Entries Tagged as 'Uncategorized'

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

On The Value of Not Pissing Off Than Shwe

Anne Applebaum, David Cameron, and others have been calling for the rest of the world to ignore the junta and just start blanketing the country with aid from the air. It’s certainly tempting; orphaned kids are getting sick as planeloads of medication wait a short trip away, and it’s ludicrous that anyone should have to […]

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

Cotton Castle

Will and I are in Turkey for the week, and the above is a shot Will took from Pamukkale. It’s bizarre, other-wordly white rock that cascades down the side of a small mountain. It looks like ice, but it’s 70 degrees out and warm water from hots springs runs right down the incline. Tourists can […]

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

“In a Sense, They’re Handicapped”

The eminently reasonable Jason Kuznicki weighs in:
[B]eing troubled by both the state and the FLDS does not make one any less a radical for individualism. It’s perfectly conceivable that giving more control to either one means that individualism loses. Highly controlling environments like the FLDS may indeed approach the status of a government, Howley argues, […]

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Ambiguity and Abuse

Tim Lee demands clarity!
There appears to be evidence of statutory rape. That’s a relatively easy-to-define and plainly problematic crime that the state can and should prosecute. If there’s evidence that some of the teenage or pre-teen girls have been raped, that would be reasonable grounds for holding all of the girls between the ages of […]

Sunday, April 27th, 2008

A Fun and Eye-Opening Experience!

Kim Kardashian reports:
My sisters and I recently did a public service announcement about the country of Burma’s struggle for freedom. Their Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi is imprisoned right now and has endured torture.
It’s an incredible story and I’m honored to have helped raise awareness about Burma’s plight. Over all it was […]

Sunday, April 27th, 2008

Skakel Update

The Moxley/Skakel saga continues:
Michael Skakel, nephew of Ethel Kennedy and murderer of Martha Moxley, is now an artist.
Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel, imprisoned for killing a teenage neighbor, is spending some of his time in prison creating art that depicts beauty, danger and the loss of innocence.
Skakel, convicted in 2002 of killing Martha Moxley in 1975, […]

Sunday, April 27th, 2008

FLDS and Informed Consent

What to make of the bizarrely limited conversation surrounding the FLDS raids? A number of people have linked approvingly to this OpEd arguing that the men of FLDS are hapless victims of state-initiated force, guilty only of “teaching their kids that a woman’s highest calling is giving birth and raising children.” With the […]

Friday, April 25th, 2008

Happiness Is Not a Warm Child

How big is the child-shaped hole in a childless woman’s heart ? Not too big, finds Bryan:
Controlling for real income, church attendance, age, and marital status, men take a bigger happiness hit from kids than women, just as I said. On a 1-3 scale, every child predicts a 0.021 reduction in male happiness, but only […]

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

At Last! A Purpose!

Kevin Drum quotes this K-Lo meditation on porn in the military, but misses the best part:
The last thing I’d ever want is a feminizing of our military. But military bases are family affairs and therefore this is worth a discussion.
I love men. I love men being men. I love military men. And I thank God […]

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Let Them Eat Carbs

Wow:
“If part of our problem is that the Chinese are going to eat meat and you’ve got to have corn and soybeans to feed the Chinese their meat, then why isn’t it just as legitimate for the Chinese to go back and eat rice as it is for us to change our policy on corn […]

Monday, April 14th, 2008

Not Just Any Cause

Gene Healy on John McCain’s “a cause greater” fetish:
In his speeches, McCain periodically sneers at American opulence and suggests that leaving Americans alone to pursue their own visions of happiness is a narrow and ignoble goal for government…Here he is in a recent speech at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, telling his audience that if […]

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

Childless by Circumstance

Bryan writes:
Kerry may be right that explicit advocacy of childlessness was higher in the ’70’s; I don’t know. But the Current Population Survey definitely shows a sharp rise in the fraction of women aged 40-44 who have zero children. That percentage was 10.2% in 1976, versus 19.3% in 2004. That doesn’t directly contradict Kerry’s […]

Sunday, April 6th, 2008

The Cruel Tyranny of the Childless

I’ve been enjoying this back and forth over Bryan Caplan’s assertion that he’d rather his hypothetical daughter give birth at 16 than never give birth at all. I’m perplexed, though, by Bryan’s statement that “most people are hyper-aware of the important arguments against” raising kids, but ignorant of the good reasons. Bryan also implies that […]

Saturday, April 5th, 2008

Is This What George Trow Was Talking About?

I was baffled at what Kim Kardashian had done to merit her own reality TV show until I caught the transcendent E!Truly Hollywood Story on the Kardashian family, which informed me that Kim’s mother was good friends with Nicole Simpson before Kim’s father was on O.J.’s defense team, the guy in her sex tape is […]

Saturday, April 5th, 2008

Only 124 More Days Of Militant China-Bashing to Go!

The following meditation on extreme poverty is brought to you from the Weekly Standard:
The day after the IOC made its historic announcement, former Carter national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski–who these days advises Barack Obama–took to the Times op-ed page to disavow any parallel between the 1980 Moscow Olympics and the 2008 Beijing games. Brzezinski had […]