Sasha Castel-Dodge links to this Sunday Telegraph story on the fallout from Nurse Bloomberg’s campaign to make you a better person. The Boston Globe comes to similar conclusions. Long story short: New York ain’t California, where the bronzed, toned, and cap-toothed eunuchs don’t mind if their social sphere is as sterile as their screenplay plots. […]

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You know, rebutting Stan Kurtz is starting to feel a little like debunking astrology. I mean, it’s fun, but why bother? Anyone actually looking for a serious argument will come away from a piece like this with tears of laughter streaming down their face without a need for any third party commentary, and anyone who […]

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I just chanced across an excellent debate between consumer culture booster James Twitchell and Marxist media critic Sut Jhally. Consumer preferences shape ads; ads shape consumer preferences. Which is the snake head, and which the tail it bites? Does it matter?

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Tom Palmer, who shares with Brink the role of capo di tutti capo of the Cato Blog Mafia, has been giving a series of lectures on globalization at colleges and universities around the country. Out in that wilderness, capitalism and globalization (often prefixed with “corporate driven”) tend to be dirty words, though only for rather […]

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John Lott has responded via Instapundit to the most recent set of charges posted over on Tim Lambert’s site.

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Two websites—Savage Stupidity and MichaelSavageSucks—which heap much deserved ridicule upon loathesome, hateful talk-jock Michael Savage have gotten legal nastygrams. The legal theory here would appear to be that Mikey owns the word “savage,” even when not coupled with his first name, and that, furthermore, there’s a reasonable risk of consumers being confused and thinking that […]

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Ken Layne and Mac Diva both have posts on the tension between a journalistic career and a bloggerly avocation. Unlike Layne, I am not convinced that this is a particularly bad thing. First, for better or worse, it’s not altogether irrational for organizations like CNN or Time or what have you to be concerned about […]

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This TechCentralStation piece muddles an interesting discussion of strategic behavior by suggesting that behavior that’s strategically random—as when an agent plays a Nash equilibrium “mixed strategy”—is “irreducibly uncertain,” which is to say, an exercise of “free will.” First, it’s worth noting that even genuinely “irreducibly uncertain” behavior would not be the same as “free will”—certain […]

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I’m delighted to see that even Stan Kurtz opposes sodomy laws, but he does seem to have misread Sen. Santorum’s comments. Kurtz writes: For starters, Sullivan chastises me for ignoring the fact that Santorum equates homosexuality to child abuse and bestiality. But in his interview, Santorum explicitly said that homosexuality is not child abuse and […]

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The blogospheric population keeps on growing: Andrew Chamberlain is the newest member of the Cato Blog Mafia*, the Future of Freedom Foundation‘s president Bumper Hornberger has got himself a blog, and (now for something completely different) alt-rocker Beck is also on the bandwagon. *Standard disclaimer: nobody described as part of the “Cato Blog Mafia” is […]

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