A few “Quick Picks” – highlights from the week past worth passing on… Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds on the pending collapse of the higher education bubble. And Eight Reasons College Tuition is the Next Bubble to Burst. The “stars fell on” Alabama May 18, and now NASA’s looking for the meteorite. […]
Liberty, Politics, & Current Events
96 posts
Bad News: 411,000 of those are temporary positions with the U.S. Census. More from Calculated Risk… and an update from Geoff at Innocent Bystander.
Some updates on items previously discussed or mentioned on AetherCzar: The “Froot Loops” plaintiff also had a law suit alleging false advertising. Believe it or not, there is no such thing as a “Crunch Berry,” and no real berries in the eponymous cereal. Alas, his appeal was dismissed for lack […]
A few quick picks… Austrian physicists claim ball lighting is an optical illusion induced in the visual center of the brain by the intense magnetic fields of lightning. PatentlyO on the USPTO’s proposal to create a “slow,” “standard,” and “fast” lane for patent applications. Applicants will pay more for a […]
Dan Danner of The Wall Street Journal takes on the 1099 mandate in a recent opinion piece: Adding insult to injury, the law also requires all businesses to issue IRS 1099 forms to document every business-to-business transaction of $600 or more. To someone who’s never run a business, this may […]
Martin Gardner died this week at the age of 95. Author of the long running Scientific American feature “Mathematical Games,” I will remember him most for his marvelous surveys of pseudoscience including Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus and Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. More from the Washington […]
So what happens in an emergency when you tune to local radio stations for information and all you can get are automated stations with the same pre-recorded music and off-color DJ chat? Residents of Minot, ND found out the hard way in 2002 when a train derailment released clouds of […]
Reuters summarizes sources of U.S. – China tensions: Currency and debt Trade and investment Tibet and Taiwan Diplomatic and military influence Internet freedoms See the link above for details. Hat Tip: Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds (welcome back!)
Yesterday, I passed along a fascinating commentary by Arthur Brooks from the Washington Post – America’s new culture war: Free enterprise vs. government control – to my Facebook friends. The resulting discussion quickly became unwieldy as barbs and quips and talking points were thrown into the mix in a not […]
The video of the SWAT raid from last week’s “Quick Picks” has gone viral. More from Radley Balko at Reason, who has done a great job exposing over-the-top, violent, aggressive police raids for relatively minor offenses. In this case, a misdeameanor marijuana offense was the basis for a Columbia, MO […]
The bloggers at Samizdata are singularly unimpressed with the UK’s new prime minister, Conservative David Cameron, and his middle of the road campaign. Perry de Havilland says: “It is amusing to be honest. The Tory party faces a PM with no actual mandate, who is as charismatic as a bowl […]
Geoff, blogging at Innocent Bystander, updates the unemployment rate monthly, comparing it to the Obama administration’s original projection. Here’s the update though the end of April. The dark blue curve is the projection with the stimulus package. The light blue curve is the miserable future forecast to await us if […]
The new 1099 mandate I previously discussed here is beginning to attract more attention. Currently, businesses submit 1099’s for every consultant or contractor they hire. Under the new rules, businesses must submit 1099s for every other business with whom they do business. This mandate will inundate small businesses with the […]
A few quick picks: A SWAT raid back in February burst into a house occupied by a suspected drug user, his wife and seven year old son. Officers opened fire, killing a pit bull and injuring a corgi (?). The suspect was charged with a marijuana offense that resulted in […]
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has begun introducing full-body scanners. The scanners employ low-power X-ray backscattering or millimeter wave technology to generate an image of your body, enabling them to detect most concealed objects. Some people are concerned that the scans amount to a virtual disrobing, even though the systems […]
In medieval days, some believers would engage in self-flagellation: inflicting painful wounds upon themselves for no other good reason than to enhance their perceived virtue and self-esteem. The modern equivalent all too often is “recycling.” This point was brought home to me recently when I learned my local community has […]
Apparently, lawyers with too much time and too few clients on hand have made a sport of suing cereal producer Kellogg for fraud. It seems Kellogg doesn’t actually include fruit in their Froot Loops. More here. Hat Tip: OverLawyered. Now that that’s been resolved, on to more important questions: Where […]
In most jurisdictions, it is legal to video record the police in public places where they would have no expectation of privacy. That right is not always upheld in practice, however. Writing in Reason, Randy Balko examines some recent cases that illustrate the importance of allowing citizens to use technology […]
A few quick picks: Author Sarah Hoyt has an insightful essay on immigration posted over at Classical Values. Ronald Bailey looks at the myth of the “peer-reviewed” science in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report at Reason. “Tiger Woods had Sex with 121 Women While Married” – Opposing Views, April 29 […]
Another “benefit” of the new health care bill is yet another IRS mandate. This one is a doozy. When a business pays an outside consultant or contractor more than $600 in a given year, that business is required to issue a 1099 form reporting the payment to the consultant or […]
By law, 2.5% of all Federal extramural research funds are set aside for contracts or grants under the Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) program – approximately $2 billion each year. SBIR contracts are typically $100k for a Phase I proof-of-concept. If the Phase I is sufficiently promising, an agency might […]
I don’t even have a T-shirt to show for it! The very first Bluetooth Headset I had (a Motorola HS280) was so quiet that even with the volume turned way up I couldn’t always hear it. I solved that problem by buying a Plantronics Voyager 510. It turns out that […]
You may have followed the saga of the Apple engineer who “lost” a prototype of the next generation iPhone in a bar? A prototype that just happened to end up with technology blog Gizmodo? Of course, there was skepticism about how accidental that might have been, largely dispelled by Gizmodo. […]
You may recall the case of Richard Jewell, the security guard whose keen eye and quick thinking saved lives in the Centennial Olympic Park bombing in 1996. Jewell was hounded as a suspect for several months in the investigation that ultimately led to the conviction of Eric Rudolph in 2005. […]