“Parenthetically, I am getting tired of the offhanded smearing of religion that has long been endemic to the libertarian movement. Religion is generally dismissed as imbecilic at best, inherently evil at worst. The greatest and most creative minds in the history of mankind have been deeply and profoundly religious, most of them Christian.”

—  Murray Rothbard

Note: Rothbard is of course writing from a Eurocentric perspective I don’t endorse. After all, Muslims, Jews, and Hindus contributed hugely to the sciences too. And agnostics and skeptics.

The Christian Science Monitor reports on a new law that can send international aid workers to jail for helping groups designated by the State Dept. as “terrorist”:

“The US Supreme Court has put international humanitarian workers on notice that any assistance to a US-designated terrorist group could land them in an American prison. Continue reading →

From Wikipedia, a note on Discordianism:

“Here follows some psycho-metaphysics.If you are not hot for philosophy, best just to skip it.

The Aneristic Principle is that of apparent order; the Eristic Principle is that of apparent disorder. Both order and disorder are man made concepts and are artificial divisions of pure chaos, which is a level deeper than is the level of distinction making. Continue reading →

Just browsed my quantcast profile, which, for some reason, stopped receiving data the past couple of weeks.

I’m read by more men (over 66%) than women.  By more Caucasians than any other group – 77%. 8% of my readers are Asian (next highest demographic). 7% are black (not sure if this means African-American?). 6% are Hispanic.

My readers are mostly over 35 years (29% over 35, 28% over 50 years). Continue reading →

From AP, “SEC Puts In New Circuit Breaker Rules,” June 9, 2010

“Regulators still don’t know exactly what caused the “flash crash,” but they wanted to move ahead with remedies.”

“Don’t Know” and “Wanted To Move”.

Therein lies a brief history of intellectual error. Or as Pascal said: “All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.”

Mises should have written another book –  “Human Inaction.”

In a way, this attack has its redeeming side. I believe it will be a wake-up call to many Asian countries that have large Muslim populations that they are destined to suffer the backlash for the aggressive position taken by the Israeli government. Continue reading →

Michael Neumann (at Counterpunch) is to be commended for his bravery in stating what’s obvious to the non-Western world but seems to elude many Western commentators (yes, and that’s “collectivist” –  it’s a generalization, but it happens to be accurate):

:”What is remarkable about the story of Canada and wartime Jewry is not the callousness, but the pangs of conscience, which highlight the morally privileged position of Jews vis-à-vis other victims of oppression. Despite the antisemitism of at least some immigration officials, there is no reason to suppose that Canada’s policy on Jewish refugees was itself antisemitic, or that it victimized Jews. Continue reading →

AP Reports:

“Billionaire investor Warren Buffett on Wednesday defended credit rating agencies that gave overly positive grades to mortgage-related investments before the housing bust. He said the agencies were among many who missed warnings signs of the crisis.

“They made the wrong call,” Buffett acknowledged.

But he said he counted himself among those who failed to foresee the collapse of the housing bubble. Buffett called it the “greatest bubble” he had ever seen.

“The entire American public was caught up in a belief that housing prices could not fall dramatically,” Buffett told a congressionally chartered panel investigating the financial crisis. Had he known how bad it would get, Buffett said he would have sold his company’s stake in Moody’s.” Continue reading →