The first book by Hans-Hermann Hoppe that I read was the most excellent Democracy: The God That Failed. In the introduction to that book, Hoppe talks about competing social theories and, in face of conflicting arguments about society or politics or economics, how we can decide between them:
The data of history are logically compatible with… [...]
Tax rates of the rich and poor:
Lowest quintile: 4.3 percent
Second quintile: 9.9 percent
Middle quintile: 14.2 percent
Fourth quintile: 17.4 percent
Percentiles 81-90: 20.3 percent
Percentiles 91-95: 22.4 percent
Percentiles 96-99: 25.7 percent
Percentiles 99.0-99.5: 29.7 percent
Percentiles 99.5-99.9: 31.2 percent
Percentiles 99.9-99.99: 32.1 percent
Top 0.01 Percentile: 31.5 percent
I wish I could find online Gerald Early’s essay, “Dancing in the Dark: Race, Sex, The South, and Exploitative Cinema”. It was far and away the best thing I read in Best African American Essays: 2009, but it looks like it’s hidden away in Issue 57 of the Oxford American, subscribers only.
In any case, Early [...]
Before 9/11, I don’t think I could have named one living person from Saudi Arabia. Afterward, I could name one. So I didn’t know much going into Steve Coll’s book.
The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century starts near the turn of the century, with Awadh Bin Laden’s beginnings in Yemen. His sons [...]
I had been meaning to read Robert Higgs‚Äô book for years and I’m very glad I got to it. And I’ve been sitting on my review for a while because I always fear sounding like a shrill, libertarian paranoid.
Crisis & Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government explores the past century of American [...]
I had been meaning to read Robert Higgs’ book for years and I’m very glad I got to it. And I’ve been sitting on my review for a while because I always fear sounding like a shrill, libertarian paranoid.
Crisis & Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government explores the past century of American [...]
If, as a westerner, you are going to visit Africa, the earlier in your life you do it, the better. The writer also brings up the paradox of service missions:
I suspect my earnest young woman felt that the only “appropriate” way to interact with Africa was to roll her sleeves up and start hammering a [...]
The poetry of Donald Rumsfeld, via Austin Kleon. That stuff is so good. I remember a couple years ago, at a thrift store, I saw a copy of Poetry Under Oath: From the Testimony of William Jefferson Clinton and Monica S. Lewinsky. I wish I’d bought it. This review of Poetry Under Oath has [...]
“After hearing Matt Damon‚Äôs brilliant comparison of a Sarah Palin presidency to a bad Disney movie, I called up Sam and said ‘Let‚Äôs make a trailer for what that movie would look like.’” [via daring fireball]
Reason Magazine has a great illustrated flowchart showing how hard it is to immigrate to the United States.
Against Intellectual Property is a worthwhile paper summarizing IP law, some libertarian arguments for and against, and why IP can’t be justified.
Some nice visual storytelling by the woman who fought the system in Toronto and unpaved her driveway. Lovely results one year later.
I stumbled on a video of Glen Velez playing a frame drum. I saw him in a workshop a while back when I was in college. Insane skills. We also did some overtone singing, but one of the coolest things I remember was him improvising a little solo with shakers, with all kinds of mind-bending [...]
If you fight terror with terror, how do you tell which is which?
By choice, I stayed ignorant of the scandals at Abu Ghraib when the news first broke. Too disgusted. Too disheartened. I didn’t want to see it or hear about it, though it seemed the photos were everywhere. I finally came around.
Philip Gourevitch wrote [...]
Drivers of cars with bumper stickers, window decals, personalized license plates and other “territorial markers” not only get mad when someone cuts in their lane or is slow to respond to a changed traffic light, but they are far more likely than those who do not personalize their cars to use their vehicles to express [...]
New York Times Magazine has a feature on guerrilla gardening. The Guardian has a short video of the gardening guerrillas in action before a little confrontation with the police.
The existence of welfare state is one of the main rationalizations for undercutting the greatest anti-poverty campaign the world has ever known: immigration. …And unlike the welfare state, immigration has and continues to help absolutely poor people, not relatively poor Americans who are already at the 90th percentile of the world income distribution.
If Charles Joseph Minard were following the Clinton/Obama superdelegate battle. Nice connection.
This interview with Bill Bishop, about the increasing social segmentation in America, has some cool tie-ins with a book I’ve been loving lately, Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Levine touches on the changing use of public space in the early 1900s as “Culture” was increasingly associated with the wealthy, and [...]
Comic strip instructions for anarchic overthrow of the office. [via dial m for musicology]
“As unseemly as it is for America’s wealthiest people to strive for more money, America’s political class is far worse. They have a ridiculous excess of power, and yet they only want more.”
Cadillac Desert was pretty awesome. Marc Reisner tells a story (in sometimes overwhelming detail) of the American West, and how we have explored, settled, and altered it. And how it was maybe a little idiotic to do it the way we have.
The Mormons were the first to understand and refine large-scale irrigation projects. Later we [...]
You Are Not Dead: A Guide to Modern Living, an online essay + soundtrack, “was born out of fraughtful observations of the state of our States and the repetitive, empty monotony of consumer culture and electronic music.” [via waxy]
The U.S. terrorist watch list now has over 900,000 people on it. [via funkaoshi]
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