All These Things That I’ve Done was a widely popular song when it was released in 2005. Many people still find it to be deeply meaningful. The writer of this blog would an example of the type of people who love it.
What does this say about the people who like the song?
Lots of You Tube videos of the song, but we are not posting any of them because we could not find one that we could stand.
Orson Scott Card takes J.K. Rowling to the woodshed. What’s not to like?
The Pentagon’s $1 Trillion Problem will not tell you anything you don’t already know. But every now and again it is good to be reminded just how dysfunctional the government is.
I spent a considerable portion of the week angry, and in fact woke up angry Monday morning after dreaming about workplace injustices. I don’t care to revisit the details, but, like Western pioneers marking bad water, I will give a brief notice on these ill fortunes. Perhaps when some history has accumulated around these events Click Here to continue reading.
Some heretics have dared to suggest that some of the blocks in the Egyptian pyramids were cast in place with a kind of crude concrete. They are currently being rounded up and shot. You can read all about it in this Boston Globe article.
I am in no position to add anything intelligent to this argument, but this passage from the article really struck me….
Archeologists, however, say there is simply no evidence that the pyramids are built of anything other than huge limestone blocks. Any synthetic material showing up in tests – as it has occasionally, even in work not trying to prove a concrete connection – is probably just slop from “modern” repairs done over the centuries, they say.
This is either really bad reporting or the Archeolgoists have a really weak argument. How can you say out of one side of your mouth that there is no evidence for the opposing camp and out of the other side of your mouth that the evidence “probably” was caused by something else?
Other gems from the article…..
Nearly every prominent Egyptologist is adamant that the pyramids are made solely of giant blocks cut with crude copper or stone tools. They note that proponents of the concrete theory are chemists or materials specialists with little experience at ancient digs – lab researchers, not shovel-wielding field archeologists.
I am all in favor of people who get their hands dirty, but are archeologists really arguing that chemists or materials specialists have no special skills that archeologists do not? Do they really ignore the insights of all the other branches of science?
And one last gem…
Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, minced no words in assailing the concrete idea. “It’s highly stupid,” he said via a spokesman. “The pyramids are made from solid blocks of quarried limestone. To suggest otherwise is idiotic and insulting.”
Now that is my style of arguing.
This from Brad Setser’s blog….
Incidentally, the $8.7b in average weekly purchases of Treasuries over the last 8 weeks would – if sustained — be enough to finance a $454b budget deficit without selling a single Treasury bond to private investors. Sometimes I think the US should drop the façade of auctioning off Treasuries and just negotiate private placements with the People’s Bank of China and the Saudi Monetary Agency.
What’s more, all this financing was provided more or less unconditionally, with the United States creditors taking on the risk of future dollar depreciation. Further dollar depreciation against the euro – and, perhaps more importantly, the risk of further dollar depreciation against their own currencies.
It goes without saying that this flow is far, far larger than the $30b or so sovereign funds committed to troubled US financial institutions in December and January ($40b if UBS is considered a US financial institution). Yet it has attracted far less attention.
Dan Osman climbs a cliff as fast as he can with no ropes. He died in 1998. Wikipedia has more details.