Spain and Italy ban short-selling
O.o
Why Microsoft 8 Will Be a Flop
What's Behind the Fed's Slowdown in Money Printing?
New Romney Ad Accuses Obama of Cronyism
The Attack in Damascus: Who Was Killed, What It Means
Riding into the Sunset: Ron Paul versus Ben Bernanke
James Altucher Just Told a Billionaire "No"
The Big Mistake by the Obama Birth Certificate Forger
The 2012 Walter Block World Tour
Lew Rockwell Tells It Like It Is on Government and the State of the Economy
Romney’s Toothless Attacks on ‘Crony Capitalism’
The Knicks Are Even Dumber Than You Think
Was There a Jeremy Lin Asian-American--New York Knicks Thing?
A Power Nap is Good, But Don't Turn It Into a Deep Sleep
Son of Soros on What It Is Like to be the Son of an Oligarch
New Yahoo CEO's $100 Million Compensation Package
Geithner: 'I Have Been The Most F***ing Transparent Secretary Of The Treasury In This Country's Entire F***ing History'
Does Rand Paul Think Ron Paul Supporters Will Become Rand Supporters?
How Food Stamps Enrich Crony Capitalists
How to Stay Dry in the Rain Even If You Don't Have an Umbrella
The Dark Side of China's Economy
Keynesian Krugmanite Climatology Confusion
Kill Count: James Eagan Holmes versus President Obama
IMF Economist: "I am ashamed to have any association with the Fund at all"
Fascinating Rupert Murdoch View on What is Going to Happen in Afghanistan
'Dark Knight' earns $160.9M in wake of tragedy
Confrontation causes 'hysteria' at Arizona theater
Colo. suspect's mom learned of shooting from media
Syria could use chemical weapons if attacked
Shooting suspect in court with orange-red hair
Sally Ride, first US woman in space, dies at 61
NCAA slams Penn State, fines it $60 million
Questions and answers about PSU's vacated wins
The Obama GITMO myth
Alexander Cockburn, RIP
The Aurora Shootings
Government Wins Right to Pretend That Cables Released by WikiLeaks Are Still Secret
You Didn't Build That? Oh, Mr. Obama, You Can't Be Serious
Bloomberg: Police Officers Should Not Protect Americans Until Strict Gun Control Is Enacted
"GOP makes room for Rep Ron Paul at Tampa convention"?!?
I'll Have The "Enhanced" Pat-Down, Please.
Mayor Bloomberg Says Cops Should Go On Strike Until Americans Give Up Their Guns
Best idea the Mayor has had!
(although probably for altogether completely different reasons)
Latest Projects
"Even when leftists talk about discrimination and sexism, they're damn well talking about the results of the economic system" ~Neodoxy
Wesley clark on the cheney cabal and invading iraq, iran, syria, lybia, somalia, lebanon, sudan, who knows who else....
Ron Paul on FOX Business News July 24 2012 on Audit the Fed
Congressman Ron Paul's Floor Speech on Audit the Fed July 24, 2012
The HOUSE Passes H.R. 459 Ron Pauls "Audit The FED Bill"
Daily Paul:
ABC News: Ron Paul's 'Audit the Fed' bill passes the House
Congressman Ron Paul on Bloomberg News July 25, 2012
Neil Gershenfeld of MIT at TED talking about his fab lab, longer version below: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7603731854830368188
edited to add, I cant get either video to embed so I am going to wait until the market actually provides digital connectivity that is user friendly.
What is LearnLiberty?
Okay my crush on Ben Swann has been solidified.
Reality Check: Does Rapper Ice T Know More About The 2nd Amendment Than Journalists?
Victim forgives Colo. shooter
I used to think I knew what that means...but now I'm not so sure. Now it just sounds pretentious and moronic. What the hell does it mean when someone says "I forgive him"? He wants to go have coffee with him and go to Red Sox games? He wants to be pals?
In a libertarian world in which punishment would be up to the victim, I could understand that part of it...that a victim could "forgive" any "debt" that the aggressor had incurred, and the victim effectively relinquishes his right to retribution.
But I get the impression that's not what this guy is saying. Yes, he claims he wants to meet the guy...but to do what? Not to hang out and be good buddies. To literally tell him "I forgive you". It's not like this would have any effect on what happens to the shooter legally. He just wants to say it. And then as if that wasn't pretentious enough, he wants to ask permission to pray for him. First of all, I don't believe for a second that this holier-than-thou asshole is going to honor the shooter's wishes if he rejects that request. Indeed, I guarantee this victim is praying for him now, as we speak. So as far as I can tell, the only point in meeting the guy to say "I forgive you" and ask "permission" to pray for him is to shove his moral high ground in everyone's face.
I mean look at it now, he's got his own headline on Yahoo...and we're here posting about it. And I guarantee this is all over Facebook and Christian blogs and newsletters all over the country, if not the world. And all he did was say this to some reporters. Imagine if this guy ever actually gets in the same room as the shooter. It'll be a damn Barbara Walters Special.
I'm not suggesting the guy is making it up. I actually don't doubt he really does pray for this shooter (I mean these kind of people pray for everyone all the time anyway. And they are always quite good about reminding anyone who wrongs them.) But would he really be friends with the guy? Does he really not want him to be punished, or in some way incarcerated? I'm not so sure.
It would be one thing if he said "nah, I'm not really mad at him. He's obviously psycho. I don't really blame him." Or even if he said "no, I'm not really angry at him. I don't really dwell on that kind of thing." I can understand that, and appreciate that kind of self-awareness and control. But "I forgive him with all my heart"? "I want to meet him sometime" and "the first thing I want to say to him is 'I forgive you'?"
Give me a break.
+1 JJ
For anecdotal evidence, I have a lot of Christian friends on my fb... my news feed is spammed with Batman shooting memes replete with Bible verses, blah blah blah.
I have more important things to do right now, so I've decided to completely ignore this "news" item.
Clayton -
Obama's little known forays into the music business, singing Boyfriend:
http://news.yahoo.com/white-house-obama-not-seeking-gun-laws-173426783.html
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/07/chik-fil-a-homophobes-have-rights-too
It was good until the part where they were for legally punishing hiring discrimination.
Scalia: Supreme Court disagreements not personal
Boston advises teens on how to break up _ safely
Romney stirs Olympic tiff as European tour begins
EYES ON LONDON: A mayor's rejoinder to Romney
Facebook's stock tumbles after 1st public quarter
Colo. massacre casts ugly scar on Batman mythology
Chick-fil-A sandwiches become a political symbol
White House makes clear: No push for new gun laws
Poll: Few think Romney's faith resembles their own
Twitter: Data center problems caused outage
Tweet this: Study finds limits to new 'Twiplomacy'
Does Rapper Ice-T Know More About The 2nd Amendment Than Journalists?
Ice-T Is Right: There Is No Way to Regulate Against a Determined Killer
Rahm Emanuel’s dangerous free speech attack
Does Obama Leak More Than Others?
This one might be old news to some here:
But this one came out just yesterday:
Here's one section that was pretty cool to read:
Newell: When I worked at Microsoft, I got to go and visit a bunch of different companies. Probably a hundred different companies a year. You’d see all the different ways they’d work. The guys who did Ventura Publisher one day, and then United Airlines the next. You’d see the 12 guys in Texas doing Doom, and then you’d go see Aetna life insurance. I don’t know what your experience was like, but it made me think about what the structure of a company should be in terms of the goals that you have as a company. The opportunity that I think we all saw was as follows: In the same way that the PC drove a bunch of business changes, the Internet was going to make a bunch of minor business functions efficient. So you would, instead, build a company out of the highest-value people. So rather than finding the cheapest people in the world to hire, you wanted to find the most expensive people. I think there was an arbitrage opportunity. That was one of the things we wanted to take advantage of. And then if you have that group of people, you have to think about how to make them as productive as possible because they can always leave. About half the people at Valve have run their own companies, so they always have the option not just to take a job at another game company, but to go start their own company. The question you always have to answer is, “How are we making these people more valuable than they would be elsewhere?” It turns out that you make high-value people more valuable in different ways. Let’s say you worked at Valve. I don’t need to tell you anything about games, management, or technology. I can make you better in other ways. A lot of times I make people better by getting stupid, distracting, bureaucratic stuff off their desk. That’s an incredibly easy way to make a senior person more productive. Especially if they’re coming from the film industry, where they spend two-thirds of their time battling entrenched bureaucracies and organizations. It’s easy for us to make a value pitch to someone like Jeremy Bennett, who was the artistic director on The Lord of the Rings movies. However much value he created there, at Valve he can create a lot more value and have a lot more fun. I could go into a lot more detail about our vacation policies or the fact that all our desks are on wheels, but it all comes back to this question of, “How do you make people like you as productive as possible? How do you attract them to the company and then make them stay at the company?” Although you have your own company, so you don’t need it.
Newell: When I worked at Microsoft, I got to go and visit a bunch of different companies. Probably a hundred different companies a year. You’d see all the different ways they’d work. The guys who did Ventura Publisher one day, and then United Airlines the next. You’d see the 12 guys in Texas doing Doom, and then you’d go see Aetna life insurance. I don’t know what your experience was like, but it made me think about what the structure of a company should be in terms of the goals that you have as a company.
The opportunity that I think we all saw was as follows: In the same way that the PC drove a bunch of business changes, the Internet was going to make a bunch of minor business functions efficient. So you would, instead, build a company out of the highest-value people. So rather than finding the cheapest people in the world to hire, you wanted to find the most expensive people. I think there was an arbitrage opportunity. That was one of the things we wanted to take advantage of. And then if you have that group of people, you have to think about how to make them as productive as possible because they can always leave.
About half the people at Valve have run their own companies, so they always have the option not just to take a job at another game company, but to go start their own company. The question you always have to answer is, “How are we making these people more valuable than they would be elsewhere?” It turns out that you make high-value people more valuable in different ways. Let’s say you worked at Valve. I don’t need to tell you anything about games, management, or technology. I can make you better in other ways. A lot of times I make people better by getting stupid, distracting, bureaucratic stuff off their desk. That’s an incredibly easy way to make a senior person more productive. Especially if they’re coming from the film industry, where they spend two-thirds of their time battling entrenched bureaucracies and organizations. It’s easy for us to make a value pitch to someone like Jeremy Bennett, who was the artistic director on The Lord of the Rings movies. However much value he created there, at Valve he can create a lot more value and have a lot more fun.
I could go into a lot more detail about our vacation policies or the fact that all our desks are on wheels, but it all comes back to this question of, “How do you make people like you as productive as possible? How do you attract them to the company and then make them stay at the company?” Although you have your own company, so you don’t need it.
I found an interesting quote on leftism. Read it and guess who said it:
Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful. Words like “self-confidence,” “self-reliance,” “initiative,” “enterprise,” “optimism,” etc., play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone’s problems for them, satisfy everyone’s needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser . . .
Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological needs. For one thing, their attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e., failed, inferior). The leftist’s feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual’s ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is “inferior” it is not his fault, but society’s, because he has not been brought up properly. The leftist is not typically the kind of person whose feelings of inferiority make him a braggart, an egotist, a bully, a self-promoter, a ruthless competitor. This kind of person has not wholly lost faith in himself. He has a deficit in his sense of power and self-worth, but he can still conceive of himself as having the capacity to be strong, and his efforts to make himself strong produce his unpleasant behavior. [1] But the leftist is too far gone for that. His feelings of inferiority are so ingrained that he cannot conceive of himself as individually strong and valuable. Hence the collectivism of the leftist. He can feel strong only as a member of a large organization or a mass movement with which he identifies himself . . . Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists’ hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred . . . We emphasize that the foregoing does not pretend to be an accurate description of everyone who might be considered a leftist. It is only a rough indication of a general tendency of leftism.
Did you guess? It is from the Unabomber’s manifesto.
I have not read his whole manifesto, but despite disagreeing with his anarcho-primitivist ideology, I find him to have some interesting points like his analysis of oversocialization:
Psychologists use the term “socialization” to designate the process by which children are trained to think and act as society demands. A person is said to be well socialized if he believes in and obeys the moral code of his society and fits in well as a functioning part of that society. It may seem senseless to say that many leftists are oversocialized, since the leftist is perceived as a rebel. Nevertheless, the position can be defended. Many leftists are not such rebels as they seem. The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. For example, we are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not. Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them . . . The majority of people engage in a significant amount of naughty behavior. They lie, they commit petty thefts, they break traffic laws, they goof off at work, they hate someone, they say spiteful things or they use some underhanded trick to get ahead of the other guy. The oversocialized person cannot do these things, or if he does do them he generates in himself a sense of shame and self-hatred. The oversocialized person cannot even experience, without guilt, thoughts or feelings that are contrary to the accepted morality; he cannot think “unclean” thoughts. And socialization is not just a matter of morality; we are socialized to conform to many norms of behavior that do not fall under the heading of morality. Thus the oversocialized person is kept on a psychological leash and spends his life running on rails that society has laid down for him. In many oversocialized people this results in a sense of constraint and powerlessness that can be a severe hardship. We suggest that oversocialization is among the more serious cruelties that human beings inflict on one another . . . The leftist of the oversocialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples: racial equality, equality of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to war, nonviolence generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals. More fundamentally, the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of society to take care of the individual.
He also questioned the value of freedom of the press:
freedom of the press is of very little use to the average citizen as an individual. The mass media are mostly under the control of large organizations that are integrated into the system. Anyone who has a little money can have something printed, or can distribute it on the Internet or in some such way, but what he has to say will be swamped by the vast volume of material put out by the media, hence it will have no practical effect. To make an impression on society with words is therefore almost impossible for most individuals and small groups. Take us (FC) for example. If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted. If they had been been accepted and published, they probably would not have attracted many readers, because it’s more fun to watch the entertainment put out by the media than to read a sober essay. Even if these writings had had many readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose them. In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.
Lesson to be learned from these quotes? You can find wisdom in unexpected places.
Some interesting things in the article. I wish it had a bit more information, but it has a fair amount already.
I'm fairly certain that this has been posted before, but some of you may not have read it:
The Myth of the Rule of Law by John Hasnas
Good stuff.
Will the future see guns on the pirate bay, download your model, print, and assemble.
Greg Lukianoff: How Colleges Fight Free Speech
White House spokesman Jay Carney can't name the capital of Israel
The guy next to the lady: "She doesn't know! I don't know!" Lol.
To paraphrase Marc Faber: We're all doomed, but that doesn't mean that we can't make money in the process. Rabbi Lapin: "Let's make bricks!" Stephan Kinsella: "Say you and I both want to make a German chocolate cake."
A Critique of Stefan Molyneux’s “Consequentialist arguments don’t work”
http://nielsio.tumblr.com/post/28092649147/a-critique-of-stefan-molyneuxs-consequentialist
http://abstrusegoose.com/479, beneficence of society:
Awesome.
If I had a cake and ate it, it can be concluded that I do not have it anymore. HHH
http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/04/economics-so-much-heat-so-little-light.html
Mainstream economist smacking down economics :P
Financial Markets in a Free Society | by Jörg Guido Hülsmann
Murphy sings at Mises U 2012: