>(REPOST FROM Saturday, March 04, 2006) Sheila Kuehl, Democratic California Senator out of Los Angeles, wants to outlaw the voluntary (often called “private”) provision of health insurance in the state, replacing it with a compulsory state scheme (often called “public”) for universal health coverage. She would create yet another state agency: The California Health Insurance […]

Read More >Top Down Authoritarian Health Care Schemes for All

>(REPOST FROM Wednesday, February 22, 2006) Laurence Vance of the Antiwar.com blog writes: Hedonists with Guns An ex-Marine wrote me with his opinion of the Marine Corps:”The Marine Corps is like a frat party in between the hard work. For the most part, they are irresponsible, alcoholic, sex addicts. The married Marines that I served […]

Read More >The military as frat house

>(REPOST FROM Sunday, February 19, 2006) Ok, nothing mind blowingly incriminating here on the issue of pornography, but I just have an observation.Actually Pamela Paul, author of “Pornified”, has an observation, which she acquired secondhand from a somewhat famous study done in the 80s on the effects of porn conducted by social scientists Dolf Zillman […]

Read More >On Pornography and its (ill?) effects

>(REPOST FROM Sunday, January 29, 2006) So I was flipping through a book called The Anti-Capitalism Reader today at work, and I found an interesting chapter on what is called “parallel economies” – economic networks that exist alongside and apart from the mainstream. What was fascinating is that what is discussed and supported in this […]

Read More >Inadvertent support for free markets in an anti-capitalist reader

>(REPOST FROM Saturday, January 28, 2006) Follow up on “Public schools…” (See below) I noticed this while reading the NYT article: “Over all,” it said, “demographic differences between students in public and private schools more than account for the relatively high raw scores of private schools. Indeed, after controlling for these differences, the presumably advantageous […]

Read More >NYT and Public schools – Part 2, then 1

>(REPOST FROM Monday, January 23, 2006) Charles Johnson of the radgeek blog (http://radgeek.com/) reminds us that this month is the 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade. The memoirs he relays from Susan Brownmiller among others shows us that at one time abortion was an underground medical procedure, complete with cop evasion and the black market […]

Read More >Abortion and the black market

>(REPOST FROM Sunday, January 15, 2006) Apart from the earliest foot travellers into N.America, the debate over who discovered the Americas continues. This story, from the BBC, asserts that a Chinese admiral may have pre-dated Columbus in his discovery of N.America (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4609074.stm). It’s also known, though maybe not widely, that Vikings made it to New-Found-Land […]

Read More >Who discovered America again?