Back In Black

I’m back booting from a hard drive again instead of a thumb drive. It turns out that I didn’t kill my drive, it just happened to suffer from a massive physical failure at the same time that I was doing something interesting. I sent the old drive back to the manufacture and they promptly sent me a new one. The awesome warranties are the best part of building your own system as far as I’m concerned.

Continuing on with the interesting links until I am done moving sometime next weekend I will send you over to the Economist’s Democracy in America blog for a pair of nice posts.

The first is an awesome bit about the role of the cold war in shaping the political positions of American Protestantism. I’ll whet your appetite with a little quote.

Impressed by the charismatic young evangelist’s fiery anti-communist message, press baron William Randolph Hearst commanded the overseers of his influential national network of propaganda broadsheets to “Puff Graham”. (These are, apparently, “two of the most famous words in all of American religious history”, which goes to show how much I know about American religious history.)

The second is an interesting post about information pointing to more of the big bust being caused by intentional fraud than we thought. Oops.

And for a final note I will send you off with a quote that Krugman grabbed from Kung Fu Monkey:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.