Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height
- You Keep Using That Word…
In this case, “justice,” which doesn’t really mean what the left thinks it does. An interesting experiment is about to be conducted in London. A public-housing authority has constructed exact replicas of elegant early-Victorian townhouses on one side of Union Square in Islington, of the kind much coveted by bankers and lawyers in the nearby […]
- Debt Limit Chicken
Professor Bainbridge takes a game theory approach, wherein the Republicans must persuade the Democrats that they really are crazy enough not to raise the debt ceiling, barring serious spending cuts. Last time, given the election schedule, I thought the deal was defensible. But Bainbridge’s reasoning now is sound: So there are the GOP’s choices: Give […]
- Bitterness, Cynicism Don’t Work Well
Here, or in Israel: A poll publicized in Haaretz last week found that more than half the Israelis who vote for left-leaning parties (54.4%, to be pedantic) “would leave the country if they could.” That’s twice the rate of right-wing voters. According to the survey, it is the economy, rather than politics, that accounts most for the […]
- Obama’s SecDef Nominee: ‘Let the Jews pay for it’
According to JINSA official Marsha Halteman: “He said to me, ‘Let the Jews pay for it’,” said Marsha Halteman, director for military and law enforcement programs at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which led the battle to keep USO Haifa operational. Hagel’s campaign to close the storied USO port struck many observers, […]
- National Debt – Tennessee Ernie Ford Edition
Via the Eeyores over at Zero Hedge, this cheery thought about the $1 Trillion coin: It was already a bad idea. Now, it’s just stupid.
- The Great Swindle
Roger Scruton asks how we ended up with so much fake culture: Hence for a long time now, it has been assumed that there can be no authentic creation in high art which is not in some way a ‘challenge’ to public culture. Art must give offence, stepping out armed against the bourgeois taste for […]
- US Shale Oil Reducing Direct Dependence
Via Mark Perry: Prices are still largely a function of world markets, but the idea that Keystone XL, for instance, won’t help this is just silly. And the Left keeps touting boutique energies like solar and wind as means to “energy independence.” Can we please stop the ethanol mandate now? Note also that this peaked […]
- Mandatory Gun Insurance?
This strikes me as a terrible idea, since there are already plenty of laws on the books that make gun owners liable for the misuse of their weapons, either by themselves or other, but they’re asking economists, so Russ Roberts provides the coup de grace: But the logic is not quite as neat as it […]
- The Palestinian Authority’s Inconvenient Truths
Khaled Abu Toameh highlights the seamier side of the world’s favorite underdogs: – Out of the 600 Christians from the Gaza Strip who arrived in the West Bank in the past two weeks to celebrate Christmas, dozens have asked to move to Israel because they no longer feel comfortable living under the Palestinian Authority and […]
- Afghan Documents and Ancient Jewish Life There
A find to rival the Cairo Genizah, maybe the Dead Sea Scrolls? The Afghan collection gives an unprecedented look into the lives of Jews in ancient Persia in the 11th century. The paper manuscripts, preserved over the centuries by the dry, shady conditions of the caves, include writings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judea-Arabic and the unique […]
- Ted Cruz – Tie Policies to Opportunity
Ted Cruz invokes lefty favorite John Rawls (albeit somewhat inaccurately) in setting up new messaging for the GOP. But he hits the right notes: Opportunity conservatism is a powerful frame to explain conservative policies that work. It covers the gamut of issues. Republicans shouldn’t just assail excessive financial and environmental regulations; we should explain how […]
- Not Surprising: Government Spending Destroys Wealth
Via James Pethokoukis at AEI, a new study strongly suggests that the so-called fiscal multiplier for “stimulus” spending is less than 1, even in periods of high unemployment, meaning that even in a those situations where stimulus spending is supposed to do the most good, it still destroys vast quantities of wealth: We have investigated the proposition […]
- Ideology, Income, and Size of State Government
As states become wealthier, ideology of the state government becomes more important in determining the size of that government: This paper theorizes that the impact of ideology on the size of US state governments increases with state income. This idea is tested using state-level ideology data derived from the voting behavior of state congressional representatives. […]
- More Evidence that CO2 Isn’t Causing Warming
Via Powerline, Watts Up With That reports on a new study that claims to show that warming and CO2 emissions are perhaps correlated, but not causal: We use statistical methods for nonstationary time series to test the anthropogenic interpretation of global warming (AGW), according to which an increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations raised global […]
- Oriole Cafeterias’ Map of Baltimore (1947)
The Browns wouldn’t arrive until 7 years later: Follow the link, see the whole map.
- Mark Lamster: I Love New York at Night
A non-skyline slideshow:
