Donald Duck is seventy years old today. He’s still looking good, but at his age, he should watch that temper–he could give himself a stroke.

Sooner or later pretty much everyone with libertarian leanings comes up with the idea of living on the sea in international waters, and I’m no exception. This came up in a conversation with Sean Lynch at the Space Access Society conference, and he pointed me to a very interesting site by some people who are actually making serious plans to do just that. I was on the Oceania project mailing list for most of its life, so I got a chance to see one way not to do this. The greatest value of the Seasteading site is its list of things that have been tried, a much larger list than you might expect. The only real success so far is Sealand, but it’s not for lack of trying.

Continue reading Seasteading →

Apparently about eighty percent of spam is being generated by zombie machines (i.e., home computers that have been taken over by trojans, and are sending out massive emails without the owner even being aware).

Folks, if you don’t have at least a software firewall, like Zone Alarm (there is a free version), you are part of the problem. As cheap as hardware firewalls are these days, there is no excuse to have an unsecured machine with a permanent internet connection.

Via Brad Delong, an article about a guy who makes a living selling donuts and bagels on the honor principle. Take an item, drop some money in the box. There are some very interesting regularities in who cheats and when they cheat. Who cheats is basically in line with my expectations based on dealing with people in different lines of work. If it confirms my prejudices, it must be true 🙂

Anyway, grab a donut, drop your coins in the slot, and read the article.

Here’s a very moving eulogy from a prodigal daughter.

I don’t know whether the loss is easier or harder if a parent is famous; maybe it’s neither. My father belonged to the country. I resented the country at times for its demands on him, its ownership of him. America was the important child in the family, the one who got the most attention. It’s strange, but now I find comfort in sharing him with an entire nation. There is some solace in knowing that others were also mystified by him; his elusiveness was endearing, but puzzling. He left all of us with the same question: who was he? People ask me to unravel him for them, as if I have secrets I haven’t shared. But I have none, nothing that you don’t already know. He was a man guided by internal faith. He knew our time on this earth is brief, yet he cared deeply about making his time here count. He was comfortable in his own skin. A disarmingly sunny man, he remained partially in shadow; no one ever saw all of him. It took me nearly four decades to allow my father his shadows, his reserve, to sit silently with him and not clamor for something more.

RTWT

Andrew, I don’t know how you’ll feel about this, but apparently you were channeling Mark Steyn last night.

Unlike these men, unlike most other senior Republicans, Ronald Reagan saw Soviet Communism for what it was: a great evil. Millions of Europeans across half a continent from Poland to Bulgaria, Slovenia to Latvia live in freedom today because he acknowledged that simple truth when the rest of the political class was tying itself in knots trying to pretend otherwise. That

You may have seen it already, but Blackfive has a nice roundup of D-Day posts to commemorate today’s anniversary.

I may have further thoughts on the passing of the Great Communicator later today, particularly in the context of the somber anniversary in northwest France, but for now go check out these roundups of other blog commentary from Tim Blair and Laughing Wolf.

I finally got to see Troy (the movie) tonight. My wife had already seen it and she was unimpressed. She particularly disliked Achilles, because he’s a selfish, arrogant jerk. Just like in the book. She hasn’t read the Iliad, so she didn’t know what to expect. Over the last 2800 years or so we’ve become a lot less tolerant of flaws in our heros. We demand that great deeds be accomplished by men incapable of error. This cuts two ways, both on the part of the hagiographer who plasters over the gaping flaws in a man’s character, and in the critic who points them out as if this in some way diminishes the greatness of the deed. We look to the Greeks as the founders of our civilization, and their clear-eyed view of human failings should be revived. Heroes are heroic because they do great things, not because they are without failings. By acknowledging this simple fact we are better able to see the greatness in others, and the potential for greatness in ourselves.

The world just lost a man who will be remembered by history long after most of us are dust. I disagreed with much of what he did, but no amount of kvetching on my part can take away from his legacy, which is no less than to liberate the world from totalitarian communism. The Soviet Union is dead, and Ronald Reagan killed it. The rest is details.

By my count, we now have four living ex-Presidents–Ford, Carter, Bush I, and Clinton. Before President Reagan’s demise today, we had five, and I believe that’s the most that we’ve ever had. It seems unlikely that we’d have ever had more than that in our nation’s history, given the lengths of terms and the ages at which presidents normally become president, but does anyone know for sure?

Of course, if one wanted to be macabre, one could start a pool on who will be the next to go, and if it will occur before the current president joins their ranks (which of course depends a lot on what happens in November…).