The Gulf Spill: This ( “Beyond Pathetic”) is an absolutely not-to-be-missed article by Andrew B. Wilson, published in The Weekly Standard. He presents with much more evidence the thesis that I was trying to develop in an earlier blog post about the coporate culture of BP under John Browne. And there is a larger issue here: the dividing line does not run between corporations and government, but between pro-capitalists (businessmen and politicians) and--something else. My friend Rob Bradley calls them “political capitalists,” but I refuse to use that term because it was made popular in the 1960s by the infinitely odious Gabriel Kolko. Many people use the term “crony capitalists,” but that is wrong also--because it implies that a kind of capitalism involved. As a commenter on Ira Stoll’s blog “The Future of Capitalism” wrote: “Quit calling it crony capitalism. Just call it Cronyism—it's shorter, deletes the unimportant word, focuses on the important one. It is just the same as crony socialism or crony pflugerism. The issue is the cronyism, and it's the cronyism that causes all the rules of equal justice to break down.”
On Cope’s book, Experiments in Musical Intelligence: “In twenty years of working in artificial intelligence, I have run across nothing more thought-provoking than David Cope’s Experiments in Musical Intelligence. What is the essence of musical style, indeed of music itself? Can great new music emerge from the extraction and recombination of patterns in earlier music? Are the deepest of human emotions triggerable by computer patterns of notes?
The son of a frustrated concert pianist, Cope remembers crawling around under his father’s piano listening to the music of Chopin, Schumann, and Rachmaninov. “No matter how hard I tried I could not escape from the fact that I was a musician, and that was my destiny,” Cope explains. “Music is what I am.”
Ask Jeannette Claudine Romeu what she does, and you’ll get a collection of answers. The fifth-generation musician is by turns a pianist...
The piano prelude begins insistently, with a loud, rhythmic figure repeated immediately at a lower register. The music winds up and down
Like any story relying on the fantastic, the superhero film has a test: does the fantastic sharpen and enhance the theme and the conflicts..
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SAW more deaths from wars than at any time in human history—some 15 million in World War I and 60 million in World....
Consider two horrific acts. Number one: a depressed father enters his living room, shoots his wife and children, and then himself. Number
Honest Services A story I missed yesterday: Seth Lipsky (of the always valuable Future of Capitalism blog) has an article at the WSJ called “Conrad Black and the Criminalization of Business.” W hat I don’t understand is why, if people have a forum in which to speak out, their blogs are not hammering away, day after day, about the injustice of putting such men in prison. BRC intends to. I hope we can avoid being tedious. But we cannot forget the victims of anti-capitalism.
Honest Services The estimable Tom Kirkendall, of the blog “Houston’s Clear Thinkers,” performs a useful chore today: Reminding us how large a part the press played in the “Great Houston Rich-Hunt” that brought down Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and many others. (Kirkendall’s own Enron client, the company’s post-Fastow CFO, Jeffrey McMahon, was never criminally charged.) Kirkendall mentions, in particular, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, although it has, over the years, been the single least culpable voice in the media when it comes to business prosecutions—and in many cases it has done splendid work in opposing them. Thus, its apology the other day to Conrad Black was both the most expected and the least truly needed: The Black and Skilling cases are precisely the kind involving high-profile, unsympathetic defendants in which willful prosecutors like Mr. Fitzgerald are inclined to abuse the honest services law. They know the media won't write about the legal complexities, and they know juries are often inclined to find a rich CEO guilty of something. We regret that in the case of Mr. Black, that failure of media oversight included us. I mentioned the other day that Timothy Sandefur of Pacific Research Institute and Timothy Lynch of the Cato Institute filed an amicus brief in the Skilling case, but I failed to provide a link. Here is it . The Gulf Spill Lawrence Solomon of Canada’s Financial Post has a must-read article on the BP spill, called “The Avertible Catastrophe.” In it, he compares the American response to the Gulf spill with the Dutch response to oil spills--and what they could have done to mitigate the Gulf spill had their offers of assistance been accepted. Here is an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal on measuring the size of oil spills . Anyone listening to the chattering classes knows that many accuse BP of having systematically underestimated the extent of the Gulf spill, while others offer precise comparisons between the Deepwater Horizon spill and those of Ixtoc 1 and the ExxonValdez. As the Journal article points out, the figures calculated for those earlier spills are highly inexact, even long after the fact. spiderID=605
Be it the public option (that’ll eliminate all other options), the co-opting “co-op”, or the make-believe market that is the “insurance exchange”: if implemented, these euphemisms for centrally planned medicine will mean many more bureaucracies manned by plenty of government workers. Government workers may not always be genial to the public that pays them, but they are generous to a fault with their own. In the course of providing the stellar service for which the United States Postal Service has become famous, they pay themselves sizeable salaries and bountiful benefits, and retire years before the stiffs who support them can afford to.
April 16, 1967. A wet, icy wind blew off the Charles River and howled down the wide channel of Massachusetts Avenue, gusting into narrow ...
Six decades after its publication, The Fountainhead is still very much alive. New readers by the hundreds find it every day
Atlas Shrugged is structured in three major parts, each of which consists of ten chapters. The parts and chapters are named, and the....
"You want to stand alone against the whole world?" That's certainly how it seems for Howard Roark as he's expelled from...
Objectivism holds that man has free will. In every moment, many courses of action are open to us; whichever action we take, we could equally
Objectivism reads "I am my brother's keeper" as a short-hand for an ideal of self-sacrifice and service to the group. In other words, it...
Libertarianism is the political position that all human relationships should be voluntary, i.e. not subject to the initiation of force by...
Transhumanism (e.g. H+ ) or Extropianism is an ideological coalition centered on the idea that, in the near future, substantial....
In Atlas Shrugged , the hero, John Galt, makes a radio speech to the nation revealing the strike of the producers and explaining its......
The Gulf Spill: This ( “Beyond Pathetic”) is an absolutely not-to-be-missed article by Andrew B. Wilson, published in The Weekly Standard. He presents with much more evidence the thesis that I was trying to develop in an earlier blog post about the coporate culture of BP under John Browne. And there is a larger issue here: the dividing line does not run between corporations and government, but between pro-capitalists (businessmen and politicians) and--something else. My friend Rob Bradley calls them “political capitalists,” but I refuse to use that term because it was made popular in the 1960s by the infinitely odious Gabriel Kolko. Many people use the term “crony capitalists,” but that is wrong also--because it implies that a kind of capitalism involved. As a commenter on Ira Stoll’s blog “The Future of Capitalism” wrote: “Quit calling it crony capitalism. Just call it Cronyism—it's shorter, deletes the unimportant word, focuses on the important one. It is just the same as crony socialism or crony pflugerism. The issue is the cronyism, and it's the cronyism that causes all the rules of equal justice to break down.”
On Cope’s book, Experiments in Musical Intelligence: “In twenty years of working in artificial intelligence, I have run across nothing more thought-provoking than David Cope’s Experiments in Musical Intelligence. What is the essence of musical style, indeed of music itself? Can great new music emerge from the extraction and recombination of patterns in earlier music? Are the deepest of human emotions triggerable by computer patterns of notes?
The son of a frustrated concert pianist, Cope remembers crawling around under his father’s piano listening to the music of Chopin, Schumann, and Rachmaninov. “No matter how hard I tried I could not escape from the fact that I was a musician, and that was my destiny,” Cope explains. “Music is what I am.”
Ask Jeannette Claudine Romeu what she does, and you’ll get a collection of answers. The fifth-generation musician is by turns a pianist...
The piano prelude begins insistently, with a loud, rhythmic figure repeated immediately at a lower register. The music winds up and down
Like any story relying on the fantastic, the superhero film has a test: does the fantastic sharpen and enhance the theme and the conflicts..
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SAW more deaths from wars than at any time in human history—some 15 million in World War I and 60 million in World....
Consider two horrific acts. Number one: a depressed father enters his living room, shoots his wife and children, and then himself. Number
Honest Services A story I missed yesterday: Seth Lipsky (of the always valuable Future of Capitalism blog) has an article at the WSJ called “Conrad Black and the Criminalization of Business.” W hat I don’t understand is why, if people have a forum in which to speak out, their blogs are not hammering away, day after day, about the injustice of putting such men in prison. BRC intends to. I hope we can avoid being tedious. But we cannot forget the victims of anti-capitalism.
Honest Services The estimable Tom Kirkendall, of the blog “Houston’s Clear Thinkers,” performs a useful chore today: Reminding us how large a part the press played in the “Great Houston Rich-Hunt” that brought down Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and many others. (Kirkendall’s own Enron client, the company’s post-Fastow CFO, Jeffrey McMahon, was never criminally charged.) Kirkendall mentions, in particular, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, although it has, over the years, been the single least culpable voice in the media when it comes to business prosecutions—and in many cases it has done splendid work in opposing them. Thus, its apology the other day to Conrad Black was both the most expected and the least truly needed: The Black and Skilling cases are precisely the kind involving high-profile, unsympathetic defendants in which willful prosecutors like Mr. Fitzgerald are inclined to abuse the honest services law. They know the media won't write about the legal complexities, and they know juries are often inclined to find a rich CEO guilty of something. We regret that in the case of Mr. Black, that failure of media oversight included us. I mentioned the other day that Timothy Sandefur of Pacific Research Institute and Timothy Lynch of the Cato Institute filed an amicus brief in the Skilling case, but I failed to provide a link. Here is it . The Gulf Spill Lawrence Solomon of Canada’s Financial Post has a must-read article on the BP spill, called “The Avertible Catastrophe.” In it, he compares the American response to the Gulf spill with the Dutch response to oil spills--and what they could have done to mitigate the Gulf spill had their offers of assistance been accepted. Here is an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal on measuring the size of oil spills . Anyone listening to the chattering classes knows that many accuse BP of having systematically underestimated the extent of the Gulf spill, while others offer precise comparisons between the Deepwater Horizon spill and those of Ixtoc 1 and the ExxonValdez. As the Journal article points out, the figures calculated for those earlier spills are highly inexact, even long after the fact. spiderID=605
Be it the public option (that’ll eliminate all other options), the co-opting “co-op”, or the make-believe market that is the “insurance exchange”: if implemented, these euphemisms for centrally planned medicine will mean many more bureaucracies manned by plenty of government workers. Government workers may not always be genial to the public that pays them, but they are generous to a fault with their own. In the course of providing the stellar service for which the United States Postal Service has become famous, they pay themselves sizeable salaries and bountiful benefits, and retire years before the stiffs who support them can afford to.
April 16, 1967. A wet, icy wind blew off the Charles River and howled down the wide channel of Massachusetts Avenue, gusting into narrow ...
Six decades after its publication, The Fountainhead is still very much alive. New readers by the hundreds find it every day
Atlas Shrugged is structured in three major parts, each of which consists of ten chapters. The parts and chapters are named, and the....
"You want to stand alone against the whole world?" That's certainly how it seems for Howard Roark as he's expelled from...
Objectivism holds that man has free will. In every moment, many courses of action are open to us; whichever action we take, we could equally
Objectivism reads "I am my brother's keeper" as a short-hand for an ideal of self-sacrifice and service to the group. In other words, it...
Libertarianism is the political position that all human relationships should be voluntary, i.e. not subject to the initiation of force by...
Transhumanism (e.g. H+ ) or Extropianism is an ideological coalition centered on the idea that, in the near future, substantial....
In Atlas Shrugged , the hero, John Galt, makes a radio speech to the nation revealing the strike of the producers and explaining its......