Courtesy of GraphJam.com via “Mostly Cajun“

According to this Twitter account, if former Governor Mike Huckabee’s lips are moving, he’s lying.  Let put that statement to a test. Here’s an excerpt from a recent interview transcript (emphasis added): The last time out, my biggest challenge was with the establishment Republicans who just never showed their support. And while I think a [...]

We will probably never know precisely why the senior staff at the Climate Research Unit decided to quit being scientists in order to take up the profession of Cargo Cult Scientist. It could be the celebrity of being known as leading researchers. It could be a genuine fear that if they didn’t lie, humanity would make the “wrong” decision and render the Earth uninhabitable. It could be a totalitarian desire to rework society according to blue-prints that were pleasing to them. It could be because they wanted the lucrative grant money. It could be that they feared being viewed as has-been or never-were hacks.

What we can tell, though, is that their fraud was predicated on their inexhaustible supply of grants from governments, grants that transferred an uninterruptible stream of taxes into their coffers. The system was such that these Cargo Cult scientists were able to establish themselves as authorities, and suborn the skeptical review of and replication of their work, and, for a time, act in an environment that lacked negative consequences for their misconduct. That is, until someone blew the whistle.

Now, as we’ve all been taught for many years, the free market is the tool of evil brutes, who’d just as soon toss your kids into a sweatshop (if not outright slavery) to produce products that are dangerous and deadly, and will collude amongst their fellow ruffians to ensure that consumers have no recourse to [...]

For some time, it looked like Republicans were more persuasive liars than their counterparts in DC. After all, they (with the assistance of Judith Miller and The New York Times) convinced a great deal of Americans that aluminum tubes had been intercepted which were to be used to create nuclear bombs. Visions of Islamic terrorists [...]

Words fail: Ari Fleischer Communications, a sports public relations firm headed by the former press secretary for President George W. Bush, has been hired by BCS officials to help remodel the tattered image of college football’s postseason system. I can’t wait to see what softballs Jeff Gannon tosses as questions during the pressers.

Goldbugs have long-believed that central banks try to manipulate the price of gold, i.e. dumping gold onto the market at certain times to keep the price down, then slowly re-acquiring it after the spike passes, etc. But in an era where the goldbugs are predicting $2000/oz and higher (I’ve seen predictions of $5000/oz), I don’t [...]

He’s referencing an Indian doctor who offers low-cost open-heart surgeries, looking to build a new facility in the Caymans to serve the American market (emphasis added): A few notes: Shetty runs a for-profit business, not a charity. He makes money at these prices. And although a big part of his lower prices has to do [...]

Somewhere during the summer/fall of 2005, Eric started kicking around an idea with some of us on the old Life, Liberty, Property blog community. Many of us at our own personal blogs had risen to the level of Marauding Marsupial in Truth Laid Bear’s old tracking system, but Eric thought we could be a more [...]

With my busy work schedule as it is, I managed to miss the very encouraging news that Cory Maye will get a new trial! I think it will be very interesting how his second trial unfolds now that he will have a better legal team with better expert witnesses to debunk the dubious testimony of [...]

Way back in 2006 (and prior to that at my old site), I raised a question of how a libertarian society deals with children. It’s well summarized from this comment: If a parent believes in spanking, we don’t take the child away from the parents. If the parents are beating their children abusively, we do. [...]

Megan McArdle coins a new word: That’s why I really wish the media wouldn’t act like, well, a bunch of elitist hooligans who are out to get her. I’ve coined a new phrase to cover the situation: Palinoia. It’s when you think people are out to get you, and then they do their best to [...]

Just 247 days after topping $ 11 trillion and 414 days since passing the $ 10 trillion mark, America’s national debt is now above the eye-popping level of twelve trillion dollars: It’s another record-high for the U.S. National Debt which today topped the $12-trillion mark. Divided evenly among the U.S. population, it amounts to $38,974.34 [...]

This is as succinct, and as masterful a description of the relationship between the rights of man, and the government of a free state, as I have yet seen. “I cannot, and will not, consent that the majority of any republican State may, in any way, rightfully restrict the humblest citizen of the United States [...]

From the Mises Econ Blog, regarding Obama’s two most recent FTC nominees: For those keeping score, with Brill and Ramirez the FTC will now consist of two law firm partners specializing in antitrust, one former state assistant attorney general for antitrust, a law professor who specialized in antitrust, and a former staff lawyer for the [...]

Ezra Klein quotes approvingly from Bruce Bartlett’s new book, The New American Economy: The Failure Of Reaganomics And A New Way Forward: The reality is that even before spending exploded to deal with the economic crisis, the government was set to grow by about 50 percent of GDP over the next generation just to pay [...]

There are few figures in the American libertarian movement that gave rise to as much controversy or passion as Ayn Rand. Love her or hate her, it’s hard to find a libertarian who doesn’t have an opinion about the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. For many of us, she was the one who [...]

When Ludwig von Mises first arrived in the United States after escaping from Nazi Europe, and pretty much up until the present day, he was essentially ignored by the mainstream economics community in the United States. It was only through the assistance of American businessmen that he was able to get a job teaching at [...]

But the special function of certain Newspeak words, of which oldthink was one, was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them. These words, necessarily few in number, had had their meanings extended until they contained within themselves whole batteries of words which, as they were sufficiently covered by a single comprehensive term, [...]

“You see that’s the whole point of being the government. If you don’t like something, you simply make up a law that makes it illegal.” –Kenneth Brannagh in “Pirate Radio”