Isegoria

James H. Joyner Jr. calls the Netherlands a Libertarian Paradise:

I recently spent a few days in what a friend referred to as ‘the land of debauchery.’ Amsterdam, capital of the Netherlands, is probably as famous for its openness toward prostitution and drug consumption than for wooden shoes, canals, or world class museums. Yet, strangely, it nonetheless seems to be a clean, functioning society.

While Holland has an exceedingly redistributionist economic policy, it is a libertarian’s paradise on the social front.

Dilbert doesn’t understand what “fungible” means. Dogbert does.

Brian Carney suggests that Newt Gingrinch, who led the Republican Party to victory in 1994, may be making a run for the presidency in 2008:

The party governed to maintain power, and so lost touch with its electorate. And here he adds a warning: ‘Our natural majority in the country is a very reform majority. It’s the taxpaying majority. It’s the people who do not trust Washington, do not like seeing their money wasted, are not impressed with pork — if anything, they’re irritated by it. And either the House and Senate Republicans are going to move substantially in the next few months or they’re going to run a very real risk of losing the fall election.’

So what does ‘substantial movement’ look like? Unsurprisingly, Mr. Gingrich has a program. ‘[T]here are two layers. I’ll give you things they can’t do and things they can do.’ First, the things they can do, such as cutting down on earmarks and pork-barrel spending. ‘They should change the House rules so that any conference report that comes back is automatically filed on the Thomas system [the Web site where congressional actions are logged and made publicly available] and is not voted on for 72 hours so that every blogger in the country can go in and read it. That would immediately cut down on the most outrageous stuff because you wouldn’t be able to pass it.’

This is Mr. Gingrich at his best — a swish of the sword when faced with a Gordian Knot.

GapMinder‘s goal is “to make sense of the world by having fun with statistics!”

Enjoy this animated presentation, Has the world become a better place?

This is not reassuring. Minister offers £6m to behead cartoonist:

A minister in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has offered a £6m reward to anyone who beheads one of the Danish cartoonists who outraged Muslims by depicting the prophet Muhammad.

Yaqoob Qureshi, minister of minority welfare, said the killer would also receive his weight in gold. He made the offer during a rally in his constituency in Meerut, northeast of Delhi. Protesters then burnt an effigy of a cartoonist and some Danish flags.

A Pakistani cleric has also offered a $1m reward — and a car — as a “prize” to anyone who kills one of the cartoonists. Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi made his announcement after Friday prayers in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar.

I may have to remodel the house. From HiddenPassageway.com:

Creative Home Engineering is a registered contracting company that adds value to homes by integrating silent, automated hidden passageways.

I’m not surprised that they have sample hidden doors triggered by pulling books on a bookshelf or twisting candles on a mantle; I’m surprised that they don’t have one triggered by a button in a bust of Shakespeare.

Harriet Brown says Go With Your Gut — because it’s better for you:

I’d like to make a radical suggestion: instead of wringing our hands over fat grams and calories, let’s resolve to enjoy whatever food we eat.

Because, as it turns out, when you eat something you like, your body makes more efficient use of its nutrients. Which means that choking down a plateful of steamed cauliflower (if you hate steamed cauliflower) is not likely to do you as much good as you think.

In the 1970′s, researchers fed two groups of women, one Swedish and one Thai, a spicy Thai meal. The Thai women — who presumably liked the meal more than the Swedish women did — absorbed almost 50 percent more iron from it than the Swedish women. When the meal was served as a mushy paste, the Thai women absorbed 70 percent less iron than they had before — from the same food.

The researchers concluded that food that’s unfamiliar (Thai food to Swedish women) or unappetizing (mush rather than solid food) winds up being less nutritious than food that looks, smells and tastes good to you. The explanation can be found in the digestive process itself, in the relationship between the ‘second brain’ — the gut — and the brain in your head.

In The Saintly Sinner, Joan Acocella looks at Mary Magdalene and the stories that rose around her.

From the Bible itself, we know two things about Mary Magdalene: she was crazy — Jesus cast “seven devils” out of her — and she saw the angel who announced His resurrection.

Later stories conflated her with Luke’s “sinner” — it all made sense, after all — and Mary Magdalene was declared a whore:

As such, she was a tremendous success. Europe, once it was converted to Christianity, was not content to have all those holy people in the Bible confine their activities — or, more important, their relics — to the Middle East. And so the Magdalene, among others, was sent west. After the Crucifixion, it was said, infidels placed her in a rudderless boat and pushed it out to sea, in full confidence that it would capsize. But, piloted by the hand of God, the Magdalene’s bark arrived at Marseilles, whereupon she undertook a career of strenuous evangelism and converted southern Gaul. Eventually, however, she tired of preaching and retreated to a cave in a mountain near Marseilles, where she wept and repented her foul youth. She wore no clothes; she was covered only by her long hair (or, in some paintings, by an appalling sort of fur). Nor did she take any food. Once a day, angels would descend to carry her to Heaven, where she received “heavenly sustenance,” and then fly her back to her grotto. This went on for thirty years. Then, one day, her friend Maximin, the bishop of Aix, found her in his church levitating two cubits above the floor and surrounded by a choir of angels. She promptly expired.

This is a summary of various stories, but most of them can be found in The Golden Legend, a collection of saints’ lives written by a thirteenth-century Dominican, Jacobus de Voragine, who later became the archbishop of Genoa. After the Bible, The Golden Legend is said to have been the most widely read text of the Middle Ages. On its basis, sermons were composed, plays written, altarpieces painted, stories told by the hearth fire. The Magdalene, according to some sources, became France’s most popular saint after the Virgin Mary.

This story made me a bit queasy:

The crucial development in Magdalene scholarship was the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library. Biblical scholars had understood for a long time that the orthodox Church was just the segment of the Church that won out over competing Christian sects, notably the so-called Gnostics. But, apart from what could be gathered from the Church fathers’ denunciations of these supposed heretics, students of early Christianity knew little about them. Then, one day in December of 1945, an Arab peasant named Muhammad Ali al-Samman drove his camel to the foothills near the town of Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt, to collect fertilizer for his fields, and as he dug he unearthed a clay jar about three feet high. Hoping that it might contain treasure, he broke it open and, to his disappointment, found only a bunch of papyrus books, bound in leather. He took the books home and tossed them in a courtyard where he kept his animals. In the weeks that followed, his mother used some pages from the books to light her stove; other pages were bartered for cigarettes and fruit. But eventually, after a long journey through the hands of antiquities dealers, black marketers, smugglers, and scholars, Samman’s find was recognized as a priceless library of Gnostic writings—thirteen codices, containing fifty-two texts—recorded in Coptic (an early form of Egyptian) in the fourth century but translated from Greek originals dating from between the second and fourth centuries. In time, the books were confiscated by the Egyptian government and moved to the Coptic Museum in Cairo, where they remain today. (They were published in 1972-77.) Actually, they were not the first Gnostic texts to be discovered. Others had come to light in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but most of them were not published until after the time of the Nag Hammadi discovery.

The Mary Magdalene of the Gnostic texts is far from a lowly prostitute; she’s a fount of wisdom.

In Shining Tree of Life, Adam Gopnik explains why the Shakers made such fabulous furniture:

Most of the elements of Shakerism are common to orders and sects: the Dervishes whirled, Dominican monks renounced the flesh. What seems distinctive is, first, their feminism and its insistence on coed monasticism, which made much of the sexual while also denying it. Theirs was a genuinely radical feminism. Shaker communities, though not specifically matriarchal in rule—there were plenty of male elders, too — were among the few American communities of nearly perfect sexual equality. There is even a sense, perceptible in the letters and other writings, that this made a Shaker colony a welcome place for “effeminate” men — a surviving letter reveals a code of homoerotic innuendo that is as easy to decrypt as pig Latin.