Taras Bulba has always troubled me. Gogol wrote the greatest single work of Russian literature, bar none: Dead Souls. (Even unfinished it beats all the others.) Taras Bulba is an enormously entertaining read, but it reeks of Russian chauvinism, anti-semitism and glorification of one of the most brutal peoples ever to inhabit the earth, the Cossacks. But I learned recently that Gogol actually wrote two versions of Taras Bulba. The first one was written in Ukrainian in 1835, and the second in Russian about ten years later. The Russian version is considerably longer because Gogol added a lot of "Russian soul" blahooey to it to attract a Russian readership. I really would like to read the Ukrainian version (in translation, of course), but it seems that it is hard to get even in Ukraine, and I can't find any evidence it has ever been translated into English. If anybody has any leads, please let me know.
Would somebody please explain "carbon trading" to me? I certainly get the idea that if emission of greenhouse gases is a limited privilege, then there could be a market in it. But, to the best of my knowledge, nowhere on earth are there enforceable laws against emission of greenhouse gases, as such. There are laws against air pollutants that may incidentally reduce some greenhouse emissions, and there may be laws in some places mandating gradual adoption of certain technologies, but neither of those is a limit on the right to emit the gases.Without such a limit, why would anybody pay for such a right?
It is hard to believe intelligent adults actually think that anything in this world is going to stop, or even slow, the anthropogenic production of greenhouse gases. I mean--seriously? Why don't we just save all the money that goes into these grand international talkfests and use it to do something practical, like move to higher ground? That's what we're doing in Alaska.
Francisco Franco was an incredibly nervy bastard. In Morocco, he
once he sat on top of a wall as bullets whistled around him and and laughed at his men for
cowering behind it. In his later career, he was the absolute master of
remaining bland, mute, colorless, leading people to think he was indecisive. Then he struck like a cobra. He was also believed to have
a bladder of steel, even in old age. He sometimes chaired 12-hour Council of Minister meetings
without allowing a single bathroom break. Franco died cuddling the mummified arm of Theresa of Avila. How's that for throw-up material?
Speaking of bladders, in earlier times people were "cut
for the stone." In the Middle Ages, this meant making a crude slash in the
perineum, reaching up inside the bladder, and groping for the stone. At least
half of patients died. By the 17th century, surgeons had
evolved a surprisingly sophisticated technique of first locating the stone by
inserting fine probes through the urethral opening, then making a tiny incision
in the perineum and fishing the stone out with a special forceps. The mortality
rate for that procedure was, at least in the case of one well-regarded surgeon,
only around 10%. This suggests a possible way to reduce medical costs in America: outlaw anesthetics.
Can anybody explain to me why on earth anybody would watch athletic competitions, unless maybe they had a kid playing? For the life of me, I can't understand what is at all interesting about watching strangers chase a goddam ball around. Paying money for the privilege strikes me as worse than pointless. Now this, that's different. I'd pay to see that.
The air-to-air missiles used in the Vietnam war were practically worthless. I
don’t mean just the Russian missiles. The American ones had something like a 3%
kill rate. This was not what the American public was led to believe by
the Pentagon and enthusiastic media accounts of aerial combat. Air Force pilots began to demand that their
craft be armed with 20mm cannon, because they were failing to get kills they
could have got if they had had such armaments.
Fortunately, the Air Force had done an excellent study of aerial gunnery in the
late 1950’s and knew exactly what systems to install. U.S. kill rates
rose sharply, although the overall performance of the U.S. Air Force in the
Vietnam War remained very mediocre.
