June 3, 2012

Support for free market medicine from an unlikely source

An interesting article in this week's New England Journal of Medicine discusses the impact of the Affordable Care Act on illegal immigrants.  The author, who is at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill, says:  ...

January 22, 2012

The Golden Rule of Economics: People Want Stuff

One expects science to make progress, but since at least the 1930s, the science of economics has been stuck between two rival and largely contradictory paradigms, with no end in sight.  Much of the confusion revolves around money rather than wea...

October 27, 2009

Lies, damn lies, and opinion polls

As a life member of the Sierra Club, I enjoy a subscription to their bimonthly magazine.  A small item in the Nov/Dec issue caught my eye: the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) surveyed 19 countries asking...

October 4, 2009

The New Scientist?

I enjoy my subscription to The New Scientist in large part for seeing to what lengths they are willing to go to support global warming orthodoxy.  This week's issue, for example, describes a hitherto unobserved and completely unexplained phenome...

May 6, 2008

Gaia Declares Hudna

A desire to understand the universe seems to be hard-wired into our brains.  However we need a worldview (from the German Weltanschauung which means, literally, "world view").  Continuing with the computer metaphor, a worldview co...

April 27, 2008

False Consciousness and the Rich

Ah, things were so much simpler in the old days, when rich guys would carry moneybags between their homes on Fifth Avenue and the ones in Newport.  Meanwhile proles, living in Dickensian squalor, toiled 18 hours a day in filthy and dangerous mil...

April 26, 2008

A Scorecard For The 21st Century

1939-194121st CenturyTotally outmatched PolandFranceAttempted resistance feeble and ineptFranceGreat BritainSaved the worldGreat BritainUnited StatesTried to stand by but eventually had to take a standUnited StatesChina?Tried to make a deal with the ...

August 4, 2007

Art Or Propaganda? Postwar American Photography

Not since Socialist/Heroic Realism in the 1930's has a mode of art been so rigidly constrained to a political orthodoxy, as photography has been for the last 40 years. Art is, I'm told, is supposed to invoke some kind of thoughts or feelings in the v...