<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>I've been working on a new website for the "Clarington saga" -- that's the saga of my parents, who were charged by the municipality of Clarington for running a "commercial conference centre" ... [read more]

There is an ongoing debate in Scotland on how to curb alcoholism among the Scottish people. The governing party, the Scottish National Party, is proposing to enforce a 45p per unit minimum price on alcoholic products. Apparently the num ... [read more]

In this excerpt from my interview with historian David Kennedy, I asked him to discuss the standard view that Hoover’s ideology tied his hands and kept him from attacking the Great Depression while Roosevelt was an economic wizard. In h ... [read more]

In 1979, Sony introduced the Walkman, the first portable music player. It weighed 14 ounces and cost $200. It could play a cassette that could hold about 90 minutes of music. It was a little bigger than a cassette. It was pretty ugly. A ... [read more]

Here are two videos (one long–45 minutes, one vey short–under two minutes) that make me feel glad to be alive and inspire me. The first is the incredible documentary on the quest of Andrew Wiles to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem (HT: Alex ... [read more]

The war in Iraq is now over. All American combat operations are suspended. The troops are going home. Hooray. The Iraqi prime minister has addressed the Iraqi people. The U.S. president has addressed the American people. The ships are l ... [read more]

The nonsense about President Obama being a Muslim has got to stop. I rise to defend him from this absurd accusation by pointing out that he is obviously an atheist. [read more]

Learning and Leviathan: By and large, until, say, 1945, the expansion was fairly harmless. The underlying motives were noble, benevolent, or at worst foolish: a democratic ideal, the need to occupy the young increasingly excluded from t ... [read more]

Midweek stuff1. Most unsurprising headline I've read all year: "Only in Japan, Real Men Go to a Hotel With Virtual Girlfriends." Sub-head: "Dating-Simulation Game a Last Resort For Honeymoon Town and Its Lonely Guests." That's from the ... [read more]

Toronto mayor's raceAccording to a Forum Research poll, Rob Ford leads George Smitherman 34%-22%. Unlike most other polls that show the other three "contenders" in single digits, FR finds Rocco Rossi at 15%, Sarah Thompson with 14%, and ... [read more]

A recent Washington Post news story describing a speech by Christina Romer, the outgoing chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, provides a nice example of how to implicitly assume your conclusion. The author writes: At week's en ... [read more]

Pollution trends – here and here.  (And I know that, for at least some pollutants, the trends were also downward – that is, good – prior to 1970.)  (HT Ross Kaminsky) [read more]

Discovery Channel's environmentalist 'zealot' hostage takerI have a post about Jason Jay Lee's anti-human views over at Soconvivium and read Lee's environmentalist manifesto, with all its human-beings-as-pollution rhetoric. [read more]

Some native chiefs are worried that the government’s goal is to bring property rights to the native reserves. So far the limited amount of property rights that has been introduced to some reserves has led to marked improvements in the r ... [read more]

No modern myth dies harder than the familiar claim – today repeated in the Los Angeles Times by one Joan Mortenson – that “It was the massive spending of World War II that finally ended the Depression.” Between 1941 and 1945 Uncle Sam d ... [read more]