Links and Minifeatures 08 29 Monday

Carnival of Capitalists is up at Casey Software. Recomended reading (in the same order they appear in the Carnival): Art of Peace, Gongol, Roth and Company, Econbrowser, The Prudent Investor, Small Business Trends

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Carnival of Personal Finance is up at All Things Financial. Recommended: Steve Pavlina. I'm not a goals fetishist but they are necessary, and he provides some worthy thoughts. (There are some duplicates from COTC)



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I guess I should say publicly what I have said privately in email on several occasions. The reason I do the recommended reading part of my Carnival links is that so many Carnival submitters seem to be intent upon telling me that their site is not worth my time or anyone else's. There is an inherent problem in submitting a trivial, poorly thought out, or poorly written article to a carnival. If you think the post is good enough to submit (which you do because you did), and it's garbage or a throwaway, that tells me your judgement isn't the best, and you're not likely to add value to future discussions. I feel that those who take the time and make the effort to do a thoughtful, original article, particularly one with with broad applicability, when so many do not should be rewarded. I may not completely and wholeheartedly endorse every bit of every article I recommend, but I am saying that they contain useful information, useful thinking, useful perspective, or they are truly amusing. They stand out from the noise. Want a recommendation from me or others? I love sharing good stuff (and this is a big part of what my Links and Minifeatures articles are about)! Give readers something worthwhile to take away from the time we spend reading your article. Information, thought process, perspective, laughter. Teach me something I can use, or amuse me. It's all about signal to noise ratio, and people are looking for signal.



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Now that that's off my chest, I should immediately eat crow because the latest RINO Sightings suffers very little from the problem described above. It was fun and interesting going through every submission, not a slog. Almost every post has something worthwhile, so if I'm going to reward those who stand out, I have to say Especially Recommended: Don Surber, Strata-Sphere, Politburo Diktat. Thank you RINOs!



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Captain's Quartershas the scoop on what caused the unraveling of talks with the Sunnis (basically they wanted to move the goalposts), and why the consitution has been submitted without concensus.



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China. Iran. Speaking of scary regimes with nuclear weapons, Michael Barone has a good point about Vladimir Putin: he appears to have dismantled all possible domestic centers of opposition to him. This being the traditional method of dictators, particularly dictators with aspirations of conquest, to follow, it bothers me. I really hope Russian nationalism doesn't turn to be the stealth threat we ingored until it was too late. Just because they are not a world spanning superpower any more doesn't mean they can't still do a lot. Unlike the jihadists, they are a true military threat. They still have their nukes - more than any country except maybe the United States. Even if they are kind-of allies in the War on Terror, some allies can be harmful. Hitler had no desire to go to war with the United States until England and the USSR were put away. His pacts with the Japanese who attacked Pearl Harbor forced his and our hands.



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Strata-Sphere has some good ideas on why intelligence warnings were ignored and compartmentalized to death.



Victor Davis Hanson articulates thoughts very similar to mine on the Gaza pullout. Politically and tactically, the pullout makes little sense; giving up something without any concessions in return at a cost of much internal strife. Strategically and Foreign relations wise, it makes a huge amount of sense. Granted, the arab states don't care how much Israel does, but many nations do. Now the Palestinians cannot pretend that Israel controls them or keeps them down any longer, and are out of excuses for failing to control their militants.



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John Fund at Opinion Journal talks about the progress of a flat tax around the world.



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Dean's World has a nice post on stereotypes and the truthfulness thereof, and how at least one has become a self-fulfilling meme. I believe there is a certain amount of truth in some stereotypes, but it is necessary to remember that these are likely to be statistical in nature and I cannot think of a single stereotype that doesn't break down in the individual case too often to be useful for any information. As Dean observes, many white american guys do look funny dancing, but there's always Fred Astaire and too many like him to enumerate.



The stereotype set Dean spends the longest on is the old "stupid conservative vs ivory tower liberal."



To this, I note that presidents are not selected on the basis of intelligence, otherwise every single one would have an IQ over 180, and I can't think of one that did. Presidents are not selected on the basis of learning, or every one would have academic degrees in multiple subjects. Looking back on history, neither is a primary attribute of our best presidents. Indeed, most of our successful presidents were more than willing to solicit and take advice of how to get where they wanted to go. But they made the choice of where they wanted to go themselves.



What elects presidents is the ability to persuade the electorate that you will better lead it in the direction it should go. What sells the deal varies from election to election, but it's always something. Note that just because one person convinces more voters doesn't mean those voters were right, only that you got elected. But we certainly haven't got any better methods of choosing a president.