Scraps from My Aging Firefox Tabs

• Strategic essentialism, or how the Irish stopped being white:

  Ireland’s investment recruitment agency is now crowing about the virtues of “the Irish mind” in a series of print ads. The most popular ad, using a drawing of the Irish rock star Bono, declares: “The Irish. Creative. Imaginative. And flexible. Agile minds with a unique capacity to innovate, without being directed.”

• A headline begging to be ripped from:

  Criminals in Baghdad are stealing corpses from the scenes of car bombings and murders in order to extract "ransoms" from grieving relatives.

  In a macabre off-shoot of the capital's kidnapping epidemic, the gangs pose as medics collecting bodies to be taken back to the city's overflowing morgues.

  Instead, though, they take the corpses to secret hiding places and then demand payments of up to £2,500 a time to release them to relatives for burial. Because Muslim custom dictates that a body must be buried as soon as possible after death, many families simply pay up, rather than involve the police.

• LOL to David Remnick's year-old but highly readable profile of Bill Clinton:

  Nearly all Clinton’s younger aides refer to their boss as “the President,” but they also “do” him.

  Furthermore:

  He picked up the thread of his monologue, describing in fantastic detail why Ray Nagin edged Mitch Landrieu in the New Orleans mayoral race (“I understand it, because I know how black folks think”) ...

  “I don’t care how drunk he was sometimes,” he said. “Yeltsin really hated Communism.” ...

  In Durban, he’d picked up an eight-foot-tall wooden giraffe for Hillary (“She loves giraffes!”) ...

• Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame gets high on his own supply:

  One of us, for instance (the economist, who lives in Chicago), grew up comfortably in a Midwestern city and has fond memories of visiting his grandparents’ small farm. This author recently bought an indoor hydroponic plant grower.

• Get it? Y'all bloggers slow, man!

  

• I wasn't aware of this example of path dependency, via Kevin Drum: "Why is the Pentagon a pentagon? Short answer: it was originally intended to be built on a pentagonally shaped piece of land, so a pentagon was what fit. It got moved later, but the shape stayed."

• Maybe a good attitude:

  I once had the opportunity to have coffee with Andros Epanimondas, who had been the assistant to one of my greatest heroes, Stanley Kubrick. Reminiscing, he mentioned that, over dinner, he once saw Kubrick hurriedly alternating bites of his main course and bites of a chocolate cake. He asked why. Kubrick, busy preparing for his greatest project to date, the unrealized Napolean, simply responded, "Andros, it's only food!"

• Via the Economist's Free Exchange blog, I came across a lovely Deutsche Bank Research whitepaper entitled "The Happy Variety of Capitalism: Characterised by an Array of Commonalities" (PDF). The first page tells us that

  The happy variety of capitalism is one of the four varieties identified by a systematic analysis of 22 rich countries.

  • The happy variety of capitalism...
  • The less happy variety of capitalism...
  • The unhappy variety of capitalism...
  • The Far Eastern variety...

  For serious.