NEWT GINGRICH: The Al Gore of the “traditional values” world.
Archive for 2010
August 11, 2010
SHOULD MOTHERS blog about their kids?
FROZEN JET STREAM leads to fire, flood and famine.
NICK SCHULZ: Who’s Laffing At Europe?
AMAZON IS SELLING TEXTBOOKS AT A DISCOUNT. Plus, free Amazon Prime for students. So is it a bad thing that this wasn’t around when I was a student, or a good thing? . . . .
CAN SEX MAKE YOU MORE BEAUTIFUL? Is there anything it can’t do?
MAPPING HOLES in U.S. Border Security.
PAUL RYAN: Hill Democrats in “panic mode.”
A LIBERTARIAN HISTORY LESSON for Jonathan Chait.
WHY DRAG RACING is awesome.
DAVID HARSANYI: What The Atlantic — and others — got wrong about Colorado.
KARL DENNINGER on the economy and Mr. Ponzi.
BRUCE YANDLE: Everyman’s Deficit: Spending Beyond Our Means.
FRANK MUNGER: Another odd vehicle incident in DOE complex. “It seems like there has been a continuing series of unusual vehicle accidents at Department of Energy sites in recent years, some of them qualifying as near-misses, others even more serious.”
JETBLUE: “The whole experience of flying is now totally abusive, authoritarian and dysfunctional. It is guaranteed to bring out the worst in everyone …”
UPDATE: Reader James Flanagan emails: “Kind of like our government, eh?”
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: The Point Of No Return. “For the Obama administration, the prospect of a nuclearized Iran is dismal to contemplate— it would create major new national-security challenges and crush the president’s dream of ending nuclear proliferation. But the view from Jerusalem is still more dire: a nuclearized Iran represents, among other things, a threat to Israel’s very existence.” I think some people in Washington — and elsewhere — have been letting the Israelis twist in the wind in the hopes that Israel will solve our Iran problems for us, and take the blame. I don’t think these “leaders” will like the outcome, and if I were the Israelis I wouldn’t be trying too hard to make it pleasant. Irresponsibility can be expensive.
UPDATE: Herschel Smith emails: “Good point. I have a coworker who believes – and practices – the philosophy that filling in the gap for bad managers, even when you see something that is about to go very wrong, is generally a bad idea. It continues them in their stolid beliefs, enables them to continue to be poor managers, and allows them to keep from growing up. Allowing leadership to succeed or fail on their own merits is always best. It develops them and helps them to stop their bad behavior.”
IN THE MAIL: From Robert Heinlein, The Puppet Masters.
THE ANCHORESS: Love, Limits, And Loss.
That story, somehow, made me think of this one.
MICHAEL BARONE: Obama’s state capitalism: A failure of modesty.
The fact that the private-sector economy has not responded as administration economists expected and confidently predicted should be a wake-up call.
It shows the limits of expert knowledge and of the ability of political actors to make optimal economic choices.
The intellectual firepower of this administration may be high. But so was the intellectual firepower of the postwar British Labour governments that nationalized steel and auto companies and the railroads.
That didn’t turn out so well, and for decades the British economy lagged behind those of America and its European neighbors. State capitalism has been tried before. It didn’t work. Market capitalism works better because it doesn’t depend on one set of actors to make all the choices. Entrepreneurs with a vision for the future can take their chances, and most may fail. But some will turn out to be Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, who changed our world in ways that 99 percent of economic experts were unable to predict.
Indeed. You could write a book about it.
YOU CAN’T FIGHT IN THE WAR ROOM, and you can’t sing the National Anthem at the Lincoln Memorial.
TAXES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE (CONT’D): Museum Directors Enjoy Tax-Free Housing in Multi-Million Dollar Condos.