Feed: Belmont Club - AggScore: 39.0

Jeremy Lin: The Wrong Kind of Guy

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USA Today tries to understand why what ought to be ordinary — success in America — has created a sensation in the media. After all, lots of players get recruited into the NBA without attracting this much attention. But Jeremy Lin’s story is different. The answer from the media is that the unusual attention arises [...] [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Pretend It’s Working

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The Washington Post reports that North Korea’s new strategy for advancing socialism is to secretly let domestic capitalism support it. In that way socialism can pretend to succeed while capitalism can pretend to fail. “Recent defectors and economists who study North Korea describe an emergent underground capitalism in which ordinary people bring dollars, euros and [...] [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

The Life of Ants

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A centrally managed, but inherently unnatural, system requires a lot of inputs and control mechanisms to keep up the appearance of stability. Because everything is imposed from the top, not from the operation of rational choice from below, the level of costs rises in proportion to the level of desired control.  By contrast, a society [...] [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Money For Nothing

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Richard Epstein at the Hoover Institution looks at whether government can require companies or the States to give things away for free.   The idea is nothing as crazy as one might think. There’s an argument that it can already mandate behavior as a condition for receiving government money, a subject which has recently created tension [...] [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

We Have Ways of Making Men Vote

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The phrase “we have ways of making men talk” comes from a 1935 movie entitled “The Lives of a Bengal Lancer”. It is uttered by the Oxford-educated Afghan leader, “Mohammed Khan”, as he prepares to thrust lighted bamboo slivers down the fingernails of 41st Lancer officers Gary Cooper and Franchot Tone, unless they reveal the [...] [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Mad Men

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Two articles, one from the New Republic and the other from the New York Times, examine the recollections of Mimi Alford, who was a 19-year old intern when JFK had his way with her. Both articles focus not upon JFK’s infidelity — that is old news — but with his shallow callousness. In one revealed [...] [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

“12345″

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The Weekly Standard looks at what hacked data shows about the Syrians. Readers have a choice before proceeding. Do you want to laugh or to cry? Here’s laugh. Last week, the shadowy online activist group known as Anonymous penetrated 78 email accounts from Syria’s ministry of presidential affairs and posted their contents online. The hackers [...] [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Danger In the East

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Hugh Tomlinson of the Times, reporting from Riyadh, says Saudi Arabia will acquire nuclear weapons within weeks of a successful Iranian atomic effort. Citing Saudi government and military sources, Tomlinson wrote that “warheads would be purchased off the shelf from abroad, with work on a new ballistic missile platform getting under way to build an [...] [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Breaking Taboos

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Among recent news stories are instances of people talking back, openly challenging the received wisdom in surprising ways. For example, Karen Handel calls Planned Parenthood a “gigantic bully“ for pushing abortion on the Komen foundation. The bishops of the Roman Catholic church finally nerved themselves to openly clash with the president in a public space, according [...] [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Curtain Raiser

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“If Hitler invaded Hell,” Winston Churchill once remarked, “I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” Alliances make strange bedfellows,  not from love, but out of shared enmity.  The appearance of David DeGraw, a spokesman for the 99% Movement and Mark Meckler, one of the founders of [...] [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]