Month: July 2007
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Build a better world by destroying wealth!
A post by Ward Farnsworth at Volokh on “rent seeking behavior” reminded me of one of my objections to lawyering: ….there are two general ways to increase your wealth: by creating things people want, or by fighting over prizes that already exist — things other people have created or found. Either strategy might be more…
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Meanwhile in Berkeley….
Who needs satire when all you have to do is read news from Berkeley? By law, elected members of the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board (the rent control commissars) are supposed to live in Berkeley. However, according to a report in the SF Chronicle, that legal technicality has not prevented one elected commissioner from living in…
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“We cannot have intact testicles on government property!”
So says “Dan Nender, a 1634 supporter who filed suit in Sacramento Federal Court” to have a “marble monument to service dogs, originally set to be displayed in Sacramento, California” altered. According to the full story at the “Official News Agency” they want the statue’s nuts sawed off: [Sacramento, CA] A marble monument to service…
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Crime, punishment, and blurred distinctions
In a long update to my “I should care?” post, I got a little hot and bothered by the idea that disagreeing with gun control means not caring that people are being killed. This touches on a fundamental disagreement which tends to be lost in the gun control debate, and that disagreement is over CRIME…
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Nerds
Instapundit has brought up a topic near and dear to my heart. Nerds. He gives a few links. I clicked on this one and got Tom Maguire’s view on the subject. Very nice. There was a long discussion in the comments about gangsta culture and its aversion to numbers and all things technical (white). Some…
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The Home Gun Smitth
The Home Gunsmith.com Has some very neat plans for a home shop built SMG (submachine gun). Here is what the site owner has to say about gun control: My own view is that the gun not only belongs in the hands of the agents of the state (they can never be disarmed) but in the…
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“So many bone-shattering idiocies, so little time.”
I usually don’t start a post by quoting someone’s comment to another post in another blog, but I did so here, because this is just too damned typical, and there are just too many damned typical examples of this too-damned-typical complete lack of common sense which now seems to have modern America in a deathlock.…
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I should care?
Who was Jason Brewer and why was he shot? Not to pick a murder victim at random, but the Philly.com web site provides few details about the murders, and I get the impression that the overall tally is more important: Philadelphia tallied six murders over the weekend, police said, bringing the total for the year…
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Minding The Campus
I just found a new site (via Instapundit) called Minding the Campus that concerns how the Race, Class, Gender (RCG aka Angry Studies) people are undermining liberal education. A good place to start is this piece on the Ward Churchill case, recently in the news, by KC Johnson of Durham in Wonderland/Duke Lacrosse case fame.…
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A Wartime Holiday
From Slide Rule, the autobiography of Nevil Shute In the autumn of 1915 my father took advantage of a break clause in the lease to give up South Hill, the house at Blackrock. I think he was concerned at the rising cost of everything due to the war and the mounting income tax, which was…
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Bringing back the Peace and Prosperity Channel
In a very thoughtful Pajamas Media piece, Rick Moran looks at the desire of many Americans for a “return to normalcy” (meaning a return to pre-9/11 world): Torn as they are between the desire for a different kind of politics that Obama is offering and the sure handedness that Hillary Clinton is trying to sell,…
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The Great War At Home
From Slide Rule, the autobiography of Nevil Shute We had a motor bicycle between us by that time, a new Rudge Multi. My parents must have been very wise to launch out on this extravagance at a time when my father must have foreseen rising taxation, for the Rudge cost almost sixty pounds, a lot…
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The details change, the narrative remains
For nearly a week, a triple murder in a sleazy Philadelphia bar has been much in the news, with the local press has been reporting that the shooting was triggered by an argument over a bet. This story, headlined “Six killed in weekend violence — Dispute over bet turns deadly” is typical: The gunman inside…
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Drug the children!
I guess the rule is that it’s OK to drug children with benadryl for takeoff if you’re an airline, but a criminal offense to use the same drug on them at naptime if you’re running a day care center. (Actually, there is a certain logic to this, because it is undeniable that flight attendants have…
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Lose so that we can win!
Bill Hobbs says the war is not lost, but that the Democrats are determined to lose it: The war has not been lost. American forces on the ground are in the process of winning it. The American military has never lost a war that the American people and its politicians have vowed to win. It’s…
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Liberal against Hillary Rejects Savage Sullivan conservatism!
A question I asked myself yesterday about the new “Conservatives for Hillary” phenomenon only seemed to reopen a Pandora’s box of endlessly undefinable definitions. (But words fail, because the “box” has been irreparably burst open for a long time.) Anyway, Socrates left this comment: Sullivan is not a conservative. I don’t know what he is.…
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It Is Coming
I have a friend who reports on the defense industry. Nice Jewish boy. He says via e-mail that it is no use wasting your time trying to convince idiots of the obvious (morally it is sound though). He says a big war is coming. BIG war. Like Pearl Harbor it will unite us. He says…
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more nots
As it’s YouTube night and as M. Simon started the tradition of “Not Fade Away” nostalgia here, so I thought I’d supply a few variations on the theme: First, here’s the Rolling Stones, from a 1964 appearance on the Mike Douglas Show: Originally a Buddy Holly song, “Not Fade Away” was the Stones’ first hit…
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We’re at war, right?
Yes, it is a question I feel forced to ask from time to time. Reading about horrors like this make me wonder whether the United States government has become almost as dysfunctional as the Saudi government. The latter has a well-known penchant for paying their dysfunctional children go and make trouble all over the world,…
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A single nuke can ruin your entire freedom!
In a Reason Magazine piece titled “Gut Feelings and Real Threats: Why civil libertarians shouldn’t be cavalier about terrorism,” Cathy Young has some common sense advice for libertarians: In the past, wars and other national security threats led to far worse assaults on American liberties than anything being contemplated now. Already, the majority of Americans…