Smelly
Jorrit Wiersma mentions his research.#
I'll take a packet of pebbles, and... a beard for my mom.#
Michael Williams on the yearly fraternity deaths:#
In my opinion, Gordie Bailey is solely responsible for his own death. Unless someone used force or the threat of force against him, mere peer pressure is not nearly enough to shift blame away from the drinker. I have no doubt whatsoever that the members of the Chi Psi fraternity are pathetic, low-life scum, but Bailey was an adult and knew exactly what he was getting himself into the whole way down the line. You don't drink that much by accident, you do it to impress your newfound "friends" and to get as drunk as possible.
[...]
I'm sorry to say so, Mr. Lanahan, but Gordie's death was meaningless.
Don Boudreaux records some lessons he'd like his son to learn.#
- If he is ever asked to die for a government that claims a monopoly over his allegiance, he should politely refuse.
- In fact, government is not in the habit of asking for anything; instead, government coercively demands. So, if and when government demands that he soldier for it, he should refuse to do so. He should go to Canada, become a Quaker, fake an obsession with homo-necrophilia — that is, he should do whatever he must to prevent brutes in suits from forcing him to risk his life for their cause.
- Above all, he should be forever skeptical of received wisdoms and truths — but always understand that there is much genuine wisdom and many valuable truths in our world; skepticism is indispensable for sorting these relatively few gems from the pack of imposters.
From The Atlantic, issue of October 2004:#
A Nation of (German) Immigrants
They lost two world wars, but they conquered America. According to a recent Census Bureau report, when asked their ancestral ethnicity, 43 million Americans chose German, which beat out the runner-up, Irish, by more than 10 million. (The next most commonly cited ethnicities were African-American and English, with roughly 25 million each, followed in descending order by Mexican, Italian, Polish, French, and American Indian.) Teutonic dominance used to be even greater: from 1990 to 2000 the German-identifying share of the population decreased from 23 percent to 15 percent, and the other major Northern European groups suffered smaller but significant dips. The groups that grew the most in percentage terms were Latin Americans (particularly Mexicans and Puerto Ricans) and Asians (with Chinese, Indians, and Filipinos leading the way), and also those describing themselves more generally as Hispanic, African, European, or white. Good news for those who fear looming ethnic balkanization: the number of people who called their ancestry simply "American" grew by eight million, to roughly 20 million, during the 1990s, in the largest numerical increase for any group.
David Carr: "Give peace a rest."#