Archive for November 2010
Too much vitamin D, or not enough? Yes
Today’s New York Times front page has a story with the headline “Extra vitamin D and calcium aren’t necessary, report says”. It refers to a report from an expert committee, which the Times says finds: The very high levels of vitamin D that are often recommended by doctors and testing laboratories – and can be achieved only […]
Are Wikileaks and its media mouthpieces being played?
I was not impressed with the earlier Wikileaks revelations (as I wrote about in spiked here), and the latest batch haven’t led me to change my mind. As before, this is a big dump. This time it mostly consists of mundane proceedings, embarrassing personal remarks and confirmations about things we already knew. As Frank Furedi argues in today’s spiked, the news organizations with first access – the […]
Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing)
This is a live recording from Benny Goodman’s famous, triumphant concert at Carnegie Hall in 1938. Goodman was the first jazz musician to perform at Carnegie Hall. And this one performance transformed jazz from a music associated with blacks regionally to an American-wide phenomenon. Hard to believe that one concert could change American culture. “Sing, Sing, Sing” was the climactic piece […]
This week’s articles of note
“A house that Murdoch bought,” The National Interest, by Conrad Black [Review of three books on the newspaper industry] “What good is Wall Street?” The New Yorker, by John Cassidy “Chomsky: ‘The business elites… are instinctive Marxists,'” truthout, by Keane Bhatt “The answer is no,” New York Magazine, by Jason Zengerle [Profile of New Jersey […]
A liberal contempt for the land of the free
For all the praise heaped on Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel Freedom, it actually reveals the people-hating, anti-freedom essence of the modern liberal mindset. Read my review, in the spiked review of books, here.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Enjoy your feasting! (And to my non-American friends: why don’t you indulge too?)
More on airport screening
As I noted last week, I believe the airport security routine is excessive and ultimately irrational. And so, of course, I oppose the latest stepping-up in intrusiveness – the new imagining scanners, and the mandatory pat-downs for those who choose to avoid the scanner. But before getting too carried away with the protests against the latest airport […]
Fate of the World game: “Malthus on a computer chip”
Norm Benson at Timberati has a great post about a new video game, Fate of the World. He writes: The scenario for Fate of the World (FotW) starts in the year 2020 when climate change induced disasters strike. Then the “World Environment Organization,” (a turbo-charged United Nations), makes you the climate czar to “decide how […]
GM’s IPO: not a return to former glory
General Motors went public again last week, raising $23 billion in its initial public offering (IPO) – the country’s largest ever. The US government’s ownership stake was halved as a result. The successful offering appeared to vindicate the Obama administration’s decision to bail out the struggling automaker in early 2009. For many of those who support free markets […]
Visualizing the shadow banking system
This chart is a roadmap of “The Shadow Banking System”. It was created by economists at the New York Federal Reserve, and I learned about it from an article by Gillian Tett in the Financial Times. My picture of the map is hard to read here, but it does convey how complicated finance has become. The top […]
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