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Insight

Thirteen smoke jumpers died in the Mann Gulch fire [August 5, 1949]. White crosses below the ridge still mark the spots where the men died. But after several terrifying minutes [Wag] Dodge emerged from the ashes.
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[Mark Jung-Beeman] recommends that, if we're stuck on a difficult problem, it's better to set the alarm clock a few minutes early so that we have time to lie in bed and ruminate.
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One of the surprising lessons of this research is that trying to force an insight can actually prevent the insight.
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Concentration, it seems, comes with the hidden cost of diminished creativity. "There's a good reason Google puts Ping-Pong tables in their headquarters," [John] Kounios said. "If you want to encourage insights, then you've got to also encourage people to relax."

"The Eureka Hunt: Why do good ideas come to us when they do?" by Jonah Lehrer, The New Yorker, July 28, 2008

Hat tip: Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution

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July 24, 2008 04:47 PM   Link    Comments (0)

"Sources Warn Miley Cyrus Will Be Depleted by 2013"

The Onion: Sources Warn Miley Cyrus Will Be Depleted by 2013




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July 2, 2008 06:37 AM   Link    Comments (0)

"Global Warming as Mass Neurosis"

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it's time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in.
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The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere's coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.
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A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.

"Global Warming as Mass Neurosis," by Bret Stephens, The Wall Street Journal, July 1, 2008

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July 1, 2008 07:47 AM   Link    Comments (0)

The Manolo he recommends the shoes for Congressional pages

Dear Manolo,

I am a Congressional page and I’m in need of comfortable, yet stylish, black shoes. Our uniform is a navy blazer with grey slacks or a skirt (with which we have to wear nude or black hose). I’m open to almost anything that looks cute.

Caitlin

Manolo says, ayyyyy! One minute you are sitting in your sophomore social studies class, reading about the founding geniuses, John Adams and George Washington, and the next, thanks to the help of your Uncle Don the politically active scrap metal baron, you are in the Senate cloakroom fighting off the inappropriate fumblings of the senior senator from the Great State of Inebriation.

Read the whole thing: "Manolo the Columnist," Manolo’s Shoe Blog, May 2, 2008

More About Congressional Pages

June 30, 2008 07:57 PM   Link    Comments (0)

Amazon down since Monday? 3-day Amazon outage?

Is it just us or has Amazon.com been down since Monday morning, June 9, 2008 (it's now 2 pm ET, Wednesday, June 11, 2008)?

Since Monday, during the day, we have been able to reach Amazon less than 1 hour each day. We've tried 2 different locations using 2 different access providers, and can't reach Amazon from either.

Is this Amazon outage occurring anywhere else other than in the DC area? Anyone else having these problems?

June 11, 2008 02:07 PM   Link    Comments (0)

Diplomas Count 2008 - Dropping Out of High School

As the nation struggles to close its graduation gap, Diplomas Count 2008 examines states' efforts to forge stronger connections between precollegiate and postsecondary education.
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Nationwide, about 71 percent of 9th graders make it to graduation four years later, according to data from 2005, the latest available. And that figure drops to 58 percent for Hispanics, 55 percent for African-Americans, and 51 percent for Native Americans.

Those rates improved slightly from 2004 to 2005 for all groups, but large gaps remain across states. While more than eight in 10 students graduate on time in Iowa, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Wisconsin, for example, the proportion drops to fewer than six in 10 in the District of Columbia, Georgia, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, and South Carolina.

Analyses conducted for Diplomas Count by the EPE Research Center also continue to show wide disparities between state-reported graduation rates and the center’s estimates. Such disparities are one reason that the U.S. Department of Education proposed new rules this spring that would require all states to calculate graduation rates based on a uniform method that tracks cohorts of students as they progress through high school.

"Executive Summary," Diplomas Count 2008, by Education Week and the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center

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June 8, 2008 10:07 AM   Link    Comments (0)

"China’s Cyber-Militia"

Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the information systems of U.S. companies and government agencies, stolen proprietary information from American executives in advance of their business meetings in China, and, in a few cases, gained access to electric power plants in the United States, possibly triggering two recent and widespread blackouts in Florida and the Northeast, according to U.S. government officials and computer-security experts.

"China’s Cyber-Militia: Chinese hackers pose a clear and present danger to U.S. government and private-sector computer networks and may be responsible for two major U.S. power blackouts." By Shane Harris, National Journal, May 31, 2008

Hat tip, Slashdot

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June 1, 2008 06:37 PM   Link    Comments (0)

Nutella ... and guilt....

See this image from Mr. Toledano.

Mmmmmmmm, Nutella




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May 26, 2008 08:27 PM   Link    Comments (0)

And you thought your divorce was acidic....

A biochemist was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole Friday for killing her estranged husband by knocking him out and stuffing him into a vat of acid, possibly while he was still alive.

Larissa Schuster was convicted in December of murdering Timothy Schuster with the special circumstance that the murder was committed for financial gain. At the time of his death in July 2003, the Schusters were in the middle of a divorce after nearly 20 years of marriage.

"Chemist gets life for husband's acid vat murder," CNN, May 16, 2008

May 18, 2008 07:37 PM   Link    Comments (0)

Football, er, soccer, and promotion

For the promotion-phobics, the Premiership is a gilded fake while the Championship represents authentic football. ‘In my years as a supporter I have seen seven relegations and six promotions’, recounts Watford fan Graham Smith. ‘That is what being a football fan is all about. It is about supporting your team through thick and thin. It is about suffering the bad times and enjoying the good times. That’s why I like being a fan of a team that basically belong in the Football League rather than the Premier League. It is real football.’

"Every team wants to be promoted, right? Wrong," by Duleep Allirajah, Spiked!, May 9, 2008 [emphasis added]

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May 9, 2008 10:17 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Wal-Mart expands "discounted prescription drug program to offer 90-day supplies for $10"

I've spent a fair amount of time shilling for Wal-Mart's prescription drug plan on this blog, so don't think for a second that I would miss today's news that the Corporate Monster from Bentonville is greatly expanding the program to include a whole slate of new drugs, including, according to AP, "several women's medications."
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, announced Monday it would expand its discounted prescription drug program to offer 90-day supplies for $10 and add several women's medications at a discount. It also said it would lower the price of more than 1,000 over-the-counter drugs.

"The Wal-Mart Prescription Drug Benefit," by Michael C. Moynihan, Hit & Run, May 5, 2008

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May 5, 2008 03:57 PM   Link    Comments (0)

"Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn?"

In the late 1800s, a German scientist named Hermann Ebbinghaus made up lists of nonsense syllables and measured how long it took to forget and then relearn them. (Here is an example of the type of list he used: bes dek fel gup huf jeik mek meun pon daus dor gim ke4k be4p bCn hes.) In experiments of breathtaking rigor and tedium, Ebbinghaus practiced and recited from memory 2.5 nonsense syllables a second, then rested for a bit and started again. Maintaining a pace of rote mental athleticism that all students of foreign verb conjugation will regard with awe, Ebbinghaus trained this way for more than a year. Then, to show that the results he was getting weren't an accident, he repeated the entire set of experiments three years later. Finally, in 1885, he published a monograph called Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. The book became the founding classic of a new discipline.

Ebbinghaus discovered many lawlike regularities of mental life. He was the first to draw a learning curve. Among his original observations was an account of a strange phenomenon that would drive his successors half batty for the next century: the spacing effect.

Ebbinghaus showed that it's possible to dramatically improve learning by correctly spacing practice sessions. On one level, this finding is trivial; all students have been warned not to cram. But the efficiencies created by precise spacing are so large, and the improvement in performance so predictable, that from nearly the moment Ebbinghaus described the spacing effect, psychologists have been urging educators to use it to accelerate human progress. After all, there is a tremendous amount of material we might want to know. Time is short.

"Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm," by Gary Wolf, Wired, April 21, 2008

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May 4, 2008 10:27 AM   Link    Comments (0)

"I Have a Dream..."

… that one day, corporate executives will tire of being bullied by demagogic politicians. I was reminded of that dream by a press release issued yesterday by Sen. Pete Domenici, ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and long-time Republican major-domo on energy policy.

"I Have a Dream..." by Jerry Taylor, Cato-at-Liberty, May 1, 2008

See the article for Jerry Taylor's suggested reply to this congressional request.

However, if you are a company executive who won't send such a letter, and you need help preparing to testify before Congress, sign up for our 1-day course Preparing and Delivering Congressional Testimony, next scheduled for July 30, 2008

May 2, 2008 10:27 AM   Link    Comments (0)

"How Roses Handle Water"

A team of chemists from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China figured out why tiny water droplets seem to get stuck to petals of red roses. Not unexpectantly, the mechanism, known as the Cassie impregnating wetting state, is a result of nanostructures ("hierarchical micropapillae" and "nanofolds") on the surface of petals.

"How Roses Handle Water," medGadget, April 29, 2008

Reminds us of the invention of Velcro by George de Mestral.



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April 29, 2008 03:17 PM   Link    Comments (0)

"Hillary is Dunkin Donuts, Barack is Starbucks"

Hillary is minivans and American sedans, Barack is Range Rovers and Hondas. Hillary is cross-trainers with jeans, Barack is Abercrombie and Fitch and Banana Republic. Hillary is Dunkin Donuts, Barack is Starbucks. And their supporters are equally vocal, in different ways.

"Primary concern: Nasty fight between Obama, Clinton could blow it for Democrats," by Lisa van Dusen, Edmonton Sun, April 22, 2008

John McCain is Costco.

"McCain Knows Where to Vote Shop: Costco," Washington Whispers, April 18, 2008

April 23, 2008 10:17 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Contemporary China-bashing

Since the military suppression of the anti-China protests in the Tibetan capital Lhasa last month, the focus on China’s treatment of its Tibetan population has intensified. But while it has been the West doing the focusing, the Beijing Olympics has provided the lens. Everything related to the games, as French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent threat to boycott the Olympics opening ceremony shows, has now become an opportunity for moral grandstanding, an opportunity to portray China as everything we in the West are not. The 31-mile journey of the Olympic torch, from Wembley in north-west London to Greenwich in the south-east, was to prove no exception.

Yesterday morning at the British Museum stage of the route -- one of the protest points for the campaign organisation Free Tibet -- the air was already thick with indignation.

"Grown-up politics goes up in flames: Yesterday’s public grappling with the Olympic torch shone a light on the self-satisfied, cartoonish nature of contemporary China-bashing." By Tim Black and Brendan O’Neill, spiked, April 7, 2008

The attacks on China’s boys-in-blue looks like history repeated as farce. In much of the coverage of the torch relay, commentators have talked about the ‘supine’ British government and the ‘cowardly’ Bush administration which are failing to stand up against the brutes from the East, while cheering the French protesters and the Australian government for taking the Chinese on. As in the past, the driving force behind this outbreak of China-bashing is a perception that the West is in political and social decline, and the East might take its opportunity to snuff out ‘our’ civilisation once and for all. That 15 men in tracksuits could give rise to such an hysterical, out-of-control, fin-de-siècle, prejudicial debate reveals so very much more about contemporary Western fear and irrationalism than it does about Chinese wickedness.

"The invasion of the robotic thugs: The attacks on the ‘horrible, ominous, retarded’ Chinese men guarding the Olympic flame are historical prejudice repeated as farce." By Brendan O’Neill, spiked, April 9, 2009

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is apologizing to those who were disappointed when the Olympic torch relay route was changed Wednesday. However, the mayor isn't apologizing for his decision.

Faced with thousands of anti-China protesters, San Francisco authorities pulled a last-minute switch during the torch relay yesterday. The late change rerouted the torch away from thousands who had crowded the city's waterfront to witness the flame's symbolic journey to the Beijing Games.

"San Francisco Officials Defend Torch Decision," KCBS, April 10, 2008



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April 11, 2008 01:27 PM   Link    Comments (0)

"Ribbon Culture"

In many respects, Ribbon Culture is an analysis of several apparently contradictory aspects of contemporary culture. The ribbon is, explains Moore, ‘both a kitsch fashion accessory, as well as an emblem that expresses empathy; it is a symbol that represents awareness, yet requires no knowledge of a cause; it appears to signal concern for others, but in fact prioritises self-expression’.
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It is the commercialisation of causes, which both empties them of all content and transmits messages that are negative and misleading, that Moore sees as problematic. In seeking to understand why the individuals she interviewed wear the ribbons or wristbands that they do, Moore’s account stands out through her refusal to pander to the rhetoric of ribbon culture, which emphasises ‘awareness’, ‘caring’ and engagement with a cause. In reality, these positive rhetorical sentiments mask an anxious, self-obsessed, depoliticised culture.

"The relentless rise of the ribbons," by Jennie Bristow, a review of "Ribbon Culture" by Sarah Moore, spiked, March 2008





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April 4, 2008 04:47 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Night owl or morning person? Can't sleep?

Night owls are more creative, more flexible and more caffeinated, while morning people are healthier, more conscientious and more emotionally stable, studies have found. So, with the help of several experts, our columnist -- and longtime night owl -- has been working to reset her biological clock.

"Learning to Live Like an Early Bird," by Melinda Beck, The Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2008

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March 5, 2008 01:57 PM   Link    Comments (0)

Chinese Restaurants in America

Chef's Ma Paul Tofu
Chef's Ma Paul Tofu (Wu Liang Ye Restaurant, NYC)
What most Americans know as Chinese food would be more properly termed American Chinese food, a category that includes chop suey and lemon chicken, dishes born in the U.S. Given, as Lee points out, that there are about 40,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S., "more than the number of McDonald's, Burger Kings, and KFCs combined," Chinese food might be our national cuisine. "Our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie," she writes. "But ask yourself. How often do you eat apple pie? How often do you eat Chinese food?"

Chinese restaurants are ubiquitous, usually taking the form of urban carryout shops and suburban buffets. But how did these restaurants flourish across the American landscape? For the most part they are independently run, so how is it they seem to share similar characteristics, such as gigantic menus filled with egg rolls, garish red sweet and sour sauce, and General Tso's chicken?

Each chapter answers these questions and more, examining soy sauce, the distinctive shape of takeout boxes favored by Chinese restaurants, and fortune cookies, which Lee discovers are Japanese in origin.

"West eats East: A fact-filled look at Chinese food, which just might be America's national cuisine," by Bich Minh Nguyen, ChicagoTribune.com, March 1, 2008

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March 3, 2008 08:47 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Campus rape

The campus rape industry’s central tenet is that one-quarter of all college girls will be raped or be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years (completed rapes outnumbering attempted rapes by a ratio of about three to two). The girls’ assailants are not terrifying strangers grabbing them in dark alleys but the guys sitting next to them in class or at the cafeteria.
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If the one-in-four statistic is correct--it is sometimes modified to “one-in-five to one-in-four”--campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. No crime, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20 or 25 percent, even over many years. The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most violent cities in America, was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants--a rate of 2.4 percent. The one-in-four statistic would mean that every year, millions of young women graduate who have suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience. Such a crime wave would require nothing less than a state of emergency--Take Back the Night rallies and 24-hour hotlines would hardly be adequate to counter this tsunami of sexual violence. Admissions policies letting in tens of thousands of vicious criminals would require a complete revision, perhaps banning boys entirely. The nation’s nearly 10 million female undergrads would need to take the most stringent safety precautions. Certainly, they would have to alter their sexual behavior radically to avoid falling prey to the rape epidemic.
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University of Virginia students, for example, have at least three different procedural channels open to them following carnal knowledge: they may demand a formal adjudication before the Sexual Assault Board; they can request a “Structured Meeting” with the Office of the Dean of Students by filing a formal complaint; or they can seek voluntary mediation. The Structured Meetings are presided over by the chair of the Sexual Assault Board, with assistance from another board member or senior staff of the Office of the Dean of Students. The Structured Meeting, according to the university, is an “opportunity for the complainant to confront the accused and communicate their feelings and perceptions regarding the incident, the impact of the incident and their wishes and expectations regarding protection in the future.” Mediation, on the other hand, “allows both you and the accused to discuss your respective understandings of the assault with the guidance of a trained professional,” says the school’s sexual-assault center.

Rarely have primal lust and carousing been more weirdly paired with their opposites. Out in the real world, people who regret a sexual coupling must work it out on their own; no counterpart exists outside academia for this superstructure of hearings, mediations, and negotiated settlements. If you’ve actually been raped, you go to criminal court--but the overwhelming majority of campus “rape” cases that take up administration time and resources would get thrown out of court in a twinkling, which is why they’re almost never prosecuted. Indeed, if the campus rape industry really believes that these hookup encounters are rape, it is unconscionable to leave them to flimsy academic procedures. “Universities are equipped to handle plagiarism, not rape,” observes University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors. “Sexual-assault charges, if true, are so serious as to belong only in the criminal system.”

"The Campus Rape Myth: The reality: bogus statistics, feminist victimology, and university-approved sex toys," by Heather MacDonald, City Journal, Winter 2008

See also "How Crime in the United States Is Measured," by Nathan James and Logan Rishard Council, CRS Report for Congress, RL34309, January 3, 2008 (68-page pdf PDF)



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March 2, 2008 08:27 AM   Link    Comments (0)

The Most Spoiled Girl In The World?

Hmmmmm....




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February 22, 2008 06:37 AM   Link    Comments (0)

May your worst enemy....

Moral: May your worst enemy have a lawsuit in which he knows he is right.

"The Perfect Case," by Jacob Stein, The Washington Lawyer, February 2008


Legal Spectator & More, by Jacob Stein
Legal Spectator & More, by Jacob Stein

January 28, 2008 03:37 PM   Link    Comments (0)

Detroit Public Schools Book Depository

Sweet Juniper’s photos show the ruins of the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository.

"Abandoned hope," Joanne Jacobs, January 21, 2008

"It will rise from the ashes," Sweet Juniper! November 26, 2007

"Rotting textbook warehouse in Detroit," boingboing, January 19, 2007

flickr photos: sweet juniper, flickr search

Detroit Public Schools

January 23, 2008 09:07 AM   Link    Comments (0)

"Humanity, thou art sick"

"In my mother’s generation, shy people were seen as introverted and perhaps a bit awkward, but never mentally ill."

So writes the Chicago-based research professor, Christopher Lane, in his fascinating new book Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness. ‘Adults admired their bashfulness, associated it with bookishness, reserve, and a yen for solitude. But shyness isn’t just shyness any more. It is a disease. It has a variety of over-wrought names, including “social anxiety” and “avoidant personality disorder”, afflictions said to trouble millions’, Lane continues.

Lane has taken shyness as a test case to show how society is being overdiagnosed and overmedicated. He has charted - in intricate detail - the route by which the psychiatric profession came to give credence to the labelling of everyday emotions as ‘disorders’, a situation that has resulted in more and more people being deemed to be mentally ill.

"Humanity, thou art sick: Shyness is now ‘social phobia’, and dissent is ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder’. How did everyday emotions come to be seen as illnesses?" a review by Helene Guldberg of "Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness," by Christopher Lane, in spiked, December 2007



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January 19, 2008 08:57 AM   Link    Comments (0)

The shopping mall

[Victor] Gruen got an extraordinary number of things right first time [with his first shopping mall, Southdale in Minnesota]. He built a sloping road around the perimeter of the mall, so that half of the shoppers entered on the ground floor and half on the first floor--something that became a standard feature of malls. Southdale's balconies were low, so that shoppers could see the shops on the floor above or below them. The car park had animal signs to help shoppers remember the way back to their vehicles. It was as though Orville and Wilbur Wright had not just discovered powered flight but had built a plane with tray tables and a duty-free service.

"Birth, death and shopping: The rise and fall of the shopping mall," The Economist, December 19, 2007



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January 6, 2008 09:37 AM   Link    Comments (0)

"People are generally happier with decisions when they can't undo them"

In 2002, Jane Ebert and I discovered that people are generally happier with decisions when they can't undo them. When subjects in our experiments were able to undo their decisions they tended to consider both the positive and negative features of the decisions they had made, but when they couldn't undo their decisions they tended to concentrate on the good features and ignore the bad. As such, they were more satisfied when they made irrevocable than revocable decisions. Ironically, subjects did not realize this would happen and strongly preferred to have the opportunity to change their minds.

Now up until this point I had always believed that love causes marriage. But these experiments suggested to me that marriage could also cause love. If you take data seriously you act on it, so when these results came in I went home and proposed to the woman I was living with. She said yes, and it turned out that the data were right: I love my wife more than I loved my girlfriend.

"The Benefit of Being Able to Change My Mind," by Daniel Gilbert, Edge World Question Center, 2008




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January 3, 2008 09:27 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Who Pays Federal Taxes?




Source: Marginal Revolution, December 18, 2007; "Historical Effective Federal Tax Rates: 1979 to 2005," CBO, December 2007 (8-page pdf PDF)

CRS Reports




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December 19, 2007 08:37 AM   Link    Comments (0)

When your Karate instructor gets beat up by an interior decorator....

I'm not in the least bit shocked that the CIA would try to destroy the tapes of an interrogation. It's a spy agency for God's sake, not an accounting firm. The whole foundation of the CIA is based on secrecy and covert operations, not transparency and accountability. Yet I too have to confess to being shocked by this revelation. Why? Well, apparently our top spy agency is too inept to handle even a simple cover up operation. This is a very despairing revelation.

It's sort of like finding out that your Karate instructor was beaten up by an interior decorator.

"What is the CIA doing?" Ernie the Attorney, December 7, 2007



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December 16, 2007 11:47 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Real or artificial tree?

"New Yorkers should really never be included in any survey of what normal Americans do."

"re: Did You Know?" by Kathryn Jean Lopez, The Corner, December 7, 2007



Christmas Tree and Neapolitan Baroque Crèche at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC

The Christmas Tree and Neapolitan Baroque Crèche at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, November 20, 2007 - January 6, 2008.


December 7, 2007 08:27 AM   Link    Comments (0)

China

It is Hong Kong’s good fortune to possess, in addition to its corporatist elite, a vibrant civil society, the rule of law, and a free press; China has no such safety valves for the discontent of its people, no resilience in its politics. The echo chamber of today’s Chinese regime--with its slogans and show trials, its claims of expertise and openness, its pretense of oversight and accountability--cannot do the work of pluralist democracy. As James Madison knew, an extended republic, even a “people’s” republic, requires institutional checks and balances if it is not to devolve into a tyranny--or to remain one.

"My Short March Through China," by Gary Rosen, Commentary, December 2007




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November 29, 2007 02:27 PM   Link    Comments (0)

"Nothing in the modern world compares with North Korea"

Nothing in the modern world compares with North Korea, though it gives us some clue about how life must have been under the pharaohs, in Imperial Japan before Hiroshima, or in the obliterated years--conveniently erased from memory by blushing fellow travelers--when Josef Stalin was revered as a human god.
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The main feeling the visitor has in Pyongyang is one of pity at the pathos of the place--its hopeless, helpless overestimate of its own power and importance, the deluded ignorance of millions of people carefully protected from any inrush of truth about themselves, their country, and their rulers. Every radio and TV set has been carefully neutered, its tuning dial soldered so that it can receive only the transmissions of the North Korean state. There is no access to the Internet except for a tiny, select few. Cell phones are confiscated from visitors upon arrival, though the very senior elite are believed to possess and use them. The newspapers are comically constipated accounts of speeches by the Dear Leader, long-ago angling contests, and uninteresting visits by junior dignitaries from countries ruled by dubious governments, which you would struggle to find on a map.

It may well be even worse than it looks. Pyongyang is a show city, inhabited by a favored layer of privileged and chosen people, who know that misbehavior of any kind could lead to exile to places we cannot even imagine. I have seen the miserable coal towns of China, which are open to visitors and have at least been touched by the prosperity flowing through the People’s Republic. They look like 19th-century pit villages in Britain. But even I cannot conceive of the dreariness and overpowering gloom of their North Korean equivalents, hidden away in the northern mountains, which no Westerner ever sees.

"Prisoners in Camp Kim: Strange, secretive, and desperately poor, North Korea tests the limits of social control." By Peter Hitchens, The American Conservative, November 19, 2007




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November 28, 2007 09:47 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Do any economists, other than Milton Friedman, have their own choir?

Do any economists, other than Milton Friedman, have their own choir?

Hat tip to Marginal Revolution

November 21, 2007 08:07 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Lyndon LaRouche - blogger extraordinaire?

If anyone was made for blogging, it was surely Lyndon LaRouche.

"Publish and Perish: The mysterious death of Lyndon LaRouche's printer," by Avi Klein, Washington Monthly, November 2007

November 5, 2007 07:17 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Chinatown Bus

It used to be that you had to venture below the grime-caked pylons of the Manhattan Bridge, to a scene more reminiscent of Luoyang than of the Lower East Side, in order to catch a cheap bus ride between New York and Washington, DC. Even now at the intersection of East Broadway and Forsyth St, ticket hawkers scream out destinations in thick Cantonese accents--“DC, DC, DC!” “Philly, Philly!”--and grab the arms of passers-by toting luggage. Loading queues often disintegrate into a Hobbesian struggle to nab untaken seats.
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Most recently, a Marriott executive founded DC2NY, a service between Washington and New York that guarantees customers seats if booked online and charges only slightly more than the Chinatown buses (a $40 round-trip versus $35). It also offers free bottles of water and Wi-Fi internet access. The “luxury” bus carrier has more than doubled its operation since its inaugural trip this summer. Watch as its older rivals start copying its perks.

"The Chinatown express: Innovation brings emulation," The Economist, October 27, 2007

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October 30, 2007 07:57 AM   Link    Comments (0)

Health Savings Accounts (HSAs)

The open enrollment season for next year's benefits elections is already underway.

Whether you're an employee being faced with new health insurance options through your company plan, run your own company like me, or purchase individual health insurance, the choices you make regarding your health insurance are an important part of your 2008 financial strategy.
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... I found there are a lot of misconceptions about HSAs, including that if you don't use the entire balance of your HSA before the end of the year, you forfeit it. That's not true -- with an HSA, there's no "use it or lose it" rule.

"Seven Things to Know About Health Savings Accounts," by David Bach, Yahoo! Finance, October 22, 2007

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October 27, 2007 10:37 AM   Link    Comments (0)

"Political theology"

It was this trust, bred of homogeneity, that allowed the ideal of toleration to be actualized [in the young United States]. People feel comfortable when they are with their own, and it is only in an atmosphere of mutual trust that norms of acceptance and openness can develop. Because the early Americans seemed familiar to each other, at a certain point it no longer seemed far-fetched that a white male who followed one Protestant preacher and cut his hair in one way, could eventually learn to tolerate another white male who followed a different Protestant preacher and cut his hair in another -- or, later, that this same principle might be applied to people who were not white, male, or Protestant. Tocqueville begins the first volume of Democracy in America with these geographical and sociological givens, which he saw as the necessary conditions of establishing a successful democracy in a large continent. If toleration is the great achievement in American political and religious life, the road to it was not paved with toleration alone. It was the by-product of many other factors that had to be in place before the deeply rooted human urge to distinguish, discriminate, and fear could be snuffed.

But now the principle of toleration has been rooted in the United States and, at least since the Second World War, is formally recognized in the democracies of Western Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia. This is a great success for democracy and, insofar as we have helped things along, for American foreign policy. But it has also bred fantasies about the easy spread of democratic institutions and the norms necessary to support them in other parts of the world, most urgently in Islamic nations. Toleration seems so compelling t