![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
2009-11-08 18:42Post-pneumonia: my voice still sounds odd to me; others haven't noticed but akashiver did. But I otherwise feel healthier, and went for a bike ride today since it was so nice. 15 minutes to Bloomingfood East, 16 back from Border's. A couple of curbs along 3rd seem to have been made wheelchair accessible since I last went that way. Bfood East has dill seed and ground rosemary, unlike the other brances; also nice plump raisins. Spent a lot of money at Border's: Ghost in the Shell movie, 2nd Gig, Unseen Academicals, Jhegaala, Algebraist, Spirited Away, Haruhi Suzumiya novels. Almost bought the Nausicaa manga but they were missing #6 of the 7-volume edition and I don't even know which edition I want. There are Haruhi Suzumiya manga too, allegedly by the same author, and there seemed to be a couple of stories I didn't recognize -- something about Kyon's grandmother and data lifeforms. I didn't buy them.
Biking into the sunset provided new experience of the usefulness of headlights. I could see cars coming at me, but they were dim... easy to miss if your attention drifted. Which it shouldn't while on the road, but we're all imperfect, ne? Headlights are a lot more attention grabbing. I hope mine helped, though given the directions my taillight was probably more useful.
I had the Runcible Spoon's coffee straight for once, without sugar or cream. It was nice, and not bitter.
Links since yesterday:
* US growth before and after Reagan
* Thomas Paine's Agrarian Justice, weirdly edited, an essay to a post-Terror French Revolutionary government on the equal right of humanity to natural property, and the justice of an inheritance tax to fund starter funds for those turning 21 and a pension for those over 50. (When people talk about how liberal/left/right/whatever past people were, and not judging them by modern standards... Paine is one Founding Father who'd come comfortably on the left even today, though I think he's weak on feminist advocacy. Not necessarily openly sexist, but not something he wrote about.)
BTW, his opinion of conservatism, in the sense of arguing from tradition, in The Rights of Man:
"The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of man, is that they do not go far enough into antiquity. They do not go the whole way. They stop in some of the intermediate stages of an hundred or a thousand years, and produce what was then done, as a rule for the present day. This is no authority at all. If we travel still farther into antiquity, we shall find a direct contrary opinion and practice prevailing; and if antiquity is to be authority, a thousand such authorities may be produced, successively contradicting each other; but if we proceed on, we shall at last come out right; we shall come to the time when man came from the hand of his Maker. What was he then? Man. Man was his high and only title, and a higher cannot be given him."
* Justices weigh life in prison for juveniles who never killed. Whole bunch of them in Florida.
Biking into the sunset provided new experience of the usefulness of headlights. I could see cars coming at me, but they were dim... easy to miss if your attention drifted. Which it shouldn't while on the road, but we're all imperfect, ne? Headlights are a lot more attention grabbing. I hope mine helped, though given the directions my taillight was probably more useful.
I had the Runcible Spoon's coffee straight for once, without sugar or cream. It was nice, and not bitter.
Links since yesterday:
* US growth before and after Reagan
* Thomas Paine's Agrarian Justice, weirdly edited, an essay to a post-Terror French Revolutionary government on the equal right of humanity to natural property, and the justice of an inheritance tax to fund starter funds for those turning 21 and a pension for those over 50. (When people talk about how liberal/left/right/whatever past people were, and not judging them by modern standards... Paine is one Founding Father who'd come comfortably on the left even today, though I think he's weak on feminist advocacy. Not necessarily openly sexist, but not something he wrote about.)
BTW, his opinion of conservatism, in the sense of arguing from tradition, in The Rights of Man:
"The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of man, is that they do not go far enough into antiquity. They do not go the whole way. They stop in some of the intermediate stages of an hundred or a thousand years, and produce what was then done, as a rule for the present day. This is no authority at all. If we travel still farther into antiquity, we shall find a direct contrary opinion and practice prevailing; and if antiquity is to be authority, a thousand such authorities may be produced, successively contradicting each other; but if we proceed on, we shall at last come out right; we shall come to the time when man came from the hand of his Maker. What was he then? Man. Man was his high and only title, and a higher cannot be given him."
* Justices weigh life in prison for juveniles who never killed. Whole bunch of them in Florida.