Monthly Archives: June 2010

Reasons to be cheerful, Part 2.9: Marksmanship is a perfectible praxis.

Take note: If the shit really does hit the fan — which I do not expect to happen — fortune will surely favor the well-prepared mind. No need to get fancy. Aim for the torso and don’t waste ammo.

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Reasons to be cheerful, Part 2.5: It’s raining soup and all you can do is piss and moan that Big Mother hasn’t given you a free bowl.

Take note: If you slaved away for 152 hours at an ordinary job in 1964, you could have bought yourself this classy stereo from Radio Shack: Put in the same 152 hours in 2010, at the same kind of job, and you can buy this much stuff instead: This is the power of (relatively) free […] Continue reading

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Reasons to be cheerful, Part two: If we are wise, and if we are lucky, we won’t “meet the new boss” because there won’t be any bosses.

Watch this: Yes, everyone knows Saturday Night Live is not funny, but that sketch is interesting, even so. Why? What is that bit actually saying? Actors are puppets for writers, never forget that. What are the writers of that unfunny little skit trying to say? Imagine this: Your parents spent a ton of money to […] Continue reading

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Superman

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story The little boy came gamboling up to me when I was just over the ridge. He was big for three, small for four, and cute by any measure. Brown hair, blue eyes and a smile as quiet as firecrackers. I was cutting across the park on my way to the […] Continue reading

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Politician admits human behavior is not subject to coercive control: “You can write all the laws that you want. But it sometimes doesn’t make a whole lot of difference. People don’t follow them.”

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer — made famous by Senate Bill 1070, which requires Los Angelenos, expatriate Canadian basketball players and huffy has-been musicians to act like idiots in public — observing that a state-wide ban on texting-while-driving will have zero impact on texting-while-driving. I figure I violate about 300 traffic laws on a typical day […] Continue reading

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Reasons to be cheerful, Part 1.5: Who cares about the tunnel? All I can see is the light…

I wrote this eighteen months ago, when this economic recession was just getting started. I looked at it again tonight and found nothing in it that I wanted to change. I have more to say on the subject of a long recession, perhaps a depression, but this is a very good place to begin to […] Continue reading

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“In a sense, Britain inadvertently, through its actions in Hong Kong, did more to reduce world poverty than all the aid programs that we’ve undertaken in the last century.”

From The Atlantic, an explication of economist Paul Romer’s idea to build modern-day Hong Kong-like enclaves to promote development in poverty-stricken counties: When Romer explains charter cities, he likes to invoke Hong Kong. For much of the 20th century, Hong Kong’s economy left mainland China’s in the dust, proving that enlightened rules can make a […] Continue reading

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Reasons to be cheerful, Part one: Things rarely change as quickly or as dramatically as we expect them to.

Do you want to hear some really bad news? I mean dauntingly bad, horrifyingly bad, news so bad you could spend days or even weeks ruminating on it, worrying about it, desperately praying for it not to be true. Are you ready? Here goes: While you might have heard that the national debt in the […] Continue reading

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Reasons to be cheerful, part 0.5: Sleeping giants can’t sleep forever.

Do you want something to cheer about? Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is the number one best-seller at Amazon.com right now: It gets better. The Federalist Papers is at number fourteen. I think a lot of people are annoyed that the free country they still remember clearly has somehow vanished right from under their noses. […] Continue reading

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Reasons to be cheerful: Defying the specter of ugly fates.

Reasons to be cheerful, part zero: The ground we stand upon is firm and the lever of the human mind grows ever stronger. I need to take this someplace else. I am madly off-topic here more often than not, this for the past couple of years. I think I may be in the third act […] Continue reading

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