Here And Gone In An Eyeblink

We're only temporary structures. We're only here for a little while -- which is why we ought to be nicer to one another; it's not like the annoying folks will be here forever.

The good ones often are gone before you you know it and so it is with Indiana Blogger John S Mengel, "Crazy Unc," who I only heard about after he'd left (fighting all the way!). There will be a memorial party for his friends in Seymour on the 16th.

Another good one lost: Indiana University's Elinor Ostrom, an economist who went out and looked at how people actually solved problems. This led her to the (perhaps surprising to many academics) conclusion that the "tragedy of the commons" didn't require Leviathan to avert, that normal folk were capable of self-organization in their long-term self-interest. --It's that whole "got out there and looked at the real world" thing that caught my eye. Theory's fine but practice is where most folks spend all their time. I couldn't tell you a thing about her politics but it sounds as if she was an honest observer, and that's a rare breed. One more voice pointing out we don't need to feed every dang thing through The Beast is a marvel -- a Nobel-laureate economist poli-sci Ph.D.* doing so and backing it with hard data is a treasure.
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* But she won the dynamite money for economics. And may have snuck up on the idea of users managing their resources from the Left -- hey, I don't care how they get there, as long as they do.