Read it.

I’ll tell you. It feels bad. Being a libertarian means living with an almost unendurable level of frustration. It means being subject to unending scorn and derision despite being inevitably proven correct by events. How does it feel to be a libertarian? Imagine what the internal life of Cassandra must have been and you will have a pretty good idea.

Imagine spending two decades warning that government policy is leading to a major economic collapse, and then, when the collapse comes, watching the world conclude that markets do not work.

Imagine continually explaining that markets function because they have a built in corrective mechanism; that periodic contractions are necessary to weed out unproductive ventures; that continually loosening credit to avoid such corrections just puts off the day of reckoning and inevitably leads to a larger recession; that this is precisely what the government did during the 1920’s that led to the great depression; and then, when the recession hits, seeing it offered as proof of the failure of laissez-faire capitalism.

Wisdom. Attend.

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Your tax dollars at work.

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We have the technology.

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But the high salaries of lawyers suggest that there is a genuine demand out there for all that lawyering. Quite simply, we need a lot of lawyers because we have a lot of laws.

Tim Cavanaugh at Reason magazine doesn’t like investment bankers much.

I’ve seen this fear of the appearance of conflict of interest before. It never translates into any concern that you might actually have a conflict of interest and thus shouldn’t be doing what you want to do. That pattern holds here: At several points in Sorkin’s story, officials who used to work at Goldman or Morgan, who have multiple professional and personal overlaps with the firms, are quickly granted waivers from Treasury and Fed conflict-of-interest rules so they can help out their old allies. Hypocrisy being the tribute vice pays to virtue, we should probably be grateful that anti-conflict niceties exist at all. But it’s just the old constitution-is-not-a-suicide pact dilemma: The rules exist right until the moment they’re actually needed; then you suspend the rules.

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Consisting of a bacon cheeseburger with a buttered, grilled and glazed doughnut standing in for a bun, the Craz-E Burger puts such fatty delights as the deep-fried Mars bar in the shade.

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Last night, for those of you who were on another planet, Favre (days before turning 40) led the arch-rival Vikings to a win over Packers, the team, of course, that cut him loose, sent him packing, told him he was too old, etc., etc.

Ordinarily we don’t do sports here, but this seemed like an appropriate exception.

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Dude, just get the flu shot, cost you $10.

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President and Mrs. Obama filled their speeches to the International Olympic Committee with references to themselves, their lives, their experiences, all because of their self-evident significance to the progress of humanity. “Both Obamas,” writes George Will, gave heartfelt speeches about … themselves.”

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“The middle class in Mexico is going down,” Arendondo told me in his office by the courtyard of the brightly painted school in the largely lower-middle-class Iztacalco, one of Mexico City’s 16 diverse delegaciones, or boroughs. “The middle class is predated by both the super-rich and the criminal poor. We are squeezed in the middle of the sandwich.”

Read it.

Hah!

Darwin Award nominee.

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We have the technology.

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He was taught the technique called echolocation, similar to sonar used by bats, by Daniel Kish, a blind Californian who founded the World Access for the Blind charity.

Read it.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Oops, sorry, it’s already happening here. Forget I even mentioned it….

Read it.

A more far reaching proposal to consider is limiting the claims of secured creditors to encourage them to monitor the riskiness of the financial firm.

This could involve limiting their claims to no more than say 80 percent of their secured credits. This would ensure that market participants always have ‘skin in the game’.

Unfortunately for Chairman Bair, the whole point of being a secured creditor is so that you don’t have to spend a lot of time monitoring the riskiness of a financial firm. Secured creditors charge a lower interest rate because they have a lower risk. As the government found out during the recent bailouts, secured creditors are the fly in the oinment of expropriation and restructuring to favor those whom the government chooses to favor, and so they want to eliminate it in the future.

Read it.

Of course there are exceptions such as the people who have invested both their money and their lives into the appreciation of art: people with Art History Degrees. But as you have probably noticed, they have very little value to both you and society. The latter is evidenced by their annual salary while the former is to be determined on a person by person basis.

Eliot Spitzer points a finger.

When even sleazeballs are calling you out, you’re in bad shape.

Read it.

Nancy Pelosi likes to brag that she’s “drained the swamp” when it comes to corruption in the House, but ethics problems could come back to haunt Democrats in 2010. Democrats are currently the subject of 12 of the 16 complaints pending before the House ethics committee. Two of the lawmakers being investigated—Reps. Jack Murtha and Charlie Rangel—have close ties to Pelosi, who has come under criticism for not asking them to resign their committee posts. Murtha, chairman of a key defense-appropriations subcommittee, is under investigation for his ties to a lobbying firm whose clients received millions of dollars in Defense earmarks. Rangel, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, is facing scrutiny for not fully disclosing assets. The ethics committee is also looking into ties between Rangel and a developer who leased rent-controlled apartments to the congressman, and whether Rangel improperly used his House office to raise funds for a public policy institute in his name. Rangel and Murtha deny any wrongdoing. (Another lawmaker under investigation: Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., who, according to the committee, “may have offered to raise funds” for then–Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich in exchange for the president’s Senate seat—a charge Jackson denies. The panel deferred its probe at the request of the Justice Department, which is conducting its own inquiry.)

This in Newsweek — when the Crust loses its own cheerleaders, what next?

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Medical researchers in Philadelphia have conducted out a study which indicates – according to their interpretation – that carrying a gun causes people to get shot more often. “People should rethink their possession of guns,” say the medics.

Oh, but wait – what’s this:

There didn’t seem to be any account taken of the fact that people with good reason to fear being shot – for instance drug dealers, secret agents etc – would be more likely to tool up than those with no such concerns.

It’s “research” like this that is responsible for all of the bad public policy foisted on us each year.

Steve Sailer takes a look at the Letterman imbroglio.

If David Letterman’s lady friend staffer had threatened to sue for sexual harassment, but her lawyer told Letterman’s lawyer that she’d be willing to sign an agreement promising never to say a word about the affair in return for a $2 million settlement, that would be perfectly legal, right? I mean, the law encourages people to threaten to sue their bosses for sexual harassment, right? And the law also encourages the parties to settle out of court, and promises of secrecy in return for money are legally enforceable, right?

What if the blackmailer instead of threatening to write a screenplay about a horndog talkshow host had actually written the screenplay and submitted it to David Letterman as a film to be produced by Letterman’s Worldwide Pants production company, and Worldwide Pants could buy up all rights to it for just $2 million. (It probably wouldn’t be that much worse a screenplay than the Strangers with Candy screenplay that Worldwide Pants did produce a few years ago.) I kind of seems like Mr. Halderman got himself arrested for being in a hurry to get paid, for not being suave about his approach.

Read it.

We have often asserted in this space that Islam is not a religion, but a totalitarian political ideology masquerading as a religion.

It is not, however, a political ideology in a vacuum: from its inception, Islam was a tactical and strategic blueprint for military victory. It was designed to motivate and instruct the tribes of the Arabian peninsula as they went forth in jihad against non-Muslims (and non-Arabs) in the name of Allah.

Exactly so. Read and learn.

Read it.

You would think that even stupid people like Congressmen would realize that, when you increase the price of something, the demand for it goes down — something that even high school students can grasp.

But of course they do understand that; they just don’t care. What they care about are the votes of union members, whose wages go up with each rise in the minimum wage, and to hell with unemployed students who aren’t old enough to vote anyway.

Read it.

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Conditions are still worse with the ‘stimulus’ than were predicted without it, much less than the predictions with it. When will people learn that elected officials and their court experts just don’t know what they’re talking about, and can’t be trusted with YOUR money?

Read it.

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The boy grabbed his junior-sized .410-gauge shotgun and fired at the creature which was 20 times his size and is one of the biggest ever seen in Texas.

He learned to shoot guns at the age of four and also knows how to drive all-terrain vehicles.

Well, Texans are like that.

An Informative Flow Chart.

Jerry Pournelle has some thoughts on the subject.

Burke said that for a man to love his country, his country ought to be lovely, and there is something to be said for that. Investment in the general welfare was written into the Constitution, but that meant harbors, roads, canals, parks, public buildings and monuments, all of which had to be paid for by taxing the productive — almost by definition the unproductive don’t have much to tax — but it hardly meant a direct transfer of resources from the productive to the unproductive.

Apparently that’s just the way things are. If you’re productive you owe it to those less fortunate. And there is a class that has the right to pay itself — by taxing you — for taking your output and distributing it among those who weren’t so fortunate as you. Get used to it.

Read it.

This is huge.

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Jeez, nobody’s got a sense of humor any more.

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The amphitheatre was a focal point of Portus, the port through which the Romans imported everything from wheat and wine to slaves and exotic animals from their sprawling empire.

Once the gateway to the Mediterranean and twice the size of the modern-day port of Southampton, it gradually silted up and now lies two miles inland.

Read it.

Hey, I’m scared. Aren’t you scared?

Pakistan has warned the United States that it will not allow drone attacks on suspected Taliban bases in its troubled Balochistan province, military sources have said.

I’m curious as to what they plan to do about it. Sick the Taliban on us?

Read it.

It’s still a problem. As of a few weeks ago, the “hole”—which isn’t so much a gap in the ozone layer as an area of seasonal thinning—is even bigger than it was at the height of the ozone panic in the 1980s. (At the moment, it spans a patch of sky almost the size of North America.) That said, the ozone layer is in much better shape today than it would have been had the world not taken decisive action 20 years ago. It’s just that the damage we did in the old days is going to take a long time to heal.

And yet we don’t see anything about it in the news. Why not? Bush left office, that’s why not. Funny how all of these earth-shattering kabooms aren’t worth worrying about when Democrats are in office.

Forbes has its usual list.

Note that, of the top eight, seven are Democrats and one is a RINO.