Unqualified Offerings

Megan McArdle shakes free of the albatross of her old sobriquet.

Avedon Carol writes
But I wonder if Jim has given much thought to the commercial aspects of having all this free-flowing personal “intelligence” in the hands of so many private companies who have no apparent limitations on what they can do with your data once they get their hands on it.
Answer: Depends what you mean by [...]

An American attack on Iran would be evil and stupid. Dan Froomkin suggests the media talk to some people who actually know something about the subject. Tony Karon reminds us of the bad thinking and worse journalism that eased America’s path to war with Iraq, and shows how the media and Washington’s hawks are repeating [...]

The rare bitch about an internet phenomenon in a literary forum that strikes me as true. Excerpt from “Against E-Mail” (WARNING: Link will decay!):

For it has lately become clear that nothing burdens a life like an email account. It’s the old story: the new efficient technology ends up costing far more time than [...]

I just directed Amazon to ship me Kevin Carson’s Studies in Mutualist Political Economy and Tyler Cowen’s Discover Your Inner Economist in the same box. Do you think it might explode?

Michael Vick cops a plea. Prosecutors will recommend 18+ months, though his own attorneys will ask the judge, pretty please, for less than a year. Since cruel and unusual punishment is wrong, I won’t recommend breaking Vick’s arms and legs and tossing him into a pit with his own dogs.

By Thoreau
Afternoons are free. Supposedly you use that to network and schmooze, but a lot of us faculty types are using it to catch up on emails, writing papers, reading papers, reviewing papers, etc. Or, in my case, blogging before I catch up on work.
The morning’s talks were OK, for the most part. [...]

By Mona
George W. Bush, the Andréa Sakharov of our times:

By the time he arrived in Prague in June for a democracy conference, President Bush was frustrated. He had committed his presidency to working toward the goal of “ending tyranny in our world,” yet the march of freedom seemed stalled. Just as aggravating was the sense [...]