Thoughts

Secret Assault on Terrorism Widens on Two Continents By SCOTT SHANE, MARK MAZZETTI and ROBERT F. WORTH The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/world/15shadowwar.html In roughly a dozen countries — from the

A long day of reading. A long day of studying college course curricula from a dozen large universities. A long day of discovering that far too many feign scientific methods,

Let me say this in public. Openly. With conviction. “Over…. My…. Dead…. Body….” Let me promise any and all that I mean that statement. I’ll die to prevent it. Period.

[table id=2 /] NOTES Forms Of Argumenta) Our Republican political system is a trade of violence for argument. Argument, consent, and majority-voting are proxies for violence. These proxies for violence

The Curious Capitalist at Time Magazine posts: “Is economics ideological by nature?” by Barbara Kiviat It’s easy to rag on economics as not being a “real” science, and I try

MEGAN MCARDLE at the Atlantic, posted an essay question by Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect,

From the WSJ: The Wall Street Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet

For some reason, Joseph Fouche from The Committee On Public Safety found a proposal on revising English Spelling interesting enough to write about. He lifts this example: It woz in

As I spend more of my time trying to understand the different ways by which the USA will degenerate from its position of trade-empire, I have been working on the

Loved this little paragraph today on “extend and pretend”. Although I can’t remember where I found it. The government has been playing “extend-and-pretend” based entirely on the idea that pent

This article by a local democratic group led me to this CBPP article, which is a response to a paper by the Heritage foundation. Some critics continue to assert that

Paul Krugman writes, in Permanently High Unemployment I really don’t think people appreciate the huge dangers posed by a weak response to 9 1/2 percent unemployment, and the highest rate

I’ll finish with this: Entrepreneurship is the art of finding problems and solving them for less cost than the customer is willing to pay for it. So entrepreneurship is starting

Hi. Thanks for the invite. Interesting posts. But having built or founded a number of companies from 5M-150M, I have to say that most of the inspirational propaganda read be

Kenneth V. asks: I’m curious about your opinion on China’s future. As the democratic empire collapses in the west and power shifts its balance, do you think that the Chinese

A work of personal experience by a reporter cohabitating with soldiers in Afghanistan. A work that states the patently obvious. At least, patently obvious to anyone with testosterone: That men

I’m watching Obama talk about the new small business jobs bill on the news. And I”m struck by the observation that he has a really hard time saying ‘small business’.

Over on Questions and Observations, Bruce McQuain questions whether we’re having another “Great Depression” or just a very slow recovery. An unnamed visitor pointed to a graphic from The Atlantic

No. But increased liability would. I found the Straight Dope forums and they’re full of fairly good libertarian thinking. So I’m going to add them to my crawler’s roundtable. This

On Straight Dope, there is a thread on whether one can be anti-capitalist but pro-market. I’ve captured my response below. DEFINITIONS 1) Capitalism (distributed planning and control using the technologies