Newspapers Aren't Doing as Badly as You Might Think

Daniel Gross sees some reasons to be mildly optimistic.

What If George Bush Had Done That?

The Politico asks that question.

Looking for Something Special to Cook for Halloween?

Or maybe even Thanksgiving? Try This.

Quote of the Day: Honesty

Honest people are never touchy about the matter of being trusted. - Ayn Rand

The Costs of REAL ID

The Cato Institute says they will be high.

Quote of the Day: Happiness

Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't even remember leaving open. - Rose Wilder Lane

The American Brain Drain

More information that foreign tech students, especially Indians and Chinese, are returning to their home countries to work and start businesses, rather than remain in the United States.

Quote of the Day: Schooling

My education was dismal. I went to a series of schools for mentally disturbed teachers.
- Woody Allen

Graphic Novel

A Japanese university plants to open a 2-million volume manga library.

Quote of the Day: The Law

No law can give power to private persons; every law transfers power from private persons to government. - Isabel Paterson

If I Can't Have You

A lot of disco was really bad (a whole lot). But I always liked this song.

Quote of the Day: Solutions

Claire likes to say you can be part of the problem or part of the solution. I happen to believe that you can be both. - Phil Dunphy, "Modern Family"

Nazi News

David Lindsey reminds us what Winston Churchill and Oswald Molsey had in common.

Cities That Attract Hip, Young, Educated People

New Geography notes that have one thing in common.

Quote of the Day: War

The State thrives on war - unless, of course, it is defeated and crushed - expands on it, glories in it. - Murray Rothbard

Hispanics Love Action Movies

Steve Sailer says that efforts to woo Hispanic audiences with Hispanic-themed films hasn't worked. But they love moves where lots of things blow up.

Quote of the Day: Sex

I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy. - Steve Martin

Harper Valley PTA

Some wicked dobro on this one.

Damn Near Killed Him

Japanese man sues hospital for misdiagnosing him with cancer and.... Well, read the story.

No Daycare for You

When some children go unvaccinated, it puts others at risk.

Quote of the Day: Freedom Lovers

Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.
- Milton Friedman

The Great American Cooter Fest

It's this weekend in Citrus County, Florida. And ladies, there will be a Miss Cooter contest.

Quote of the Day: Hero Worship

Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.
- Herbert Spencer

Ayn Rand in India

Her popularity grows in some unexpcted places.

Congratulations to Don Boudreaux

Don, one of my former grad school professors, won this year's Thomnas Szasz award.

Ayn Rand Inspires the Fashion World

Rational clothes?

HT: Radley Balko

Fast Track to Single Payer

Economist Mario Rizzo shows how the Democrats' health care proposals will lead to s single-payer, government-run health care system.

Quote of the Day: More on Empire

If America ever does seek Empire, and most nations do, then planned reforms in our domestic life will be abandoned, States Rights will be abolished—in order to impose a centralized government upon us for the purpose of internal repudiation of freedom, and adventures abroad. The American Dream will then die—on battlefields all over the world—and a nation conceived in liberty will destroy liberty for Americans and impose tyranny on subject nations. - George S. Boutwell

HT: Lew Rockwell

Woman from Tokyo

I linked to Billy Joe Royal's version of "Hush" several days ago. While I was looking for it, I found, of course, Deep Purple's cover. And a few links later, I came across another one of their most famous songs.

Awkward Family Photos

From before 1930.

Quote of the Day: Empire

Every ambitious would-be empire clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie, and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it. - George S. Boutwell

HT: Lew Rockwell

Some Are More Equal Than Others

No surprise here. Elite colleges discriminate against Asian Americans and whites.

In Defense of the Tea Parties

Here's a good op ed from the Macon Telegraph, even if they did misspell the author's name in the headline.

Quote of the Day: Seeing

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see. - Ayn Rand

Partisan Politics - A Fool's Game

Robert Higgs writes:

Of course, it’s all a fraud, designed to distract people from the overriding reality of political life, which is that the state and its principal supporters are constantly screwing the rest of us, regardless of which party happens to control the presidency and the Congress. Amid all the partisan sound and fury, hardly anybody notices that political reality boils down to two “parties”: (1) those who, in one way or another, use state power to bully and live at the expense of others; and (2) those unfortunate others.

Even when politics seems to involve life-and-death issues, the partisan divisions often only obscure the overriding political realities. So, Democrats say that anti-abortion Republicans, who claim to have such tremendous concern for saving the lives of the unborn, have no interest whatever in saving the lives of those already born, such as the poor children living in the ghetto. And Republicans say that Democrats, who claim to have such tremendous concern for the poor, systematically contribute to the perpetuation of poverty by the countless taxes and regulations they load onto business owners who would otherwise be in better position to hire and train the poor and thereby to hasten their escape from poverty.

If the unborn children happen to be living in the wombs of women on whom U.S. bombs and rockets rain down in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, however, all Republican concerns for the unborn evaporate completely, as do the Democrats’ concerns for the poor children living in the selfsame bombarded villages. Both parties’ positions would seem to rest on very flexible and selective morality, if indeed either party may be said to have any moral basis at all, notwithstanding their chronic public displays of “moral” wailing and gnashing of teeth.

In any event, the parties’ principles of hatred have never passed the sniff test; indeed, they reek of hypocrisy. Thus, while railing against the “corporate rich,” the Democrats rely heavily on the financial support of Hollywood moguls and multi-millionaire trial lawyers, among other fat cats. And the Republicans, while denouncing the welfare mother who makes off with a few hundred undeserved bucks a month, vociferously support the hundreds of billions of dollars in welfare channeled to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and General Electric, among many other companies, via larcenous “defense” contracts, Export-Import Bank subsidies, and countless other forms of government support for “national security” and service to “the public interest” as Republicans conceive of these nebulous, yet rhetorically useful entities.

Quote of the Day: Troublemakers

A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill. - Robert Heinlein

Japanese TV Sniper Prank

Not Your Typical High School Football Team

The sons of Joe Montana, Wayne Gretzky and Will Smith all play on it.

Chile Wants the High-Tech Immigrants the U.S. Drives Away

Katherine Mangu-Ward has the story. Not coincidentally, Chile moved ahead of the United States this year in the Cato Institute's index of economic freedom.

Quote of the Day: Voting

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
- H.L. Mencken

Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians

I wish I had thought of this.

Classy

But her argument seems solid.

Quote of the Day: China

There are a billion people in China. It's not easy to be an individual in a crowd of more than a billion people. Think of it. More than a BILLION people. That means even if you're a one-in-a-million type of guy, there are still a thousand guys exactly like you. - A. Whitney Brown

Senate Health Bill Requires National ID

The Cato Insitute has more.

In the Can

Quote of the Day: The 1970s

Denis Leary: There we were in the middle of a sexual revolution wearing clothes that guaranteed we wouldn't get laid. - Denis Leary

Memories

My memory is really odd. I can recall major amounts of absolutely trivial information quickly. But huge swaths of my own life are completely beyond my recall, no matter how hard I try to remember them. Friends and family often think that I'm joking when they bring up other relatives or people I went to school with or worked with for years and I have no clue whom they are talking about or when they mention some pivotal moment in my life and I cannot recall what they are talking about. But it's no act. I genuinely don't know what they are talking about.

But two of my earliest memories, that stand out from all that fog, involve my Uncle Tid. The first, from around when I was three or four, is helping my mother and aunt prepare some sort of package of comfort foods and other treats for him when he was stationed in Vietnam. Actually, I think I really just bothered them while they put it together. The second was probably just a couple of years later. I was in the hospital at Christmas. I can't recall now why. But he brought me a gift of a Johnny West action figure, which was one of my favorite toys for a number of years.

Tid passed away this afternoon. But his family still has its memories of him, even me.

Quote of the Day: Economics

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a "dismal science." But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance. - Murray Rothbard

Headline of the Decade?

That's what Jesse Walker calls this one.

Free Market Health Care

We don't have it now. But dr. Ross Levatter tells us what it might look like.

Quote of the Day: Newspapers

All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that's an alibi for my ignorance. - Will Rogers

Cartoonists React to Obama's Win

They don't seem very impressed.

Three Cats, One Steak

I love the way the one in the middle eats while the other two fight.

Roll Tide Indeed

Dad knows what is important. Read the comments, too. some of them are hilarious.

The Aristocracy of Pull, Part III

Barack Obama once again rewards special interests at the expense of ordinary Americans.

Quote of the Day: Enemies, Foreign and Domestic

The most serious dangers for American freedom and the American way of life do not come from without. - Ludwig von Mises

Japan Finance Minister: Capitalism Kills

He says it raises the murder rate.

HT; Katherine Mangu-Ward.

Why So Few White Running Backs?

Steve Sailer asks.

Thug Turkeys

The bastards.

HT: Radley Balko

Quote of the Day: First Draft of History

In an amusing takedown of the pretensions of the editors of The Atlantic, Jack Shafer puts the famous line about journalism in context:

The original phrase was coined by former Washington Post Publisher Philip Graham, who delivered it to Newsweek correspondents in 1963, shortly after the Washington Post Co. purchased the magazine. Far from ballyhooing the greatness of the press and implying that historians owe it some debt, Graham staked a much more modest position. He acknowledged that much of journalism was "pure chaff" but said that "no one yet has been able to produce wheat without chaff." He went on:

So let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of a history that will never be completed about a world we can never really understand.

The Aristocracy of Pull, Part II

One of Wall Street's men in Washington.

Offensive Interference

Economist Don Boudreaux talks about possible congressional hearings on concussions in he NFL.

Hollywood Hails a New Star

Lew Rockwell has the scoop.

The Aristocracy of Pull

David Boaz explains how government really works.

Quote of the Day: Public vs. Private

The "private sector" of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the "public sector" is, in fact, the coercive sector. - Henry Hazlitt

Don't Touch Nancy

HT: Abu Muqawama

Quote of the Day: Education

You know there is a problem with the education system when you realize that out of the 3 Rs only one begins with an R. - Dennis Miller

How the Latest Attempt to "Protect Consumers" Hurt Small Business

Mark Calabria looks at the impact of the Credit Card Act.

The Real Economy Is Dying

Well, this story will cheer you up fast.

Quote of the Day: Hell

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
- Milton Friedman

Political Prisoners in Venezuela

The Washington Post reports the number is soaring as Hugo Chavez targets university students.

Quote of the Day: Stimulus

See, when the Government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of Taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs. - Dave Barry

HT: The Republican Echo Chamber

Why Chicago Lost the Olympics (Not That That Was a Bad Thing)

Foreigners are fed up with being harrassed by petty tyrants when they enter the United States.

Creating Ayn Rand

There are a couple of new books out on Ayn Rand, that are getting good reviews. Rod Long has some thoughts on one of them, which includes an story from her childhood that explains a lot about the person she grew up to be.

Quote of the Day: Taxes

Taxes must, in the end, fall upon the consumer. - Frederic Bastiat

You'll Have What He Ordered

The newest trend in Japanese restaurants.

Did the Stimulus Backfire

It clearly did not have the impact the Obama administration promised. But economist Mario Rizzo asks if it may have actually hurt the economy.

The Olympics

Ron and I were talking about this last night, but I didn't blog about it. That's OK. Jesse Walker said everything I wanted to say much better than I could have said it.

The Myth of a Conservative GOP

Daniel Larison says both conservatives and liberals exaggerate the conservative influence on the Republican Party.

Quote of the Day: Government

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
- Thomas Jefferson

Games People Play

A few days ago, I posted a link to "Hush," which was written by Joe South. He wrote a lot of hits in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The biggest was probably "Rose Garden," by Lynn Anderson. As a singer, this was probably his biggest hit.

China's Mini-Skirted Militia

Danger Room has the scoop.

Kimbo Slice May Be Totally Lost When a Fight Hits the Ground

But he is still a monster draw for TV viewers. The Wrestling Observer reports

--We don't have last night's actual Ultimate Fighter rating, but it will be almost surely the largest in history. 5.3 million viewers would indicate a number between probably 3.5 and 4.0. The replay did another 1.5 million viewers. Essentially out of out every 12 Male 18-34 in the U.S. last night watched either the live or replay show, comparable to probably the biggest sporting events in our culture other than NFL championship level games. The rating will be updated in the story on the rating already up on the site. The fight sucked but the company's editing of the television show to remake Kimbo from this world's toughest street fight to a likeable newcomer just learning was very well done. Plus, they know who is drawing because the show ended with a tease that someone could be injured and he could come back.

South African Disgrace

Steve Sailer reviews the movie starring John Malkovitch.

Quote of the Day: Money

Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. - Ayn Rand