Why Can’t American Cities Create and Maintain a Middle Class?
(This is my first submission as an essayist to the League. I am not an expert in urban planning or socio-economics but they are fields that interest me. This has been a subject I...
Monthly Archive: February 2013
Oops, I’m trying again.
Will post a proper long form post later, but just wanted to put this up here. Taking another stab at crowd-sourcing my degree. For less than the cost of an annoying NPR membership, you...
Third World Factories Aren’t All Sweatshops…
The discussion at Jonathan’s over sweatshops and the commentary on the Thursday thread has brought my mind away from unpacking my books (I still have 5 boxes left to unpack…) and back to definitions...
Your one-stop shop for Oscar miscellany
Jaybird and I had a simultaneous forehead smack. CRAP!!! *WE* SHOULD HAVE HAD AN OSCAR POOL!!!! Damn. We should have. So let’s make this an Oscar grab-bag. I’ve already posted my final Oscar predictions...
Pastagate
On Thursday, the eyeroll news of the day in Canada was the Quebec language police’s decision that a Montreal restaurant could not have the word “pasta” on their menu. It’s a new twist on...
Fun Constitutional Facts: Gun Rights Edition
The words “regulate” and “regulated” appear three times in the Constitution’s current text. Here they are: Article I, Section 8: “The Congress shall have Power…To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States,...
Could Is Not Should
The rules of the game — you may pick one “could” and one “should” in italics below. First, read this recent op-ed from Jon Huntsman in The American Conservative. A few money quotes: The...
Abolition wasn’t an Anachronism.
The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law, which preserves its force long after the...
Meanwhile, in my day job…
Lots of things conspire against me writing as much as I’d like around here, and one of them is my job. So I’m pleased to announce that I can at least sort of combine...
Thursday Night Bar Fight #1: What will be socially verboten in the future?
Note: Thursday Night Bar Fights is a FP feature I’ve been meaning to start for a while now, after a great suggestion by DRS. In a nutshell, each Thursday I’ll offer up a topic for folks...
How Much Regulation Is Too Little?
Two men comfort a third (center), who just indentified the body of his son, Wallace Manko. His son had been a passenger on the fishing vessel ‘Pelican,’ which capsized the day before. Montauk, New York,...
“Secret Children For Me, No Gay Marriage For Thee!”
Pete Domenici used to be a Senator and a conservative one at that, so conservative in fact that he managed to staunchly oppose anything that might benefit gay citizens. The Defense of Marriage Act?...
Occam’s (Rent Seeking) Razor
Both RT and Reason have reported on a story that apparently got its roots over at Infowars, regarding the Department of Homeland Security purchasing paper targets for law enforcement officials to practice gunning down...
New monument is too phallic with all these vulvas around
Without passing judgement on the wisdom of Vancouver city planners, this is not the sort of story I was expecting to read this morning:
The most fascinating behind-the-curtains look at political reporting you’ll read all day:
Last week I noted how Breitbart’s Ben Shapiro reported on a story that Chuck Hagel was in bed with those notorious terrorist sympathizers, Friends of Hamas – and how it turned out that the group didn’t...
Property Rights Are Conventional
…but that may not mean what you think it means. Property rights as enacted in the real world, not as discussed in political theory, are not imaginary. Nor are these rights “merely” conventional, as...
Sully’s Rosetinted View of Traditional Familial Norms
I am not anti-family values. I do not think that “what a family consists of” can be endlessly reconfigured without consequence. There are causes and effects, particular familial institutions and outcomes associated with them. But I...
The State of the Union’s Quiet Radicalism
Michael Tomasky of The Daily Beast’s response to the president’s fifth State of the Union address sounds much like my own. It was Obama’s second liberal stemwinder in a row; and if nothing else, the...
BIBI, Torture For the Cure Edition
It’s been a while since we’ve needlessly argued an impossible hypothetical, no? Imagine a scientist discovers a cure for cancer. The efficacy of the drug at curing cancer is undeniable: it can quite literally...
I’m having a hard time deciding which I find harder to believe…
… that Mississippi didn’t ratify the slavery-banning 13th Amendment until 1995, that after they did no one bothered turning in the paper work until just last week, that the only reason anyone thought to...
