According to Ronald Reagan, Human Events magazine offers “aggressive reporting, superb analysis and one of the finest collections of conservative columnists to be found.” Of course much of that collection as Reagan knew it is under glass now, but the magazine has others who are still alive or are cleverly simulating life.
So that’s one […]

Yes, I think that yesterday we saw a potent manifestation of the contagion of our era, a mode of how to comport oneself with others that is modeled (MBA-style?) by Mr. Insolence-in-Chief himself. It had the stamp of a particularly neoconnish brand of disdainful arrogance. And it wasn’t coming from the upstart of […]

A recent article in slate by Columbia economics professor Ray Fisman, drawing on a forthcoming paper in American Economic Review [”Diamonds Are Forever, Wars Are Not. Is Conflict Bad for Private Firms?“] by fellow economists Massimo Guidolin and Eliana La Ferrara, takes the answer to their question [i.e., no, not necessarily, and sometimes it is […]

Friday’s Wall Street Journal [sorry, can’t link] reported on 34 foreclosures in New Orleans, foreclosures by subprime lending companies which, it turns out, were invested in by the hedge fund (Fortress), which in turn John Edwards has been invested in — and which has hired him as advisor — all fully disclosed, never hidden, but […]

I’m not quite sure what all to make of it [though i’m about to make a lot of it anyway], and maybe I’m the only one only now belatedly seeing this, but I just google-stumbled [googlumbled?] on a nationwide survey on childrearing practices taken in August 2005, where 600 adults (18 and over, half male, […]

If you haven’t yet seen this last Saturday’s LAT lead editorial, it’s a real winner and sign of just how much the Emperor’s Clothes Era is still with us.
What a sad and embarrassing editorial, embarrassing for those of us who have been LA Times readers all our lives [There’s a photo of me […]

It’s classic MBA Presidency stuff (btw, Why aren’t all the MBAs in the nation rising up and calling for Bush’s impeachment? Hasn’t he singlehandedly devalued the stock of an MBA sheepskin forever?): “What’s good for GM is good for the nation.” When was the last time that flag got hoisted in public? […]

This site’s new spam blocker, which keeps the comments section from being overrun by links to everything from porn sites to closet organizer merchants, was installed on June 26. As the graphic below shows, it has blocked more than 460,000 attempts to post comment spam since then. That’s about 1,000 per hour. If we could […]

Through a combination of ill health, low spirits and technical befuddlement (all on the part of the proprietor — our other contributors are not to blame), BTC News has been variously moribund or inaccessible for much of the past two months. We’ve trashed the previous design, which was probably the source of the mechanical difficulties […]

During his two terms as president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin managed to cut the country’s economy almost in half. He invaded Chechnya, leading to the worst human rights abuses in the brief post-Soviet history; he dissolved the Russian parliament — in fact he attacked it with tanks — and he allowed friends and associates to […]