Imagine you are on an aircraft carrier with 4000 sailors on board. Each sailor gets issued 3 ration tickets every day by the paymaster. The sailor can then get a meal in one of the ship messhalls. The paymaster realizes he can issue an extra ticket to himself every day and get 4 meals. Nobody will notice. After a while the other officers begin to ( Read more... )

A judgment body from whose decisions there is no appeal; secret regulations, unknown, typically, even to body members; an ever-widening scrutiny, even of mundane activities, for unconforming ideologies.We can see the bureaucratic mindset of prior restraint in its full horror here. Every attempt by any person to rationally investigate a topic must ( Read more... )

Good summary of Soviet and Nazi planned exterminations :
By starving Soviet prisoners of war, shooting and gassing Jews, and shooting civilians in anti-partisan actions, German forces made Belarus the deadliest place in the world between 1941 and 1944. Half of the population of Soviet Belarus was either killed or forcibly displaced during World War ( Read more... )

There is an old fallacy still current amongst leftists that companies thrive by providing bad products. The most common example is that cars are made to last a set period and then rapidly deteriorate. Now it is true that some companies followed a strategy of deliberately limiting the life of their cars. The market has decisively rejected this ploy ( Read more... )

I am not personally opposed to gay marriage. It seems pointless to forbid such a thing, but I do have some comments for those who are enthusiastic about it ( Read more... )

There is now another blog for the Boston Objectivist Network.
If anyone has a paid account feel free to create a syndicated feed. (See 'About' page of that blog for the link.)

Obtaining FDA approval is still a major hurdle, in part because cells obtained from different people may not behave alike and because recipients can have varying responses to the same kind of implantAs usual the FDA is killing people for frivolous reasons. Existing organ transplants have the same problems of variable inputs and results. To hold ( Read more... )

I need some fairly urgent house repairs done. I have been waiting this week for 4 separate builders to return my call and give a quote. How bad can the economy be, if not one of them bothers to do so? I suspect the stimulus is working. Construction workers would rather have a long term overpaid government contract than do a quick market priced job ( Read more... )

Development aid does more harm than good in Africa, says Zambian economist and author Dambisa Moyo, so we should stop it. She has the ear of at least one African president, Paul Kagame of Rwanda. 'Why should Bono be the one to determine economic policy in Africa?

So, Obama gave the British Prime Minister a set of DVDs- "2001: A Space Odyssey ( Read more... )