In which I blog about curious things that strike me, in the hope of piquing your curiousity. Also, perhaps, of getting some feedback on things that I can't figure out.
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Outside of Minneapolis and conservative news outlets, you won't see much about this. Most of the top hits I got searching for "Minneapolis police funding" were about the money they cut last year, not the most recent news.
I admire Mark Steyn. Even if you disagree with everything he says -- and I'm sure a lot of people do -- he is a remarkable person. A few years ago, Michael Mann, climate scientist and creator of Al Gore's famous "hockey stick" graph showing drastic warming in the last century, sued him for libel. Steyn had called the hockey stick "fraudulent," among other things. This is not the first time Mann has sued, although I'll be honest I'm having trouble finding other examples because these things don't get covered much in the mainstream media. Steyn's co-defendants, National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, are trying to get the case over with as soon as possible, which is a predictable reaction. Steyn, on the other hand, views the suit as an aggressive attempt to shut down the debate, so he has no intention of settling. In fact, he counter-sued Mann under anti-SLAPP legislation, which as I understand it seeks to defend peopl...
Today is Peace of Westphalia day -- the 365th anniversary of the signing of the Peace of Westphalia -- in honour of which I traditionally make a Mazarin cake . Cardinal Mazarin was the French premier throughout the negotiations leading up to the peace. Admittedly, I have no evidence that the cake was named after him, but how many other people named Mazarin have you ever heard of? In fact, Mazarin is the namesake of a surprising number of modern items. There is the Mazarin cut diamond, which is a precursor to the modern brilliant cut; and the Mazarin desk, or " bureau Mazarin ," an early kneehole desk. He was a renowned collector: a famous Japanese chest is known as the Mazarin chest because it is believed he owned it, and there is also a " Mazarin Venus ." He was especially avid about collecting books; the Gutenberg Bible is sometimes known as the Mazarin Bible because it was in his collection. In fact, his personal library bec...
When I was young, I was the opposite of cool, and I had a correspondingly low opinion of the concept. Sure, I liked Fonzie, but when I thought of people being cool, I thought of classmates putting on airs to get attention. Now I'm much older. I'm still not cool, but I have a much better appreciation of the concept. "Cool," it turns out, was not invented in 1957 (pace Miles Davis's album "The Birth of Cool" from that year), and not even in the modern era. The original cool goes back to the ancient Greeks and the Stoics' concept of "apatheia," or equanimity. They aimed to free themselves from their passions to attain this state of calm, and what is a cool person but one who remains calm and collected in the face of upsetting circumstances? The concept was adapted and extended by Epicurus, who used the term "ataraxia," or tranquility -- freedom from stress and worry. Another philosophical school that promoted a...
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