A Turkish man said something not politically correct enough in Turkey and was sentenced for insulting Mohammed and gave a dispassionate and informative critique of the founder of the religion at his 13 month sentencing.

The Phonetic Alphabet

The 'names' for the letters. You know 'papa' for 'p,' 'Bravo' for 'b,' though a commenter says it used to be something else. It is more masculine to say 'b as in bravo' than 'b as in boy.' Anyway the military standards to specify the letters. Did you know that out word 'alphabet' comes from our names for the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta?

I saw a lot of carping over at Brad DeLong's site about Memorial Day. I guess the implication might have been felt that those who didn't volunteer have to rescue a narcissistic deficiency on that day. My sister was saying recently that the happiest time in our parents lives was when my dad was in the Army. he worked at the Medical Nutrition Laboratory, return address MedNutlab, at Fitzsimmons in Denver. I recall looking up at the hospital from my bike while Ike was there with an MI. Anyway for those of us who want to look at the holiday critically I suppose there is always the song, The Streets of Laredo.

The link for contributing to the burned city of West.

A lesson from the KGB

Yuri Andropov, KGB chief during the VN period, reportedly said their propaganda victory during the VN war was their greatest achievement. It was seamless in its strategy. On the one end, in VN toddlers would be set to walk to American soldiers with bombs set to detonate or women in distress apparently needing to give an infant with a timed explosive device to a new soldier. The infants might be shot and explode or thrown off a bridge and explode as the Americans defended themselves. This created a predicate for the charge that the soldiers were baby killers. As Andropov as General Secretary gave us Gorbachev who gave us the end of Russian communism, perhaps we could console ourselves and see VN as a Pyrrhic defeat leading to Russian hubris. This is not to say there were never crimes on our side, but this was part of the context, as a commenter noted, 'context' for a discussion on Bill Ayers.

An essay on Keynes by his admired biographer.

An essay called 'words of wisdom' by Greg Mankiw, Economics, Harvard.