What’s the point of being a brutal despot if you don’t get your own shagadelic bachelor pad? (Via Brooke.)

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Now, this guy, a counterprotester at the protests outside Augusta National Golf Club, sounds like a misogynist. But I noticed that quite a number of commenters on that post applied the same term to the club itself. This is very silly. Absent special circumstances, it’s pretty reasonable to assume that a club or group seeking […]

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Never let it be said that I’ve grown so jaded that I can’t still be impressed by someone who’s been in space. Having been in space is cool. Having walked on the moon, cooler still. And having been one of the first people to ever do those things… well, that’s on the short, short list […]

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Genius.

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So those on the petitioners’ side of Grutter v. Bollinger, the University of Michican affirmative action case now before the Supremes, have argued (inter alia, as the lawyers say) that the school’s means of weighing race is really a disguised quota—and we all know from Bakke that quotas and set-asides are an equal-protection no-no. The […]

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Henry Farrell posts on the role of transaction costs in sustaining despotic regimes. The idea, in a nutshell, is that there’s a sort of first-mover problem that makes submission to tyrranical governments a suboptimal Nash equilibrium. It’s basically not possible to rule by force a population determined to get rid of you. If the vast […]

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Via Radley comes the following bit of “reassurance” from the office of Sen. Joseph Biden, who proves that Republicans haven’t monopolized the art of pissing on the Constitution after all: A friend of mine who works for an advocacy group here in D.C. said he spoke with a staffer in Biden’s office about the RAVE […]

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So there’s no corroboration whatever for this, and it’s probably total bollocks, but this claim by a commenter over on Road to Surfdom was at the very least intriguing. Anyone know if there’s any basis to this? The day of Pte Lynch’s rescue,a BBC journalist on BBC World TV, reported that the raid on the […]

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I hadn’t read James Lileks for some time before tonight, as I had stopped reading a lot of the warblogs. I had read in the earlier stages of the march to war—first while I was making up my mind about the question, and then later because I was involved in the debate over the war. […]

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Wow. This is the most incendiary forum I’ve ever seen Cato hold. Watch the whole thing.

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