Tony Pierce to Kobe Bryant: "somehow i think your an orange county punk who probably should have gone to college"#

Don Boudreaux writes about the incremental improvements of the market that build up and make life better.#

In the context of private roads he says:

Almost every one of the goods and services that are routine in modern, commercial society is the result of a long series of mostly small, individual, creative efforts to improve an existing situation — to build a better mousetrap, to find materials that make a more comfortable mattress, to engineer a marginally more reliable internal-combustion engine…..

And although now quotidian, almost none of these things could have been imagined by anyone even a few decades ago. Therefore, saying about some possibility "I can't imagine it!" is not a sufficient argument against a claim that private, individual market-directed efforts can achieve some outcome that happens currently to be achieved principally by the state.

He later cites a reference to private roads in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes.

I like it.#

Chip Gibbons links to Betty Bower, of Baptists Are Saving Homosexuals, who describes why George Bush is likely to be gay.#

We at Baptists Are Saving Homosexuals have BASHed enough so-called "gays" with the blunt love of Jesus to know how to spot deviants across a crowded sale at Saks. Outside of Italian shoes, nothing sends up a rainbow-colored flare that you are dealing with a flaming homosexual more reliably than when a man breathlessly gushes the word "faaabulous!" When a Christian lady hears this word outside of her hair salon or florist, she instinctively reaches for the Bible tracts in her purse because she knows a nancy boy is within throwing range.

Therefore, conservative Christians throughout the land have become increasingly uncomfortable as they dutifully mask each awkward pause with a flurry of polite applause and yells of "more wars!" during President Bush's somewhat laborious attempts at speaking. While Tony Blair may have mastered the Queen's English, our President's vocabulary calls to mind any number of queens' English. Even our least vigilant Republican social commandos have noticed that Mr. Bush has been peppering his otherwise delightful litany of patriotic jingoism and pleasantly embroidered CIA-intelligence recaps with the effeminate mating call "fabulous" -- three giddy syllables that are tantamount to coyly cooing, "Hello, sailor!"

Doug Kern writes "Why Lord of the Rings Will - and Must - Be Remade."#

• The pre-existing fame of the LOTR novels prevents the actors in the LOTR trilogy from dominating the roles they played.
• Tolkien's novels are so richly detailed and his plots so intricately crafted that future directors will be able to re-tell the story from their own unique vantage points.
• Computer graphics will continue to improve, allowing the inexpensive creation of a new trilogy with spectacular visual effects.
• Every fanboy who watched LOTR is privately convinced that he could do a better job directing. One day, one of those fanboys will be in a position to do so.
• Cha-ching. LOTR = $$$.

(It is an article, those are the "five reasons.")

Arnold Kling presents statistics that make the case that we are better off.#

Today, there are two Americas. One America agrees with Congressman Sanders and Senator John Edwards that life is getting harder for working Americans, that things have been going down hill for thirty years, and that our only hope is bigger government. The other America realizes that it is nonsense to suggest that the middle class is disappearing and that the standard of living is eroding for working Americans.

This essay consists mostly of a deluge of statistics. But before I get to that, let me just ask you to consider what you can see with your own eyes. Is your family worse off than it was in the 1970's? Are many of the families that you know worse off? Do the people that you see in shopping malls, on vacation, on the highway, or in restaurants look like they are worse off than they were thirty years ago?

In the 1970's, ordinary working people drove Vegas and Pintos. They did not eat out much. They rarely traveled by airplane. Many of their jobs were dangerous. Do you really think that there are many working Americans today who would trade places with their 1970's counterparts?

Brian Leiter doesn't like it though.

Jet Li's Danny the Dog looks interesting.#