You may know George Orwell as the guy who wrote “War is Peace” and “Slavery is Freedom.” Of course, Orwell wasn’t espousing these absurd opinions, he was merely presenting them as examples of the sort of twisted rhetorical devices that authoritarian regimes use to consolidate and maintain their own power. What’s different about the Neoconservatives in the Bush Administration is that when they insisted that “War is Peace” and “Slavery is Freedom,” they actually mean it… or at least they want the rest of us to believe it.

One of the best example of Neocon absurdity was probably the moment our war in Iraq shifted from being directed against Saddam Hussein’s presumed Weapons of Mass Destruction and focused instead on his Weapons of Mass Destruction Related Program Activities. The phrase was so outlandish it made Bill Clinton’s attempt to re-define the word “is” at the height of the Lewinsky scandal seem like a perfectly reasonable philological exercise in comparison.

Read more »

Just in case you are somewhat puzzled by the title of this post, allow me to explain: The word “orthography” specifies an academic discipline most commonly practiced by the largely Socialist, America-hating faculty of elite Northeastern colleges like Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the Massachusetts Community College at Quinsigamond. Like Socialism, orthography is doctrinaire and very strict in its oppressive, freedom-limiting dogmas, allowing for little variation from its largely capricious and arbitrary norms. Much as they demand adherence to political correctness, Marxist theorists at Yale, for instance, demand “orthographical correctness” of their students, and will frequently deduct points from essays and reaction papers that diverge even the slightest from the orthographical straight-jacket devised by such America-hating orthographical activists as Noah Webster.

Read more »

CATO scholar Arnold Kling (whose economic views seem to vary a lot depending on who is president) reacts to a piece by Ezra Kline by writing:

“My view of the American health care system is that it hardly rations health care at all. That is why we spend so much more than other countries. I wish we put more responsibility on individuals. Instead, we have this delusion that we cannot possibly afford health care if we pay for it individually, but of course we can afford it if we pay for it collectively.”

What’s the fallacy in Kling’s logic? The fallacy, quite simply, is that Kling does not understand the idea of shared risk. He does not understand the purpose of insurance. He does not understand why the collective might want to pay for services that are rendered, at any given time, only to a subset of that collective.

Medical treatment is expensive, and in many cases, treatments may prove too expensive for any one individual to afford. But accidents and illnesses are also somewhat random in their distribution across a population. Therefore, by creating a risk pool and having all members of that pool pay into it, society can ensure that the unlucky few who are stricken by disease or who are injured in an accident can pay for the medical treatment they need by drawing from that pool.

The question is not whether a “collective” can afford medical treatments that individuals cannot (this issue has been settled beyond dispute, and it is embarrassing to have to explain a concept so basic and trivial as “insurance” to an economist like Kling) the issue is whether a scheme of private, non-mandatory insurance coverage can do the job more effectively than a public, government-run, single-payer system.

There’s a theory about Bill Kristol and his brief tenure as columnist for the New York Times (and before you object to my use of the adjective “brief,” please note that a root canal typically only takes about a half hour to an hour even though it feels like an eternity, and that William Safire, by contrast, spent 32 years as a Times columnist). The theory is that Kristol actually viewed his Times column with contempt; that he put little if any effort into his writings, “phoning them in,” as it were, and picking up a handsome paycheck for an average of fifteen minutes of work per week. Let’s call this theory the “laughing all the way to the bank” theory of William Kristol.

But there’s another theory about William Kristol’s output during that time, that I’d like to call the “no, you see, Kristol really is that stupid” theory. According to this theory, William Kristol did, in fact, devote himself to his column with an admirable sense of dedication and due respect for the position he had filled as one of the Times two regular conservative columnists. It’s just that he’s really, really stupid.

Read more »

This morning Today show host Matt Lauer interviewed Eliot Spitzer, asking the former New York governor and onetime State Attorney General pointed questions about Wall Street misconduct, outrageous executive compensation packages, government bailouts and  how awesome is it to bust up prostitution rings in the morning and then have three hookers and a 55 gallon drum of chocolate pudding sent up to your hotel room that same evening.

Read more »

Did you know that there are still people out there who are upset that Barack Obama was born in Africa, the fruit of an act of sexual congress between his Kenyan father and the chick from species? Seems it’s unconstitutional for a man to be president whose alien mother fed on the bio-electrical impulses given off by men who die while in the physical act of love. (The Founding Fathers thought of everything!)
Read more »

Good morning Stinquers! Serolf here. Been up for a while already, surfing the web for headlines so you don’t have to. Providing a service so you don’t have to waste hours trolling cyberspace. I’ve found the best headlines this morning and discarded the rest. And by best, of course, I mean the most awful, cryptic, tasteless and sad.

Let’s begin with the New York Post, which this morning informs us: “‘O TO EUROS’ BE MES AMIS AGAIN.” Yes, in the mind of some editor at the New York Post, that random grouping letters  bi-sected by colon conveys information. But to everyone else, I wager, it’s like a word scramble where all the letters are in the right place and it still makes fuck all sense. Oh, “mes amis” is French? Oh, the word “euros” does not refer to the currency? Er, whatever. Maybe it’s in code… Rupert Murdoch’s secret wingnut code. They send you the decoder ring with your subscription, I’ll bet.

Read more »