LGF. One word: Leavenworth.

WSJ. An excellent review of how badly this country is degenerating.

Kimberley Strassel points out how Democrats may just possibly be finally getting it through their thick skulls that taxes aren’t just tapping into the Great Money Pot in the Sky, but actually have real-world consequences — many of which they might not particularly like.

WT. Surprised it took him that long. Sometimes it feels like the 16th century all over again.

Read it. Spam is actually rather good, if you fry it. Let’s try that trick on spammers. Hey, it might work.

NYT. So young, and already a Yuppie. The People of the Crust train the next generation.

NYT. But of course we can’t use DDT because that would be bad for the environment. As piles of rotting human corpses apparently are not.

NYT. Notice that they don’t name the eight nay-sayers, from which (this being the Times) one can assume that they were Democrats.

LGF. Actually, any good news at all at any time is a problem for Democrats, because their power depends on the people needing them to stave off whatever the latest trumped-up disaster might be. (Of course, depending on Democrats to cope with a disaster leads you to New Orleans, where a Democrat mayor and a Democrat governor of a staunchly Democrat state watched and whined as everything came apart around their ears.)

Techdirt. Mike Masnick is almost as much of a grump as I am. I like that.

LGF.

Read it. The inherent flaw in top-down design.

WSJ. Voter fraud — an inside look. And oddly enough, this ties in with my earlier remarks about voting machines.

Techdirt. I had always wondered about that. The RIAA doesn’t sound like such a bargain for the artists, however much it may benefit the labels.

NYT. See? It’s all about the money. “Principle” is only for the dimwitted who read the press handouts and watch the well-named Boob Tube.

NYT. The Nanny State at work: Nobody wants to risk selling something new unless the bureaucracy has approved it.

LanguageLog looks at the hyperwhiteness of nerds.

Conspicuous by its absence is any discussion of the historical anomaly of upper and middle class adolescents taking their cultural cues from the underclass.

Being a loser is cool; doesn’t anybody wonder about that?

Arnold Kling is a fan of consumption taxes.

Politicians frame the issue as taxing certain types of people. Economists look at what activities are being taxed.

Economists, naive fellows that they are, don’t understand the dialectic. The reason politicians concentrate on what people are being taxed is because they are using taxes as a weapon of social policy, to help certain favored groups and punish certain disfavored groups.

Of course, only in our modern dysfunctional world would unproductive people be rewarded and productive people punished. I’d like to be able to say with confidence that in a hundred years people will look back on this system and say, “Geez, what were they thinking?” Unfortunately, it’s only gotten worse in the last hundred years, and I don’t really expect it to get any better in the next hundred. Unless the Muslims take over, in which case taxation rates will be the least of our worries.

LanguageLog. It’s not as easy as it may first appear.

NYT. Guess it goes to show that you really can’t trust anybody. Fortunately I won’t ever be famous so I won’t have to endure having my private correspondence show up in the New York Times.