Nonsequential Links V

I really need to post these more often. As usual, my comments are in parentheses.

We all need to send that little guy or gal to his or her room and wake up our inner curious two-year-old -- the one who still thinks beetles and dandelions are pretty cool. (What Lynn said.)

I do have a Facebook page, but I'm kind of afraid of Facebook. I get e-mail notification about comments and messages, but I generally avoid going to the site itself because it's very chaotic and overwhelming. I'll go there to add friends when the requests start piling up, and then I mostly squint at it then flee.

Here's a tip: Do not try to understand what is going on during the credit sequence. Think of it as the screwball equivalent of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or The Sound and the Fury. You don't understand the openings of those novels until you have read to the end, and you won't understand the opening of Palm Beach Story until the final five minutes. (I actually tried to ignore the Siren's advice and got nowhere.)

The first principle of economics is: there's not enough of what we want for everybody. (The first principle of politics is to assure the electorate you can fix this.)

Despite the occasional spittle I see flung by ignorants, it’s not as if our libraries are lavishly funded, or that the people working in them have nothing to do —- libraries and librarians are used to making do with relatively little. But there’s a point at which “little” becomes “simply not enough,” and I would expect that getting one’s budget halved will get them there pretty efficiently.

Limited to information on Iran from English-speaking opponents of the regime, both groups of Iran experts got a very misleading vision of where the revolution was heading — because the Iranian revolution was not brought about by the people who spoke English. It was made by merchants in city bazaars, by rural peasants, by the clergy —- people Americans didn’t speak to because they couldn’t. (Shades of The Ugly American, an old book which warned against this very thing. It would be nice to think that we're a lot smarter now about Iran than we were in the late 1970s -- but I'm not betting the rent money on it.)