I think that it isn't making guns smaller is what turns them into children's versions. What turns them into children's versions is the bright colors and making them look more like toy guns than real weapons. A gun should have a certain intimidating look.

I don't know, I always find the Song of Songs a great read when I'm feeling amorous.

One of the things that amuse me is that a lot of people who complain that the Abrahamic religions are anti-sex often speak positively about the Dharmic religions. This kind of ignores the fact that the Dharmic religions like Hinduism and Buddhism are very into celibacy and sexual restraint.

The common law system places a lot of weight on a person's demeanor when the testify as a way to determine whether that person is credible or not. A witnesses' facial expressions is seen as an important factor in determining demeanor. If a witness appears very nervous in some way than its kind of assumed that the witness is not credible. Thats why its important to be able to see the face of the person you are confronting in court, so that the jury coul analyze his or her expression and determine their demeanor.

I think Mike was being pithy about the conservative definition of freedom

I like Hatikvah and the Marseillese. I agree with you about the Star Spangled Banner.

On a Jewish usenet group, somebody once pointed out that you can make Adom Olam into rousing Jewish anthem by singing it to the tune of Deutscland Über Alles.

Wagner was a composer, not a song-writer. What was rousing Far Rigjt anthem?

The Far Left was much better at song-writing than the Far Right. I don't think that anybody will doubt me on this.

That would be the ideological correct manner but I'd be more impressed with a kid who wrote that he or she wanted her state to be governed in the paternalistic Prussian fashion or in the manner of the House of Bourbon where eveything was to make the King or Queen look splendid. It would show a better understanding of the varieties of monarchy.

I think it actually stems from the opponents of Maimonides. Maimonides attempted to create a creed that would distinguish Judaism from Christianity and Islam. His critics argues that Judaism is based on action rather than doctrinal beliefs.

I believe economists call this the tyranny of small decisions.

I have to admit that I'm not a fan of gnosticism even though I consider myself a religious person. The teachings of gnosticism run counter to the teachings of Judaism. In basic gnosticism, there is a distinction made between the evil of the material and the good of the spirit that Jewish teachings does not support. The Jewish argument is that religion should be about the here and now and this world rather than some time of spiritual world to come. Its why the afterlife plays a very little role in Jewish thought beyond the vague idea that something exists after death but we shouldn't fret about the details to much. In the Talmud, some Rabbis even argued that the Messiah is not going to bring about world peace but simply restore the Jewish people to sovereignty over Eretz Israel and that he is simply a political figure.* I think the focus on the here and now material world rather than any sort of afterlife or alternative to the material world makes Judaism somewhat unique among world religions.

*This minimalistic view of the Messiah is a minority position. I also realized that under this defintion of the Messiash, either David Ben-Gurion or Theodore Herzl count as the Messiah. So if the minimalistic defintion is correct than we are already living in the Messianic Age.

Shazbot, from a certain Jewish perspective belief in God is irrelevant to following the requirements of Judaism. Daniel Bell, in the documentary Arguing the World, recounted how when he told his father that he was an athiest and didn't want to go to Synagogue anymore, his father gave a mystified look that amounted to that God's existence doesn't really matter if you're Jewish than you have to do these things no matter what. The ritual and ethical practices are seen as more important than any sort of belief in God. More than a few Orthodox Jews are athiests and agnostics.

In most of the rest of the world, the idea that a newspaper or media outlet should be non-partisan and not take sides is seen as silly. They accept that certain newspapers go for certain segments or groups in the population and cater to those groups and take sides on issues. Most American newspapers operated differently for most of American history. They might have a slight preference towards one party or another but they generally felt that they should stick to the facts and let people come to their own conclusions. Its only recently that our newspapers grew more obviously partisan and a lot of people don't like it.

Don't worry, New Dealer and I are expert pro-circumcision debaters. If worse comes to worse we'll just make a raspberry on the internet and declare that we won the debate.

Sqeuak and Squawk sounds like bad British food.

This. The opening sentence doesn't capture any of the critics of the market that I know about under liberal or socialist thought. The critique is more of a critique of the culture and practices of business in general rather than the markets in particular. A critique of the inefficiencies of the free market in allocating necessary goods like healthcare or education is part of modern liberal or socialist theory but its not the whole of it.

The disaster in Bangledish this week isn't really a critque of markets. Its a critique of certain business practices that discount things like adequate safety measures and worker's rights. None of this has to do with whether a market in clothes is the best way to allocate clothing to the world's population.

The first step to reforming our prison system is to elimiante the private-for-profit prisons in their entirety. They do not work particularly well and have all sorts of perverse incentives as demonstrated by the Pennsylvania juvenile detention fiasco. Prisons must be run by the government and funded out of tax dollars. Prison guards and everybody else who works in them must be government employees.

I do not think that prison guards need to have a college education but they do need a lot of training. This training should last about a year or two before they are sent to work. It should be roughly similar to the training that the police get but also include skills necessary for working in a prison. The government should train the guards.

This prison is a giant pool party. Prisons like this are probably not riot prone but at the same time the prisoners aren't being rehabilitated towards reintering society. The best prisons in the world in terms of both maintaining order within and rehabilitation are probaly located in the Nordic coutries. At the time of Brivik's rampage in Norway, there were a lot of articles about conditions in Norweigian prisons and the steps taken to rehabilitate and reform the prisoners. This approach isn't really applicable elsewhere in the world. It requires the citizenship to give up any desire for vengence and pay the high taxes necessary to run a proper rehabilitation program.

OTOH, this is a bit different. This isn't high politics, its crime reporting. These sort of lurid prison stories were one of the meats of journalism, especially local journalism, back in the hey day of the metropolitan papers. Stories like this sold copy and papers reported them with glee.

OTOH, this is a bit different. This isn't high politics, its crime reporting. These sort of lurid prison stories were one of the meats of journalism, especially local journalism, back in the hey day of the metropolitan papers. Stories like this sold copy and papers reported them with glee.

I think it's pretty clear that the inmate was the initiator in this ring and the prison guards were willing.

Qub, I think that Vienna's model is not really applicable towards America and is something that even many liberals might find troubling. In Vienna, most people live in and rent from the government. This goes against the entire home-owning ethic in America culture. American preferences are also for single-family houses and even in our densest cities like NYC or Boston, a lot of the housing stock is single-family houses.

More practical problems is that city governments in the United States simply do not have the money to build or run Vienna-like housing estates. Our taxes are too low and can't be raised to the necessary level. American cities have also demonstrated incompetency in building and running housing estates. We produce Cabrini Greens, not the Karl Marx Hof.

In NYC, there has been a war waged against food trucks by the brick and mortar restaurants who fear that food trucks are stealing their business. This is stupid. The customers for food trucks are not the same as those from brick and mortar restaurants.

Union Square used to have great food trucks. All gone now.