This is kind of the way I feel about most applications.
Fair trade coffee seems to be the latest fad. I kind of whatevered it until reading this essay.
Here's a relatively long piece (compared to what I wrote) on how we should go about dealing with the gay marriage issue that aligns pretty nicely with what I said in many ways. Plus the dude is gay, so it nicely complements my position from a hetero perspective.

Very important pieces on North Korea and Iraq.

Get to know the enemy (or one of them, anyway) of improving living standards.
This needs to happen. Like, Now.
More examples of the administration's stupidity. How can so many brilliant people be so dumb?

This is just about right.
More Simpsons stuff.
Puppies rule. Nice ones that prevent mass murder do, anyway.
How do you deal with a highly decentralized enemy? Duh.
Here are my thoughts on last night's draft. The Celtics did fairly well, but don't expect a lot this year from the guys they took. The Magic messed up taking Howard over Okafur, not because Howard's bad (I don't know enough to say much about that), but because combining Jameer and Okafur might have improved the team enough to convince McGrady to stay after this year. And Tom Tolbert sucks almost as much as Stu Scott.

Just lovely.

This is what moral equivalence means.
Balko brings up an interesting but not entirely new idea on stopping terrorists. It might do some good, but I doubt it would be a net positive, due to one little thing Jon Stewart pointed out in a slightly different context: We can't outpsycho these guys.
Bye bye Fourth Amendment.
Bye bye attorney-client privilege.
Bye bye democracy.

Monorail. Monorail. Monorail!

Sweet.
PJ O'Rourke on the lack of actual arguments nowadays. It's pretty much just people yelling at eachother, which really only interests me in a very few limited cases.
Here are a couple of posts on valuing NBA players using econometric methodology from Marginal Revolution that I've been meaning to link to.
Be careful when you date in Manhattan.

It's been far too long since I've posted this amazing cartoon. Go, Kikkoman. Fight!
I was talking with someone who's name must not be typed, and two things came up that I thought I should put here. The first is about that book Eats, Shoots and Leaves. It sounds pretty funny, which is pretty strange for a book about punctuation.
The second is about W's spending record. I link not to praise him for this, though I suppose some people will like it. People think he's cut education spending. In fact, he's boosted real spending at the department of education more than any president since LBJ, and even more than he's increased spending for the department of war, er, defense.

Stupid #*(%$@@ Yahoo! won't let me read my email. Heads.Must.Roll. (I hate that method of emphasis, but I wanted to try it out to see if it annoyed me as much when I do it. And it does).
On the brighter side, Franz Ferdinand kicks ass. Or, at least that one song I've heard does.

Maddox rules. Other than about Karate Kid. I mean, that's a classic!
This is what freedom is all about.
And I have to say Das Bus is probably the best Simpsons episode in the long, glorious history of the show. It's the one like Lord of the Flies, and it rules.

Those Monty Python boys are still brilliant.
Don from Cafe Hayek addresses the trade deficit. I must quibble with the quibble though. He suggests that the US savings rate doesn't matter, that only the world savings rate does. There's some truth there, but it is an exaggeration. The actions of people closer to me economically matter more to me economically than people further away. Generally speaking, though certainly not always, this means the first matters more than the second: townies vs. people who live in Watertown; Massholes vs. Californians; Americans vs. Germans.

I forgot to mention yesterday my favorite thing to happen in the playoffs. Even better than the Lakers losing was listening to Reggie Miller talk about "ceasing the moment." Highest of high comedy.

Happy to say that Detroit and LA rendered me wrong. A few people thought the Pistons would win, but I doubt anyone said Pistons in 5. Part of it was because most of us underestimated the Pistons, but it was also that LA played like shit. If they had won playing in such a listless, disjointed way, it would have been an embarassment for the league. Malone's injury contributed, but even if he was healthy, I doubt it would have made much difference
Norm!

A little Prather and Wanniski to help protect from the lies now being told about Iran.
At matthewyglesias.com there's a bit of talk about the inheritance tax. To quote Rand:
Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune.

What a shitty couple of posts.
A little Friedman on Reagan action.
A very Bugs Bunnyesque idea on how to fight terrorists. (I didn't think of that description, unfortunately).
Monorail, monorail, monorail.

With all due respect to RR, who's the greatest president ever? Clearly it's Harrison, the evidence is indisputable.
This seems like it should be on Reno 911.
More seriously, this is an extremely important look at why our intelligence agencies failed on 9/11.

People need to learn more about dirty bombs. Gordon Prather isn't a particularly great writer, but he is wicked smaht and an ok writer, so you should be able to follow along.
I found this article on Hayek and gay marriage quite interesting. I doubt that Hayek (one of the great political economists of the 20th century) ever wrote on or thought much about the topic, but I think the way he would look at the issue mirrors mine own in many ways. What I'd like to see is government stop involving itself in marriages. Help enforce marriage contracts, but not be involved in the marriage business itself. This isn't going to happen, so then we should stop treating certain marriages differently under the law, because that's what's happening. Gay people are married just like straight people are, except that a marriage of a man and a woman has the law's protection. However, we shouldn't rush in either. As we learned from Hayek, institutions exist they way they do for reasons, and we need to be careful when we change them. If the armed services had been all-white and then suddenly fully integrated, there would have been extreme problems. Instead, they were segregated for many years, then integrated. There still were problems, but not nearly as many. We should move forward on gay marriage, but do so in a piecemeal, step-by-step way. Civil unions and state-by-state initiatives seem to me be the way to go for now. As people see that society doesn't fall apart where it is tried, resistance will weaken and more progress can be made. I'll listen to alternative theories of course, but this seems to be the most logical way to deal with the issue.

Amazing.

Here's why you gotta love Bob Dole. Not a great presidential candidate in '96, but he does have sharp, biting wit.
Interviews and game theory. Good stuff to keep in mind.
Take this vocab quiz. I scored a 114 out of 126 questions I answered, 74 unanswered. There were more than a few words in there I should have known, but didn't.

More than meets the eye.
This is how you enter a room!

Reagan and AIDS. Let me get this straight. It's the mid-80's. We know very little about AIDS. Scientists believe, but are not certain, that being around someone with it is not a risky situation. And Reagan expressing understanding for why people were afraid of being exposed shows he's a "pusillanimous Bastard"? Granted, based on this excerpt it looks like he didn't condemn the atrocious mob-like behavior like he should have. Maybe I'm reading into it what I want to, but it seems more likely this guy is. Think of it this way: would you let your kid spend time alone with Michael Jackson? I don't know if Jackson has done any of the things he's been accused of, and he shouldn't be treated as a pariah until proven guilty, but it's irrational to act as if lack of proof is proof of safety. In Reagan's situation I would have clearly condemned the violence and harassment, but given the knowledge of AIDS at that time, being worried about it spreading and trying to prevent it from doing so were not contemptible offenses.

Derrick Jackson takes a different view of Reagan. I think Jackson's full of shit. I disagree with much of what Reagan did, including some of his policies involving race. However, opposing certain policies Jackson thought would help blacks here or to end Apartheid is not evidence that Reagan was racist, or even wrong about those policies. Jackson is evincing what Thomas Sowell calls the Vision of the Anointed, and what I call being an Ugly Liberal.

There's a theory that every election, to the extent it's held honestly, always turns out correctly. I don't completely buy it, but with some additional caveats, I do think it has some insights to consider. Here's some support for the idea.
Goodbye Ray Charles.

Here's a great piece on why the FCC needs to go. Whatever usefullness it used to have (and that's suspect, too), it's time has surely passed.
You often hear that teachers are chronically underpaid and we need to do something about it. Wrong.
Dude, this is such as a necessary invention.

A nice, generally positive but fairly balanced view of Reagan.
And I definitely like this idea of how to honor the man. It's time we got off of the Greenspan standard, so to speak.
This site has some interesting info on the upcoming election. I haven't really checked it out enough to vouch for the info, but it seems accurate. I definitely want Bush to lose, as it suggests he likely will, but I'm not sure how likely I think it is. By November the economy looks like it will be in great shape overall, with Bush justifiably taking a good portion of the credit (though, like any politician, taking more than he should). I don't think we're going to see a lot of developments affecting the election outside of the economy and Iraq, so what happens there will be the determining factor. It can't go well, but it might go well enough to take the heat off of Bush so that people don't base their votes on it as much as they should. And, of course, Kerry really hasn't articulated much of a vision of how he'd handle the situation. Kerry has a history of closing well, so I'm not writing him off by any means, but I still agree with this guy at this point, if I decide to vote for a major party candidate. Which I probably won't do. Ok, enough rambling.

Just wonderful. Really.

As promised:
1. False 2. e (a little bit of all 4) 3. False 4. False (may depend on definition of term) 5. False 6. b 7. False 8. True 9. b 10. False 11. True 12. True 13. True 14. True 15. True 16. True 17. True 18. True 19. True 20. True 21. True (as I interpret it) 22. True 23. True 24. True 25. True 26. True 27. True 28. True, or huh? 29a. a 29b. e 30. True 31. what do you mean directly?

Also, here's a good piece on Reagan. I found the mental characterization of him illuminating.

RIP

Here's an interesting argument for opposing the Iraq War. I don't agree that it is the best argument, but there is something there to consider.
Some decent questions to answer, I probably will tomorrow (to quote Larry David, curb your enthusiasm).
You've been juiced!

I never thought to compare prostitution and carbohydrates before, but it kind of makes sense, if you don't take it too literally.
And then there's Britney's variable chest size, which makes no sense at all.

It's been 15 years, but still the image evokes the same responses from people.
On a somewhat-related topic, follow the link. Jeebus.

The NBA Finals start on Sunday. In the conference finals, I picked one series dead-on, and one wrong. So that makes me 12 out of 14 on picking series winners, though only 4 times have I picked the number of games right for the winner. Plus, I picked both teams remaining to lose a series. So I've done decently, but not great.
Conventional wisdom is that the Lakers will dominate the Pistons, at least when they are focused. In this case, the CW is right. Unless Shaq or Kobe goes down with an injury, the Pistons have almost no chance. The Lakers will be careless enough to let Detroit to win at least one game, and probably two, but that's it. Lakers 4, Pistons 2. Hopefully, I'm wrong. I don't like Detroit much, but I hate the Lakers. Beat LA.

I've always pretty much dismissed the Cheney-Halliburton stories as people making mountains out of molehills, but there may be something there of significance.
Once more we are shown why Curb Your Enthusiasm is a great show.
Seeing this article on Iraq's orignal reasons for arming reminded me of this op-ed on Iraq's disarmament and reaction to inspections.

Well, it looks like we've got a stealth draft now.
Ew.

So I saw The Day After Tomorrow tonight. For free, thankfully. I knew going in that the science behind it was laughable, so I decided to tune it out and just enjoy the rest of it. I figured it would be exciting and fun, and hopefully even good other than the fictional science. Wow. The dialogue was terrible, the acting was medicore, the plot twists were generally stupid, and it lacked any semblance of subtlety. The science may have actually been the strength of the movie. Well, maybe not that, but still, it was awful. Don't pay money to see it.