Malcolm Harris writes of the dark history of liberal reform.
Meet Freddie, the cow that escaped the slaughterhouse and found a home.
Warm winter weather is bad for squirrel waistlines.
I wish this piece on the awesomeness of consumer choice had chosen something other than blue nail polish as an example.
The Guardian looks at the question… what the heck happened to Sarah Palin? My stock answer is always the same: The right wanted an icon, the left wanted a villain, and she wanted to be a star.
Jonathan Freedland is concerned that we are laughing at Trump and Palin when we should be worried about how they have tapped into middle class rage.
Labour pollster Deborah Mattinson does not seem optimistic about 2020. This phase of politics where everyone decides that voters can’t be flipped is going to end in tears. For some, anyway.
How FDR and a data whiz from Michigan gave birth to modern polling.
Have we exported spree shootings to Canada?
According to a new study, liberals are more dogmatic than conservatives.
The Bernie Sanders campaign picked an odd fight with Wikipedia over use of its campaign logos, though apparently backed down.
Cheap oil usually does wonders for the economy, but not this time.
Drive safely on Estonia’s icy roads: Make sure to stay over 25mph and don’t wear your seatbelt.
Bruce Springsteen does Take It Easy. I admit that I am a sucker for tribute covers of the newly departed. Somewhat relatedly, Michael Reilly writes about how the Internet has changed the way we deal with death.
Michael Hiltzik writes of the long con of the NFL, and how San Francisco paid a high price for cooperation.
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Nail polish & middle class rage links are wrong.
Fixed and fixed.
Tusen Takk!
from dark history:
“These new schools weren’t bound to the classical curricula of their New England predecessors, and they prioritized practical research and creating experts. They promoted the study of “political economy”—“economics” by 1900—and the discipline took academia by storm.
The first generation of American economists were not laissez-faire capitalists, as an observer might reasonably imagine based on the current state of the field. In fact, they were anything but. “As Christians they judged laissez faire to be morally unsound,” Leonard writes, “and as economists they declared it functionally obsolete.” The British (think Adam Smith) model was unsuited for the era of railroads, labor unions, and scientific management. They much preferred the German idea of society as a single organism. Granted the premise that individuals were shaped by the nation and not the other way around, progressive economists had to decide who would run the country. These people had to be unbiased, scientific, brilliant, and out for the public good. The progressive economists decided on themselves.”
from
https://mises.org/library/pennsylvanias-anarchist-experiment-1681-1690
“The councillors, for one thing, had little to do. And being private citizens rather than bureaucrats, and being unpaid as councillors, they had their own struggling businesses to attend to. There was no inclination under these conditions to dabble in political affairs. The laws had called for a small payment to the councillors, but, typically, it was found to be almost impossible to extract these funds from the populace.
If for most of 1684-88 there was no colonywide government in existence, what of the local officials? Were they not around to provide that evidence of the state’s continued existence, which so many people through the ages have deemed vital to man’s very survival? The answer is no. The lower courts met only a few days a year, and the county officials were, again, private citizens who devoted very little time to upholding the law. No, the reality must be faced that the new, but rather large, colony of Pennsylvania lived for the greater part of four years in a de facto condition of individual anarchism, and seemed none the worse for the experience. Furthermore, the Assembly passed no laws after 1686, as it was involved in a continual wrangle over attempts to increase its powers and to amend, rather than just reject, legislation.”
Ha!
I finally got around to reading this whole thing. Quite fascinating! Thanks for sharing.