Esquire.
The currently observed turmoil in financial markets, which is believed to have been ignited by the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, has recently brought to prominence the ideas of Hyman Minsky (1919–1996), a prominent member of the post-Keynesian school of economics. Many commentators are of the view that Minsky’s framework of thinking accurately anticipated the current financial crisis.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, the day reserved for giving thanks and feasting. In Ohio, at least, another day may be reserved in the future: a day for apologizing to the state. In 2006, an Ohio hunter shot a deer out-of-season. It doesn’t matter whose property the deer was on, all deer in Ohio are the assumed property of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
As late as 1999, oil was trading at $10 per barrel and gold at $250 per ounce, down from their nominal peaks in 1980 of $39 and $850 respectively. And that’s not even adjusted for the fact that the value of a dollar was a lot lower in 1999 than in 1980. Many pundits at the time argued that prices would continue to go down. The Economist had a cover in March 1999 entitled “Drowning in Oil” where it argued that oil would continue to fall well below $10 per oil.
