How much can we or should we rely on Wikipedia, particularly concerning controversial issues? I have linked the site in the past from Liberty Papers’ posts and probably will in the future but I do think anything you or I find at Wikipedia should be verified by at least one other source before assuming it [...]

Reading the point/counterpoint posts on the question of how the supreme court would decide on Obamacares constitutionality, was quite disturbing to me in several ways. On the one hand I was heartened, because clearly both Brad and Doug are sane and rational folks with a reasonably solid background in both law and politics, and a [...]

While I’m sympathetic and agree with some of Occupy Wall Street’s grievances, too many of their solutions are fatally flawed. Louis DeBroux over at United Liberty has written some grade A quality snark concerning OWS’s demands for economic equality. DeBroux says he had an epiphany while watching some of the ESPN coverage concerning the NBA [...]

Here’s a very fascinating video taken at New York’s Zuccotti Park where Peter Schiff has a dialogue with some of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Schiff brought a sign that read “I Am the 1% Let’s Talk,” and talk they did. One of the things that occurred to me watching this was how little true [...]

President Obama and his sycophant Keynesian friends in the MSM can’t quite figure out why his policies haven’t improved the economy. Maybe President Obama should listen to an actual job creator, Steve Wynn to get some clue about why businesses aren’t expanding. Here is an excerpt from Wynn from a recent conference call where he [...]

Ezra Klein has a rather thought-provoking post today about human genome sequencing and its ability to allow doctors to better-tailor treatment to the specific needs of an individual patient. It presents a phenomenal opportunity to both make medicine more effective, and IMHO to make it cheaper by spending less time and energy on substandard treatments. [...]

Turned on the news recently? It seems the looters (i.e. collectivists) are everywhere and more active than ever. The big story over recent weeks of course has been the special interest government employee union looters in Wisconsin who call themselves “ the working people” who say they have a “human right” to collective bargaining. Meanwhile [...]

Re: “Don’t Forget Your Homework…or Your Miranda Card” Liberalism in the United States has, over the past forty years, been usurped by the socialist agenda. Our public schools are little more than indoctrination camps for the pacification of future generations. At the same time, conservatism in the United States has been usurped by war-hawks and [...]

Even with all the crowing from the authoritarian left about violent rhetoric, I have yet to see a call to violence as clear as this one from leftist Sociologist Frances Fox Piven: So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs? [...] Second, before people can mobilize for collective action, they have [...]

I tend to be a stickler for definitions and proper usage of terms. One of those that stick in my craw is the use of “Marxism” to describe a lot of systems that Marx wouldn’t have supported. Marx, as an intellectual, had quite a few pretty strong insights economically, but he had some social beliefs [...]

This doesn’t sound good: Chavez said the authorities have determined that 25.8 percent of shares in Globovision belong to one of the owners of the Banco Federal, which the government took over last month citing financial problems and irregularities. … With that minority ownership stake, the government will have a right to name a board [...]

Not sure how it ended up this way, but I’ve got three posts coming this morning on socialism/communism. First we’ve got Friedrich Engels, communist intellectual, opining on the American government in an 1891 work: Society had created its own organs to look after its common interests…. But these organs, at whose head was the state [...]

Being a football junkie, engineer, and overall nerd, one of my favorite sports websites is Advanced NFL Stats. They delve into the minutiae of the game at a level relatively unseen elsewhere, in addition to regularly linking commentary about the sport elsewhere that tackles strategy and tactics at almost a “football coach” level rather than [...]

If it wasn’t already evident that Hugo Chavez is a complete madman, the exhuming of the long dead revolutionary Simon Bolivar should prove that to you: (Reuters) – Venezuela exhumed the remains of 19th century independence hero Simon Bolivar on Friday and will test them to see if he was poisoned by enemies in Colombia. [...]

Saw this (original comic by Wuerker of Politico) at The Big Picture: My question… In what world is it fair that any entity stakes a forcible claim to 40% of your income? It doesn’t matter that the number was higher in the past, the number is simply too high. Again, that number is 40%! You [...]

Sometimes this gets tiring. I’m getting a bit sick of showing that bad consequences, entirely foreseeable (and possibly planned) and predicted, are coming to fruition — and the power-brokers in Washington have the gall to actually act appaled? The great mystery surrounding the historic health care bill is how the corporations that provide coverage for [...]

As we all know, most of ObamaCare is pushed out to 2014 or so. But Ezra Klein, ever helpful, points out this nice PDF which explains what will occur nearly immediately. Ezra is always celebrating the cost-control measures of ObamaCare, so let’s see how these provisions stack up: 1. SMALL BUSINESS TAX CREDITS—Offers tax credits [...]

Catastrophe Denied: The Science of the Skeptics Position (studio version) from Warren Meyer on Vimeo. Warren is local to me (he lives about three miles away actually), and runs both the excellent libertarian small business and economics blog CoyoteBlog, and the absolutely essential climate blog Climate Skeptic.

…Doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have any choice at all. The first freedom is the freedom to fail… And when it comes to choosing our leaders in this country… whoooo boy have we failed big time, for a long time. So fellow gunblogger Tam, being an Ovarian American, got a bit tweaked at a comment over [...]

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 [...]