Who Were the Sea Peoples?

(I knew you've been wondering.) It's when some marketing department (like Vonage's this morning) writes "Save up to 50% or more on your phone bill!" Aargh! You can write "Save up to 50 %" or "Save 50% or more," but combining the two makes no sense!

is sorted out here . (Via Jim Henley.)

Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Patriot Act. On an email discussion group of Austro-libertarians some were lamenting the inability of our efforts to do anything to check State power. Others were saying that we had to keep plugging away with articles and PhDs etc. I for one said that there had been modest gains on tax and inflation rates, at least since the 1970s. In response to my naivete, someone said I was ignoring the curtailment of civil liberties under the "Bush gang." Someone else chimed in--and I can't remember the exact quote--to say that we were now living in an Orwellian state. This struck me as a bit much. If we're trying to be "realists," as the cynics who questioned the efficacy of our writing efforts professed to be, then we're not in an Orwellian state. Winston in 1984 wasn't on a fairly accessible email discussion group talking about the best ways to eliminate government.

Ever since Slate rejected my submission, I must attack every economics piece it runs...

While following up on a link from an LRC article, I saw this nice statement from Ann Coulter. (She has a JD, ya know.) The odds of an innocent man being found guilty by a unanimous jury are basically nil. Now I'm no JD holder, but don't many courts in the US require a unanimous jury opinion for conviction? Isn't that the whole deal with a hung jury ? Sooo, is Ann Coulter really saying the odds of an innocent being convicted in our great nation are basically nil??? Not only is that naive, it also contradicts our alleged rule to let 10 guilty go free rather than falsely imprison 1 innocent. Seriously, if someone wants to clarify her claim, please chime in. Even though she likes to say shocking things, this statement is so palpably stupid that I want to give her the benefit of the doubt.

A friend, whom I just had dinner with in London, mentioned that his friend was a faculty member at CalTech with an unlimited travel budget. One year he took such advantage of that fact that he was moved to calculate his average speed for the year as a whole, which turned out to be something like 70 miles per hour.

This ad makes me irrationally happy. I gotta say, I love seeing a product blatantly marketed at men telling them that they're ugly and unsexy and everybody thinks so, thus they need X.