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Friday, September 05, 2003 :::

The Culture: Contrasting Values

Anyone who flipped around the television dial last night witnessed a telling contrast: ABC, one of the nation's top commercial networks, aired an opening night celebration for the NFL, the nation's most successful professional sports league; meanwhile PBS, a network supported by government funds and leftist ideology, ran the Democratic presidential debate. The former showcased wealth creation and individual achievement; the latter featured a discussion of how best to destroy wealth and collectivize society.

Anyone want to wager what show got the higher rating?

::: posted by Skip Oliva at 10:18 AM | link | donate |

Rights and Reason: Price Controls by Another Name

The Bush-Cheney reelection campaign is touting the president's "six point plan for the economy." Point #1 is quite telling:

Making health care costs more affordable and predictable. President Bush proposes to allow small businesses to pool together to purchase health coverage for workers at lower rates.

On first reading, this sounds rather uncontroversial and pro-free market. But that's only if you don't grasp the context. If health care consumers want to combine their purchasing power, that's perfectly fine. The problem is that healthcare providers--physicians and hospitals--don't enjoy the reciprocal right to join their economic power to negotiate with consumers. The FTC and DOJ claim it's "unfair competition" when physicians exercise the right Bush wants to expand for consumers.

The Bush administration gets this. That's why their message is that healthcare costs will be "more affordable and predictable" under his plan. Of course it will. If the government prevents physicians from negotiating in a free market, the costs will be kept down simply by force of law. This is what we used to call a "price control"; but in a Republican White House, it's given the name of "market reforms."

::: posted by Skip Oliva at 10:08 AM | link | donate |

Rights and Reason: Bill Moyers goes Green

Consider this line from PBS's Bill Moyers on the anti-enviromentalists:

Their god is the market -- every human problem, every human need, will be solved by the market. Their dogma is the literal reading of the creation story in Genesis where humans are to have "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the Earth, and over every creeping thing ..." The administration has married that conservative dogma of the religious right to the corporate ethos of profits at any price. And the result is the politics of exploitation with a religious impulse.

Meanwhile, over a billion people have no safe drinking water. We're dumping 500 million tons of hazardous waste into the Earth every year. In the last hundred years alone we've lost over 2 billion hectares of forest, our fisheries are collapsing, our coral reefs are dying because of human activity. These are facts. So what are the administration and Congress doing? They're attacking the cornerstones of environmental law: the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, NEPA [the National Environmental Policy Act]. They are allowing l7,000 power plants to create more pollution. They are opening public lands to exploitation. They're even trying to conceal threats to public health: Just look at the stories this past week about how the White House pressured the EPA not to tell the public about the toxic materials that were released by the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center.

Then Moyers says he's a capitalist:

It stuns me that the people in power can't see that the source of our wealth is the Earth. I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a capitalist. I don't want to destroy the system on which my livelihood and my journalism rest. I am strongly on behalf of saving the environment [in no small part] because it is the source of our wealth. Destroy it and the pooh-bahs of Wall Street will have to book an expedition to Mars to enjoy their riches. I don't understand why they don't see it. I honestly don't. This absence of vision as to what happens when you foul your nest puzzles me.

It puzzles me that Moyers has the audacity to say he's a capitalist while simultaneously damming the free market. Moyers claims the corporate ethos is �profits at any price.� Any price? That�s news to me. And why does Moyers believe that the pro-reason position is that man does not have dominion over the earth? What else, according to Moyers, comes before man?

If Moyers was even remotely a capitalist, he would argue for individual rights--that is, that the individual has a right to his life. He would argue for property rights. He would not smear the individual�s right to profit from his labor. He would argue that the standard for judging so-called environmental damages would be proof of actual harm to humans from pollution, proven in a court of law.

And more fundamentally, Moyers would argue for reason. He would not glibly dismiss the mountain of evidence against global warming theory. He would argue against the faith based arguments of the environmentalists and the religious leftists.

Yet the chances of all this happing are about as great as Moyers leaving PBS to air his programs on greedy capitalist-dominated commercial TV.

::: posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 10:05 AM | link | donate |

Capitalism and the Law: Judge Nixes Lawsuit Against McDonald's

This from the AP:

For a second time this year, a federal judge threw out a class-action lawsuit Thursday that blamed McDonald's for making people fat.

U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet said the plaintiffs failed to show that the fast-food chain misled consumers into believing its food was nutritious and part of a healthy diet.

Sweet tossed out an earlier version of the lawsuit in January that claimed McDonald's food causes health problems in children.

On Thursday he rejected a request that the plaintiffs be permitted to file a new version, which claimed that McDonald's violated New York's consumer protection laws and engaged in deceptive advertising.

The Oak Brook, Ill.-based company called the ruling a "total victory" and said its menu options can fit into a healthy, well-balanced diet.

A message left for the plaintiffs' lawyer was not immediately returned.

In a statement, the National Restaurant Association said Sweet's decision demonstrated that "reason and common sense have prevailed."

The judge said the lawsuit failed to back allegations that any injuries resulted from McDonald's representations about its french fries or hash browns.

In his earlier ruling, Sweet said consumers cannot blame McDonald's if they choose to eat there.

"If a person knows or should know that eating copious orders of supersized McDonald's products is unhealthy and may result in weight gain ... it is not the place of the law to protect them from their own excesses," Sweet wrote at the time.

Needless to say, it's a good thing this utterly irrational crusade is getting its just "desserts" in court.

::: posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 9:20 AM | link | donate |

Thursday, September 04, 2003 :::

Rights and Reason: Disconnect on gas prices

Bruce Bartlett observes California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante's call for price controls on gasoline yesterday at the Washington Times:

Last week, Mr. Bustamante proposed amending the California state constitution to allow the Public Utilities Commission to regulate gasoline prices. "Californians are being gouged," he charged. His proposal would require oil companies to justify price increases and regulate their profits in the state.

The price control plan has universally been condemned on economic and legal grounds. "It's a terrible idea," says energy expert Philip Verleger. He warned that it will lead to gas lines as oil companies export gasoline production from California refineries to other states and reduce imports of gasoline from Canada, the Caribbean and others places that now serve the California market.

The state would have no power, even if the constitutional amendment were adopted, to compel oil companies to keep supplies in the state or bring gasoline in from elsewhere. Any effort to do so would be a violation of the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution and surely be thwarted.

Says law professor Anthony Sabino, "Gasoline and the business of selling gasoline is part of interstate commerce that belongs to Congress to regulate, if at all." He added that Mr. Bustamante "is either very ignorant of the law or he's getting incredibly bad advice from his advisers or it's a publicity stunt."

The first thing I thought of when I read this story was how such a proposal would violate the rights of the oil producers. Too bad that wasn't the first thing on Bruce Bartlett's mind. This is how Bartlett tackles the pro-price control premise:

Unfortunately, the movement to control gasoline prices is not limited to California. Last year, Hawaii enacted a law giving it the power to regulate gasoline prices. It is scheduled to go into effect next year. In Washington, Rep. Edward Markey, Massachusetts Democrat, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Connecticut Democrat, have been pressuring the Energy Department to take action against high gasoline prices.

Apparently, neither has bothered to learn the facts of the situation before lashing out at the oil companies � always convenient whipping boys for liberal politicians. If they checked, they would see that real (inflation-adjusted) gasoline prices are about where they have been for most of the last 20 years. The recent runup is from a historically low level. Even so, they are still substantially lower than they were in 1981: $1.79 per gallon now versus $2.74 then. And contrary to popular belief, oil company profits are not rising. According to Business Week, the profit margin in the oil industry is only 5.4 percent, compared with 6.4 for all industries.

The main reason why gasoline prices rise and fall is because of fluctuations in the world price of oil, which oil companies have little control over since they import most of it from places like Saudi Arabia. California, however, has deliberately imposed higher costs on itself by requiring that gasoline sold there be specially formulated to reduce pollution. With a limited number of refineries able to produce the kind of gasoline California demands, prices there have long been higher than in the rest of the country.

Note the absence of a moral argument. Bustamante and like-minded others are wrong, but only in so much as they don't understand that oil companies earn less profits on average than other industries.

What if oil companies earned 50% profits? What if oil prices were, on average, higher today then they were in the past? Would it then be acceptable for Bustamante and his ilk to regulate the price of gas? I think not.

Bartlett is right more often then he is wrong, but this most recent column of his was little more than a waste of ink.

::: posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 12:58 PM | link | donate |

Antitrust News: Attacking producers and consumers

The Associated Press reports on the latest target of antitrust enthusiasts:

A lawsuit against bookstore chains filed five years ago by a former independent book store owner in North Carolina is expected to reach a courtroom this fall.

Wallace Kuralt, the brother of the late CBS newsman Charles Kuralt, filed a federal lawsuit in 1998 seeking $38 million in damages from Barnes & Noble and Borders Books. The former owner of a Chapel Hill independent bookstore said the Intimate Bookshop, which at one point had grown into a nine-store regional chain, was a victim of industry competition as big-box bookstores sprouted in area shopping centers.

Kuralt accused the chains of bullying publishers into providing deep discounts not available to smaller stores. He alleges the companies are violating the Robinson-Patman Act, enacted in 1936 to keep large businesses from using their buying power to get volume discounts.

The chains will answer the antitrust charges in the Southern District of New York on Nov. 10 before Judge William Pauley.

Borders and Barnes & Noble state in documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that they plan to "vigorously defend the action."

"I believe that if we had all the benefits that they [sic] the big chains had, we could have done incredible things," Kuralt said Tuesday.

Kuralt said the chains illegally pressured publishers to give breaks not available to the smaller bookstores, including what he alleges were illegal promotional fees, rebates of shipping charges and inflated discounts.

Two years ago, the American Booksellers Association settled a similar lawsuit filed on behalf of 26 independent bookstores in California for $4.7 million. The settlement with Borders and Barnes & Noble represented about a quarter of the ABA's legal fees.

The ABA also won a consent order in 1998 that kept publishers from favoring certain retailers.

You wonder why the large retailers settled with the ABA. They should have realized that settling, for any amount, would only encourage more litigation in the future. No doubt the retailers' lawyers assured them that settling was the safest option. Indeed it was--for the lawyers. They get paid no matter what simply for advising their defendant clients.

On the merits of the Kuralt claim, it should strike even antitrust advocates as odd that the argument here is against a business practice that benefits consumers--namely volume discounts to large purchasers. A market composed largely of small, independent retailers generally doesn't bode well for lower consumer prices. If it did, Wal-Mart wouldn't be the world's largest retailer. Volume discounts more often than not encourage the precise type of competition antitrust wonks claim is good. Yet here Kuralt is suing, in essence, because consumers benefitted at his expense, and he wants the courts to punish the consumers for preferring his competitors' business model.

It reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon where Dogbert states the two basic rules of business: First, the customer is always right; second, they must be punished for their arrogance!

::: posted by Skip Oliva at 12:22 PM | link | donate |

Wry Observations II: DC is worse for a reason

Nick cites a post below arguing that young black males are more likely to die on the streets of D.C. than serving in the armed forces in Iraq. I can think of one reason this is the case: a black male soldier is allowed--indeed required--to carry a firearm while stationed in Iraq. A law-abiding black male in D.C., however, is banned from owning a private handgun under the local law. D.C. policy is to make sure the criminals are armed while the population is effectively helpless.

::: posted by Skip Oliva at 12:15 PM | link | donate |

Antitrust News: Congress Takes on College Football

As I write this the House Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing on "Competition in College Athletic Conferences and Antitrust Aspects of the Bowl Championship Series". If it sounds like a political effort to exploit popular discontent with college football's postseason format, that's because it is. Testifying at this morning's hearing is NCAA President Myles Brand, Big Ten Conference Commissioner James Delany (speaking for the BCS), former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Steve Young, and Tulane University President Scott Cowen, who heads a coalition of non-BCS, Division I-A football schools.

The Judiciary Committee's press release notes: "The projected revenue for the four 2004 BCS games is $90 million. An estimated $6 million of this will go to the 55 non-BCS schools while over $80 million will go to the 62 BCS schools." What is left out is that it's the 62 BCS schools that generate that revenue. ABC is not paying to televise a matchup between Tulane and Montana. They are paying to see Michigan, Notre Dame, Miami, etc., the major football schools. The real problem is that under the current NCAA structure, you have half the schools producing revenues, while the other is spending themselves into debt to try and compete. If the non-BCS schools would come to their senses and scale back on their money-losing athletic programs, all this talk of antitrust and the BCS would cease.

Of course, the BCS schools could force the issue by taking their football programs out of the NCAA entirely. Somehow I doubt that option will please would-be congressional regulators.

It's also worth noting that Tulane's Cowen, the anti-BCS leader, has said he doesn't want Congress involved, that it was up to the NCAA members to figure this out for themselves.

::: posted by Skip Oliva at 12:11 PM | link | donate |

Wry Observations: DC is worse than Iraq

Saw this on Instapundit and thought it was interesting:

Stefan Sharkansky notes that the District of Columbia is a quagmire of violent resistance to peaceful government, despite the efforts of American authorities:

According to this week's story from Scripps Howard News Service, there are 140,000 troops in Iraq, and there have been 286 fatalities from all causes since the war began in March (about 24 weeks ago). That gives us an annualized death rate of 443 per 100,000. Only about half of these deaths (147) were in combat, for a combat death rate of 228 per 100,000.

According to Center for Disease Control / National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, there were 21,836 young black men (age 18-30) in Washington DC in 2000, the latest year that mortality data is available. The total number of deaths in this group from all causes was 132, with 95 homicides. i.e. the death rate for this group was 604 per 100,000 and the murder rate was 435 per 100,000.

In other words, a young black male soldier from Washington DC would have been 36% more likely to die by staying at home than by serving in active duty in the Iraq war, and almost twice as likely to be murdered at home than to be killed in combat. Yes, that's horribly sad, but it puts a few things in perspective.

This exercise misses the ratio of black troops to white troops in Iraq, but the point is well taken nevertheless.

::: posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 12:01 PM | link | donate |

The Culture: Business 2.0 Magazine Unveils 'The Books That Matter' List of Best & Worst Books

I've never heard of them before, but there is this magazine that calls itself "Business 2.0". Apparently they see themselves as an improvement over regular old business. Business 2.0 recently released its list of the best and worst books on business. This from their press release:

The following is a sampling of book selections by category from Business 2.0's list of the "The Books That Matter":

Pillars of Capitalism: The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith (1776)
Management: The Principles of Scientific Management, by Frederick W. Taylor (1911)
Strategy: The Art of War, by Sun Tzu (c. 300 B.C.)
Innovation: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas S. Kuhn (1962)
Leadership: Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville (1851)
Marketing: The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen (1899)
Investing: The Intelligent Investor, Benjamin Graham (1949)
Booms and Busts: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay (1841)
The Business of Technology: Fire in the Valley, by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. (1984)
Greed: Liar's Poker, by Michael Lewis (1989)
Working Life: Seize the Day, by Saul Bellow (1956)
Biography: Wheels for the World, by Douglas Brinkley (2003)
Envisioning the Future: The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov (1951-1953)

"Before businesspeople take that last long weekend of the summer over Labor Day, we thought we'd help them choose a great business book," said Josh Quittner, editor of Business 2.0. "At first glance, some of our choices may seem unusual--such as the inclusion of Moby-Dick--but each of the selected books spotlights examples of business savvy and ideas that we're sure will resonate with our readers."

Leadership from Moby Dick? Gimmie a break. You doubtless know the outlines of the "story": a mentally unbalanced whaling captain hunts a white whale which had once bitten off his leg. He finds it and dies fighting it. That's it. No adventures, no close calls with the white whale, no deep exploration of the captain's obsession. Nada. There are few events in this dark, malevolent novel. It's mainly rambling.

One book Business 2.0 felt would not resonate was Atlas Shrugged.

Titles that made the editors' "Remainder Bin" of overrated business books include the best-selling Who Moved My Cheese?, Ayn Rand's classic Atlas Shrugged, the management blockbuster In Search of Excellence, and Mark Twain's first novel, The Gilded Age.

Atlas Shrugged overrated? Heh. I think I'll wait for the Business 3.0 philosphic bug fix rather then buy into the current version.

::: posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 10:35 AM | link | donate |

Wednesday, September 03, 2003 :::

Light blogging today

Light blogging today--I'm on the road. In the mean time, I recommend you take a look at Dollars and Crosses.

::: posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 2:35 PM | link | donate |

Tuesday, September 02, 2003 :::

The Culture: People Shocked by Maddona

Call me amazed, but there are people out there who are still shocked by Maddona.

::: posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 7:56 PM | link | donate |

Rights and Reason: Colleges Move to Stop File-Swapping

Alex Veiga of the AP reports that colleges are moving to prevent intellectual property theft on campus:

Students arriving for fall classes at colleges across the country are facing technological hurdles and stern warnings aimed at ending swapping of music and movie files over high-speed campus Internet connections.

Several of the universities are responding to a recording industry campaign to control the rampant copying of files over peer-to-peer networks.

Among other things, campuses are distributing brochures, running ads in student newspapers and devoting school Web pages to information on copyright infringement.

Some are even using software to choke the amount of data that can flow in or out of a computer when students use Kazaa and other file-sharing programs.

"We're feeling a great deal of pressure as a result of what the entertainment industry is doing, and we're stepping up a lot of activities to address it," said Jim Davis, associate vice chancellor for information technology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

As they should, because it is their networks that students use to loot IP.

No college could long exist if intellectual property was not protected. That some of the most egregious IP theft takes place on college networks should be reason enough for colleges to take the lead to address the implications of this theft.

::: posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 6:39 PM | link | donate |

Foreign Policy: North Korea's Nuclear Program

National Review Online's Stanley Kurtz notes the key difficulty in negotiating with North Korea--that they cannot be trusted. Two points must be kept in mind by the Administration team:

1. The success of the negotiations must be measured in pounds of plutonium handed over. The North Korean program must be rolled back, not frozen.
2. Any success is temporary, buying time. North Korea will continue to pursue nuclear weapons and psychotic adventures as long as it is run as a demented hellhole. Even if they hand over the plutonium and the enrichment machines they have today, they will go back and cheat tomorrow.

::: posted by John Bragg at 6:38 PM | link | donate |

Communications: Breaking News

It seems bloggers don't just analyze the news--they break it. Case in point: Howard Bashman.

At this very moment, the CNN.com Web site has the following banner headline across the top in white letters on a red background: "BREAKING NEWS: Federal appeals court in San Francisco overturns an estimated 100 death sentences. Details soon." Of course, I posted that news online here at "How Appealing" approximately two hours ago.

Update: The Associated Press, at least, was only an hour and a half behind me in reporting on the news[.]

There is no free service that covers the appellate courts as attentively as Howard Bashman. Period.

::: posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 5:16 PM | link | donate |

Foreign Policy: D�j� Vu All Over Again

Cato's Charles V. Pe�a writes that Iranian nuclear weapons are not a threat to the US:

The bottom line, however, is that Iran, like Iraq, is not a direct military threat to the United States, even if it possesses weapons of mass destruction. The terrorist groups Iran supports are anti-Israeli and do not currently target the United States. And the allegations of linkages to al Qaeda are as tenuous as the claims made about Iraq. As Yogi Berra said, it's d�j� vu all over again.

It would be folly for the United States to wage another war against another Muslim nation after Afghanistan and Iraq. Such action would likely be interpreted as a war against Islam by the rest of the Muslim world. If anything, the United States needs to avoid turning the war on terrorism against al Qaeda into a larger holy war against Islam and the more than one billion Muslims around the world.

Iran's Islamic government issued a fatwa against British novelist Salman Rushdie calling for his murder on the grounds that his 1989 book The Satanic Verses blasphemed Islam. This fatwa, a threat against the free exchange of ideas--the very cornerstone of western civilization--has never been rescinded by Iran.

The Rushdie fatwa alone is justification for war with Iran. The prospect that the same power that believes it has the right to kill writers it doesn�t like is developing nuclear weapons ought to be cause for serious pause. So what if Islam interprets a war with Iran as a war against Islam? Islamic militants have no qualms over waging war against us. Yet even post-9/11, it seems people in the US still have qualms with our waging a defense.

::: posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 10:02 AM | link | donate |

The Conduct of War: Israel vs. The Arabs

Joel Mowbray writes from Israel:

Dozens of men�mostly with long beards and either skull caps or strange-looking hats (the likes of which I had never seen before)�approached me. This was understandable since not only had they never seen me before, but I was dressed in long khaki pants and a casual blue button-down shirt�a far cry from the black slacks and pressed white dress shirts almost everyone else was wearing. But rather than scorning me as an outsider, they embraced me and welcomed me to their house of worship.

Less than 48 hours later, at a funeral for a Hamas terrorist responsible for repeatedly plotting mass murders of innocent Israelis, this was the scene as described by the New York Times:

��We want martyrs, more sacrifice,� blared a voice amplified through loudspeakers as more than 1,000 Palestinians marched through Gaza City today during the funeral procession.�

This reminds me of a point Chip Joyce made about "angry" Arab funerals. What kinds of people have angry funerals? What kinds of people turn an occasion of grief and morning into an angry demonstration?

I suspect angry funerals are the product of people who don't care so much for the memory of the dead as they do for their joy in killing.

::: posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 8:50 AM | link | donate |

Rights and Reason: Dealing with the mixed economy

I leave for a couple days and I miss a real debate. Skip and John's discussion over the rights of atheist students in public schools reads to me like a classic case of finding the right in a mixed economy. The schools ought to be private. Teachers, to be effective, must be free to control the focus of their students and to serve as what Leonard Peikoff once called "total cognitive authorities" in the classroom.

Yet most elementary schools in America are not private, and being government-run, are bound by the First Amendment, which protects religious freedoms. Do I think public school teachers ought to genuflect before the irrationality of their religious students, such as, for example, exempting students from requirements to understand the theory of evolution or allowing them to don religious dress if they so wish? No. No one has a right to the irrational. Yet people do have a right to their freedom of choosing and exercising their own philosophy, which, in its 18th century language, is what I believe the First Amendment serves to protect. Again, we have the inevitable conflict between freedom and controls that the mixed economy begets.

And this conflict yet again underscores the pressing need to privatize public education. Public school teachers are given an impossible task: instruct, but be neutral, teach, but without authority. However public teachers attempt to accommodate the different philosophic and religious beliefs of their charges will always be inadequate. We see this. We need to ask ourselves why our opponents don�t.

::: posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 8:36 AM | link | donate |

Foreign Policy: Tell that to the Marines

Paul Wolfowitz says the war in Iraq is part of the war on terror in today's Wall Street Journal.

Anyone who thinks that the battle in Iraq is a distraction from the war on terror should tell it to the Marines of the 1st Marine Division who comprised the eastern flank of the force that fought its way to Baghdad last April. When I met recently with their commander, Maj. General Jim Mattis in Hillah, he said that the two groups who fought most aggressively during the major combat operations were the Fedayeen Saddam--homegrown thugs with a cult-like attachment to Saddam--and foreign fighters, principally from other Arab countries. The exit card found in the passport of one of these foreigners even stated that the purpose of his "visit" to Iraq was to "volunteer for jihad."

We face that poisonous mixture of former regime loyalists and foreign fighters today.

I agree, but the failure to identify militant Islam as the force that drives our enemies continues to be a dangerous and negligent omission.

::: posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 8:07 AM | link | donate |

Monday, September 01, 2003 :::

Capitalism and the Law: Junk e-mail

I took a few days off to head to the ocean and recharge the batteries. Like most of us, I came back to check the inevitable mountain of e-mails. In less than one week, I received over 1,500 junk e-mail messages.

1,500. That's incredible. And frankly, there ought to be a law. I should be able to indicate via my e-mail sever whether I want unsolicited e-mail, and if I don't, those that spam me should pay.

I don�t buy that it is too hard to defeat spammers. Spammers have no moral right to my time, or my computer. If not, e-mail is dead as a medium.

It is said that dealing with spam costs in the billions. Those that generate that unwanted spam should be made to foot the bill.

::: posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 8:23 PM | link | donate |

What It's All About: Labor Day

On Labor Day

Today we celebrate productive labor. Either we work at jobs and careers which are our primary joy in life, or we work for money so as to pay for that which is our primary joy. Raise a glass, and if the weather permits grill a steak, in honor of our dedication to our happiness, and the work we do in devotion to it.

Happy Labor Day.

::: posted by John Bragg at 9:46 AM | link | donate |

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