let many Chinas bloom

As I understand it, both Beijing and Taipei maintain the fiction (or perhaps some in both capitals even believe it) that China is a single state, with one or more province(s) temporarily out of communion with the capitol. A large faction in Taipei would prefer to drop the fiction and “declare independence”, a notion that makes Beijing see red.

What if the Taipei regime were instead to dissolve itself, as the USSR did, letting sovereignty revert to the provinces? Beijing could hardly take that as the same kind of insult.

Posted in politics | 1 Comment

would you believe more links?

Tim Worstall: Bad, Bad Minimum Wage. Guess what: a price floor reduces demand! In real life, even!

Sean Corrigan: We Shoulda Seen it Coming! Since the effects of loose money are well known to economists, why can’t business adjust for them?

Check Point Nullification Project; Road Block Registry

cultured bone wedding rings; reported in New Scientist

yellow pages of patron saints

Patrick J. Buchanan: The Anti-Conservatives

electrodes against depression — me next!

The Smaller Picture: you help design a bitmap font

Posted in economics, general | Leave a comment

rule of law, you may have heard of it?

What I’ve read about the case of José Padilla tends to come filtered by dangerous subversives like Hornberger; so I’m wondering who, other than employees of the Executive Branch, takes the opposite view. Anyone?

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the future of Latin

In the last chapter of A Canticle for Leibowitz, a priest makes a pun:

“Onerem accipisne?” [Do you accept the burden?]
“Honorem accipio.” [I accept the honor.]

In classical Latin, onus ‘burden’ is neuter, so the accusative is onus not onerem. Even a dead language, it seems, changes at least a little bit during the future dark ages.

April 20: Oops, I misremembered. The first priest’s line is tibine imponemus oneri? [Shall we impose the burden on thee?] — where ‘burden’ is instrumental, not accusative.

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thank heaven for macros

Google finds 36 thousand uses of the phrase searing indictment.

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bon mot

Selwyn Duke, a suspiciously white male, comments on the diversity police:

It’s a bit like insisting that every can of paint contain equal amounts of every color, so as to ensure that every color has a place in every can. This certainly would increase the constituent elements in every can, but the end result is that you would be left with only one color of paint in the world. Trying to make the constitution of every unit of society uniformly diverse does not yield true diversity, for it serves to make every unit the same.

Other links du jour — the jour in question being February 16-17, up to which I have caught in reading Rational Review News Digest:

Dave Kopel: The Klan’s Favorite Law

Glenn Harlan Reynolds: Real Social Security Reform

Tim Worstall: The Money Is In the Long Tail

Those who are committed to these leftish values of both a statist economy and a redistributive tax system need to make a choice, which of those do you actually want?

Posted in medicine, race | 3 Comments

and keep your eye on the sparrow

Sean Haugh relays a list of Federal capital crimes. The list is so long, it’s somehow disappointing to look closer and find that nearly all are varieties of murder.

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