Unqualified Offerings

I’m exhuming this from the Star Wars thread because it’s becoming a more general topic. Down-item, Gary Farber is attempting to uphold what is apparently called the “Expanded Universe” canon of Star Wars against viewers who think rather that they get to interpret the facts of Anakin Skywalker’s parentage for themselves with reference to intra-movie [...]

Matthew Yglesias is right that, from the perspective of one libertarian value, Social Security is not nearly so bad as other government programs. It’s “big government” in terms of money, but it doesn’t involve intrusive micromanagement. Indeed, some partial-privatization schemes might make social security much bigger government in the regulatory sense.
From another libertarian perspective, social [...]

It will please certain people, in an ironic way, that I have fallen foul of my own XHTML validator and lack the patience to puzzle out the problem. Thus, some answers to John Tabin here, because it’s my blog.
I think the distinction between “principled” and “pragmatic” libertarianism tends to dissolve. Pragmatism can only exist toward [...]

Dammit, I’m the Iraqi Electricity Production Blogger! But Tim Lambert’s tabular history of the “good news” on the electricity front is a useful contribution to the field. His summary:
Due to lack of maintenance, electricity production fell from 9000 MW in 1991 to 4400 MW before the war. Since then, there have been many announcements of [...]

Iraq’s government announces that it’s going to lock down Baghdad with “40,000 Iraqi troops” starting next week in a bid to secure the capital. (Via OTB.) My question is, why announce this in advance? Why not just do it and gain the element of surprise on the violent actors?
I am notorious for my defeatism, but [...]

The word being “privatization” in this case. Mongolia appears determined to misapply Hernando DeSoto’s ideas about “vivifying dead capital.” Kerry Howley finds the story, Jesse Walker writes in comments that
If anything, this reminds me of various state-socialist schemes to settle nomads in places like Tanzania and Somalia, but with a “market” veneer.
The IHT report itself [...]

To Chris Bertram and his Crooked Timber posse for a major role in overturning the British Association of University Teachers’ mean and counterproductive boycott of Israeli academics that got rammed through without full debate or attendance a few weeks ago.

Eric Thompson’s “Is the Name ‘Neo’,” a lengthy response to the post below.
The Hit&Run comment thread on same.
The press coverage page of the new IISS Strategic Survey. Hopefully someone like Logan, who has a budget, will get to read and analyze the pay version.
“Sometimes You Are Just Screwed,” one of the better Juan Cole pieces [...]

Possibly accurate reports from Islamist websites say that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is wounded, and urge us to pray. I do too, for septicemia. Do thou likewise.

Eve hands me one of the book memes.
1. Total Number of Books I’ve Owned. The mind boggles. I used to work in the book business. I got free books of all kinds and a discount on almost everything I couldn’t get free. I’m married to a bookworm and the community property laws incline me to [...]