Thanks to Le Loup for posting a fascinating link to the Hudson's Bay Company's 1733 price list for its operation in Fort Albany in Ontario ( Read more... )

[h/t to Jay GIn some circles, the Northeast US is synonymous with intrusive nanny-state politics--or with caring governments that shepherd individuals unable or unwilling to look out for their own best interests, if that's the way your political compass swings ( Read more... )

Farhad Manjoo at Slate brings an unbelievably angsty editorial about Nerf guns:

Over the past few weeks I’ve been playing with some of the new Nerf guns, and I’ve tied myself in knots thinking about whether ultrarealistic weapons are just harmless fun or whether they reveal something terribly wrong with modern American boyhood.Holy hell, dude-- ( Read more... )

Last time 'round, I voted for John McCain. This was not because I thought he was a good candidate; he was a terrible candidate. It was primarily because these days my choice between Giant Douche and Turd Sandwich comes down overwhelmingly to the candidate's position on Supreme Court appointees ( Read more... )

Attorney General Eric Holder, who's been doing everything in his power to derail an investigation into a Justice Department scheme that coerced US gun dealers into selling rifles to Mexican narco-terrorists, and then tried to use the resulting carnage as a pretext to undermine Americans' Constitutional civil rights...

...Says his critics are ( Read more... )

A further example of civic amphimetric strife can be seen in the disputed between the two wives that Socrates held concurrently under the concession of c. 410, which allowed Athenians to marry two wives to compensate for the oliganthropy caused by the Peloponnesian War (Xanthippe, mother of Lamprokles, and Myrto, mother of Sophroniskos and ( Read more... )

They've had Alan Cumming, En-Pee-Aitch, and now Dita Von Teese.My understanding is that Harris and Cumming didn't perform in the primary show, but hid away in locked rooms and had one-on-one scenes with audience members who were brought to them by the actors. This may be how they use Von Teese, too, but everybody's tight lipped about it. Maybe ( Read more... )

I've bitched about the US coinage system on this blog before, but in case I wasn't clear, it's completely bonkers. Michael Zielinski at Coin Update sums up, in a gently-worded article about the "unusual" state of our circulating coinage:

The cent and nickel each cost more than their face value to produce and distribute. The quarter dollar is in ( Read more... )

While most of the US gun control groups are going down in a death spiral, reduced to shouting insults on Twitter, the only serious public threat to our Second Amendment civil rights is New York City's Mayor Bloomberg and his Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which opposes illegal guns and supports making as many guns illegal as possible. Bloomberg may ( Read more... )

The left, at the moment, is fairly agog at Senator Buttfroth's comment that science should get out of politics.

My response to this is nuanced--I actually do think we'd be better off with a hell of a lot less science-based policy for complicated reasons, but Santorum is still clearly wrong here. He doesn't want less science-based policy; he ( Read more... )