• STANFORD Magazine: March/April 2010 > Features > Clelia Mosher. www.stanfordalumni.org (2011-01-12). In 1973, historian Carl Degler was combing the University archives, gathering research for a book on the history of the family. Sifting through the papers of Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher, who taught in Stanford's hygiene department around the turn of the 20th century, he came across a mysteriously bound file. Degler… (Linked Wednesday 2011-01-12.)

• Common Sense, or a functioning economy has no underclass. Marja Erwin (2011-01-12). 1. A government can’t solve systemic unemployment through stimulus. It can create temporary boosts which *mask* systemic unemployment; it may even have significant effects depending how easily it responds to spending and how slowly the unemployment rate approaches its normal level relative to the economic system.2. A functioning economy has… (Linked Wednesday 2011-01-12.)

• Reading Chomsky. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2011-01-12). The Good (in churlish brevity) I've just finished reading Noam Chomsky's Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World (it was a Christmas gift). Unsurprisingly, nearly all of it is excellent, and I highly recommend it. Chomsky lucidly explains how u.s. foreign policy is not only imperialist now but has been… (Linked Wednesday 2011-01-12.)

• The Taxpayers Won't Benefit. Sheldon Richman, The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty (2010-12-15). Why does everyone say the taxpayers will be winners when the banks, AIG, and GM repay their TARP and other bailout money with interest? The taxpayers won't see a dime! I doubt if any money will even go toward reducing the debt. The only real winners will be the politicians… (Linked Thursday 2011-01-13.)

• What "Undercover Boss" Could Be. Steven Horwitz, The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty (2010-12-15). Recently I stumbled across the TV show Undercover Boss.  A CEO poses as a new employee at one of his firm's factories or stores in order to see how the company really runs.  In the episode I watched, the CEO of the Johnny Rocket's restaurant chain spent time working in… (Linked Thursday 2011-01-13.)

• Winner of Beth A. Hoffman Prize for Economic Writing Named. Foundation for Economic Education, The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty (2011-01-12). The first annual Beth A. Hoffman Memorial Prize for Economic Writing has been awarded to Kevin A. Carson, the Foundation for Economic Education announced. Through the generosity of a FEE donor, the prize has been established to honor the memory of Beth A. Hoffman by recognizing the best article on… (Linked Thursday 2011-01-13.)

• If Martin Luther King Were Alive Today, He’d Be Just Like Me. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2011-01-13). You know all those articles that purport to say what George Orwell would believe if he were alive today, in which Orwell turns out to have had a change of heart on every significant subject where the author disagrees with him? You can do that to Martin Luther King too:… (Linked Thursday 2011-01-13.)

• Food:Class:Working Class. bfp, flip flopping joy (2011-01-03). I've been wondering why food for working class people is always represented as "manly man food" that is greasy, heavy, thick food. I mean, I get the origins of working class food as thick greasy meat based food—fish and chips, for example, has enough heaviness and calories to last through… (Linked Thursday 2011-01-13.)

• Szasz in One Lesson. Sheldon Richman, Free Association (2011-01-13). (First posted in 2006, and now amended. The relevance to the Tucson massacre is self-explanatory.)This is something I came up with some time ago to summarize a good deal of what Thomas Szasz, a great libertarian and hero of mine, has been saying for half a century.If neuroscientists discovered that… (Linked Thursday 2011-01-13.)

• Radio Theater. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2011-01-14). Get ready to suspend your disbelief. One of the most resilient acts in theatrical history has returned to the D.C. stage: the We're Going To Defund Public Broadcasting show. Every time this play gets revived, the director alters the story slightly to reflect recent events. This time the performers are… (Linked Friday 2011-01-14.)

In logic, a non sequitur is the fallacy of asserting a conclusion which simply does not follow from the given premises. The world being what it is, I noted a while back that that isn't a strong enough criticism for some popular arguments; we need a new category, the contrarium sequitur (or contra-sequitur for short), which is the fallacy of asserting a conclusion which is exactly the opposite of the conclusion that you should draw from the given premises.

The New York Times Op-Ed page has always a particularly fertile field for picking ripe contra-sequiturs. That’s no doubt partly a function of the sort of people they employ. But I don’t think it’s just those particular guys; it’s really a feature of the house style, and perhaps an inevitable product of the intellectual environment when Very Serious People set themselves to issuing important opinions about matters of public concern.

Any political hack can churn out something that tries to shoehorn unruly facts into a predetermined party line, but it takes a special kind of environment to go beyond mere hackery day after day, to maintain such consistency in coming up with conclusions so exquisitely opposed to what the facts obviously suggest. For example, consider the recent online battle over Wikileaks, and the ongoing government efforts — led by the Obama administration and by Senators like Joe Lieberman — to pressure corporations like Amazon, Dyn Inc. (EveryDNS), et al. into cutting off the Internet services that Wikileaks needs to keep its website running, and to pressure payment processors like PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, and Bank of America to cut off their access to funding, in the interests of national security and the alleged public interest. Many people see this and offer opinions which are better or worse informed, better thought out or worse thought out.

But only the New York Times Op-Ed page could take this government-driven campaign of intimidation to shut down Wikileaks and take it as proof of a crying need for more extensive government regulatory controls, which would allow the United States federal government to take a more active role in directing the business decisions of banks and payment processors. So that they can protect irksome bloggers, risky organizations, and unpopular opinions from being shut down by risk-averse banks, you see. This decision should not be left solely up to business-as-usual among the banks — so, instead, they’ll leave it up to someone you can always count on to stand up for open debate and a free press for organizations like Wikileaks — the United States federal government.

All in the public interest, of course.

• no one who has ever been tempted toward a revolutionary. Captain Capitulation, eye of the storm (2011-01-10). no one who has ever been tempted toward a revolutionary politics or a radical political philosophy or envisioned a big transformation can be entirely comfortable with the the notion that "anti-government" rhetoric must be…controlled, lest it lead to violence. that sort of thing threw eugene debs in prison and deported emma goldman. (Linked Monday 2011-01-10.)

• On Cable News | The Agitator. www.theagitator.com (2011-01-10). Ta-Nehisi Coates: …it’s my impression that much of cable news is rigged. Complicated questions are forced into small spaces of time, and guests frequently (Linked Monday 2011-01-10.)

• The Agony of Paul Krugman. Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2011-01-11). Paul Krugman is a Very Serious Thinker. His words are like the rain. If he did not say these things about purely political matters, who else possibly could? (Linked Tuesday 2011-01-11.)

• Graceless Degradation: WordPress Uglification for Outmoded Browsers. drench.github.com (2011-01-12). Graceless Degradation Graceless Degradation is a WordPress plugin that gives visitors still using Internet Explorer 6 an appropriate user experience. (Linked Wednesday 2011-01-12.)

• If suspect Jared Lee Loughner has schizophrenia, would that make him more likely to go on a shooting spree in Arizona? – By Vaughan Bell – Slate Magazine. www.slate.com (2011-01-12). If you found evidence on the Web that Jared Lee Loughner or some other suspected killer was obsessed with soccer or football or hockey and suggested it might be an explanation for his crime, you’d be laughed at. But do the same with “schizophrenia” and people nod in solemn agreement…. (Linked Wednesday 2011-01-12.)

• Interpreting lesbian historiae. Marja Erwin (2011-01-08). At some point, I’m not sure exactly when or from where, I picked up the dominant interpretation of recent lesbian historia.Among other problems, this view misrepresents separatist feminism. Of course, separatism can have serious flaws, but its actual character don’t always correspond with its supposed character.In the dominant interpretation, separatism… (Linked Saturday 2011-01-08.)

• The fact that the productivity of abundance technologies is growing faster than the capitalists can raise the rents on artificial scarcity is a bug for them rather than a feature. reddit: the voice of the internet — news before it happens (2011-01-03). submitted by rechelon to Anarchism [link] [1 comment] (Linked Sunday 2011-01-09.)

• A Better Text Find & Replace User Interface. Mark Alldritt, Mark Alldritt's Journal (2010-12-31). I have never been happy with the Text Find & Replace panel in my applications (Script Debugger and Affrus). I started with a version of the Find panel that first appeared in Apple's Text Edit and many other early Mac OS X applications. Here's an example from the currently shipping… (Linked Friday 2011-01-07.)