While it would probably be inaccurate to say that Gene Healy is a friend of F&S–basically because I highly doubt he reads our site–I can say that many of us greatly admire him. So, it is with great pride that I read this little ditty by George Will singing his new book’s praises:

But then, rhetorical—and related—excesses are inherent in the modern presidency. This is so for reasons brilliantly explored in the year’s most pertinent and sobering public affairs book, “The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power,” by Gene Healy of Washington’s libertarian Cato Institute. (emphasis added)

Anyone familiar with George Will knows he isn’t a writer known for overstatement, (save, perhaps, his columns relating to his love of baseball), so such praise is remarkable…and well-deserved.

Radley liked it a lot too.

And if I may throw in my two cents: Gene’s gift for language allows him to go through the history of the presidency without the bloated wonk-speak that often hamper books that come from the think-tanks. It is a very accessible read, well-researched, and has a good amount of the author’s wit and humor to keep it interesting. I highly recommend it.

So, what are you waiting for? BUY IT.

Comments Off
Filed under: Consumerism Rulez, Profiles in Governance

CHINA!

Police in southern China have discovered a factory manufacturing Free Tibet flags, media reports say.

The factory in Guangdong had been completing overseas orders for the flag of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

Workers said they thought they were just making colourful flags and did not realise their meaning.

That’s right, hippies. You’ve been supporting the Chinese government by buying your ‘Free Tibet’ flags from companies that pay Chinese taxes.  Thus, in your own special and smelly way, financing the oppression of the people you want to protect. Smooth.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for Tibetan freedom (and shit), but this is just funny.

Via Fark.

1 Comment »
Filed under: Consumerism Rulez

I imagine this will be the only time on this blog — and certainly by this author — that a positive word will be said of FDR and his policies. But, as I sit at my office (and might I add I’m pretty sure I’m still drunk from last night) I must give credit where it’s due: the left’s favorite poster-child (in the Jerry’s Kids sense) pushed for the end of prohibition.

After 13 dry years, legal beer had returned to the United States. It may seem silly to commemorate that day’s 75th anniversary. After all, it’s only beer, and we’ve got bigger things to think about. War. Global warming. Soaring gas prices. Crashing home prices.

Silly? For shame. There is nothing wrong with celebrating beer for beer’s sake.

So, if you’re one of those people who need a reason to drink — if you’re not into that whole NCAA thing — go out and celebrate the 75th anniversary of legal beer tonight.

You can even raise a glass to FDR — just this once.

1 Comment »
Filed under: Behind Every Law..., Consumerism Rulez, Profiles in Governance

Apparently I rushed to judgment when I called for everyone to get sporks last week. Someone in Alaska heeded my call and proceeded to lose his damned mind:

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Anchorage police have arrested a suspect in an armed robbery. Now they’re trying to determine if the weapon involved was a spork — a hybrid of a spoon and fork found at fast-food restaurants.

Police said a suspect tried to grab a man’s watch on Monday night.

The victim said the assailant swung a pocketknife at him but four parallel scratches on the victim’s side make police suspect the wound was administered with a spork.

Peter Albert, 52, was arrested a few blocks from the scene and charged with robbery. Police said Albert was intoxicated and carrying a small pocketknife as well as a backpack containing a fast food bag and sporks.

Albert is being held at the Anchorage jail with bail set at $5,000.

Comments Off
Filed under: Consumerism Rulez

Ah, the language police have struck again:

ALTOONA, Pa. - A convenience store chain’s billboard advertising its fried chicken sandwich is ruffling the feathers of some residents.

Sheetz Inc. unveiled the “Crispy Frickin’ Chicken” billboards at the beginning of February.

…

“There was a lady who left an angry voice mail,” code enforcement officer Fran Calarco said. “And a man called and said he had small children and didn’t think they should be exposed to that type of language. I told him I completely understood and agreed.”

What the frick, dude?

Via Fark.

1 Comment »
Filed under: Consumerism Rulez

Whatever one thought of the Teri Schiavo debacle, there were two facets of that case that American patients should take comfort in:

1. That there was a real and legitimate debate about what Mrs. Schiavo’s real wishes would have been, with different sets of loved ones presenting the courts with differing evidence that supported differing conclusions and
2. that, if it could be determined definitively what those intentions were, it would have made a difference.

Our neighbors to the north are currently engaged in a controversy of their own that papers are calling “the Canadian Schiavo case,” but there are some stark differences that illustrate some of the unforseen dangers of the single-payer health care system. There, despite the fact that the family of Salvation Army Grace General Hospital patient Samuel Golubchuk are united in wanting to keep their father alive, and despite the fact that his being a strictly observant Orthodox Jew would seem to leave little question as to what his thoughts on the matter would be:

Golubchuk’s doctors informed his children that their 84-year-old father is “in the process of dying” and that they intended to hasten the process by removing his ventilation, and if that proved insufficient to kill him quickly, to also remove his feeding tube. In the event that the patient showed discomfort during these procedures, the chief of the hospital’s ICU unit stated in his affidavit that he would administer morphine.

The difference, of course, is that in Canada, the state is both payor and provider of all health care, and even if Golubchuk’s family had the means to pay for their father’s continued hospitalization, it would be illegal for them to do so. When opponents of socialized medicine complain of “rationing,” this is specifically what they mean — he who pays the piper calls the tune, and once all health care costs become public, so too, do all health care decisions:

the director of the ICU informed Golubchuk’s children that neither their father’s wishes nor their own are relevant, and he would do whatever he decided was appropriate. Bill Olson, counsel for the ICU director, told the Canadian Broadcasting Company that physicians have the sole right to make decisions about treatment — even if it goes against a patient’s religious beliefs — and that “there is no right to a continuation of treatment.”

Comments Off
Filed under: Behind Every Law..., Consumerism Rulez, Profiles in Governance

It used to be that fashionable folks wouldn’t be caught drinking anything but clean, pure bottled water. Tap water was strictly for livestock and the lower middle class. Evian was the only way to go.

Wake up to today. Bottled water is the new environmental crime. Now only Neanderthals dare to chug from the Fiji bottle, and for the most obvious reason: carbon footprint. Let the Telegraph explain further: 

…new research shows that drinking a bottle of water has the same impact on the environment as driving a car for a kilometre. Conservation groups and water providers have started a campaign against the £2 billion industry.

A BBC Panorama documentary, “Bottled Water: Who Needs It?”, to be broadcast tomorrow says that in terms of production, a litre bottle of Evian or Volvic generates up to 600 times more CO2 than a litre of tap water.

In what is surely meant to be a conversation-ending trump card, various UK-based idiots are trying to tell us that drinking bottled water ”borders on being morally unacceptable” and should be considered as socially unacceptable as smoking. You know what? I say we split the difference. The anti-smoking crowd will, since they’re so morally superior, be allowed the occasional sin of drinking their bottled water, while we smokers agree to give up all forms of packaged dihydrogen monoxide.  Cool?

Comments Off
Filed under: Consumerism Rulez

Roto-Rooter has my email address because I used their online scheduling system to get a service appointment a couple of weeks ago. (I highly recommend it. Filled out the form online, and less than an hour later there was a dude at my house, uh, servicing my pipes.)

Today, I received an email inviting me to enter Roto-Rooter’s Pimped Out Powder Room Sweepstakes, which obviously I’m going to do, over and over again–because yes, that’s a towel rack/heater with a 17″ LCD TV that doubles as a mirror. And yes, that’s a toilet with a heated seat and a bidet. And yes, it’s a salon-style hair dryer. And a mini-fridge. And you don’t have to paint the whole room pink if you don’t want to, but maybe I do, okay? Maybe I want to look trashy, did you ever think of that?

Now I like to be an informed consumer, to create information symmetry wherever I can, so I read the sweepstakes rules. And I swear to god, under “Conditions,” I had to read this sentence a couple of times before I could even make sense of the words in this order:

If a Canadian resident is selected as a winner he/she must correctly answer a time-based mathematical skill test administered by phone/mail to be eligible for a prize.

So it’s already funny, because, you know, it says “Canadian,” and all things Canada are hilarious (Did you know there’s something called the Canadian dollar that apparently they use for money instead of real money? What a quaint little people they are!), but can anyone tell me why the devil Canadians have to have their math tested (and in a time-based manner, at that), to be eligible to win a shitter? Or, for that matter, why time-based mathematical skill testing of Canadians seems to be sort of a standard deal in sweepstakes? What happens if they get it wrong?

This will keep me awake tonight, I fear.

3 Comments »
Filed under: Consumerism Rulez, Pop! Goes the Culture

Under consumer pressure, the Hershey Company is discontinuing “Ice Breakers Pacs” because of their strong resemblance to street drugs.

Ice Breakers Pacs remain on store shelves but are expected to be sold out early this year and no more are being made, [Hershey CEO David J.] West said. Kirk Saville, a company spokesman, said they had been distributed nationally on a limited basis.

Hershey has said the mints were not intended to resemble anything, and West said consumers who tested and purchased the product liked it.

Well, if it wasn’t intended, that is the most coincidental cocaine look-alike bag I’ve ever see….er, I mean, I’ve heard they resemble cocaine bags very closely.

Perhaps Hershey & Co. should double-check the marketing department’s drug-screening results. Just a thought.

::sniffle, sniffle::

Comments Off
Filed under: Consumerism Rulez

Protestants ♥ freedom and shit…or at least capitalism, which is facilitated by freedom and shit.

I was reading this post over at Tech Liberation Front, which quotes a passage from a 1975 book about telephony that mentions the relationship between the Calvinist work ethic and entrepreneurship, which was particularly pronounced in 19th century America:

[T]he economic rewards of invention under the U.S. patent system were great and well advertised; Bell and others like him knew well enough that the inventor and original backer of the telegraph had become millionaires, and his passion for secrecy about his experiments, along wit his early and intimate association with the Patent Office through Hubbard, suggest how well he realized he might be onto something commercially big. And he was urged on by both his philosophical background and the current social climate in America. The Scottish Calvinism of the nineteenth century made a primary virtue of material success achieved through hard work, and as an example Bell had his countryman Andrew Carnegie, twelve years his senior, who had come to the United States from Scotland in 1848 and by 1875 was already a millionaire in the process of consolidating the largest steel company in the world. As to the social climate, 1875 was the heyday in America of laissez-faire venture capitalism, when men had a kind of savage fury for fame and fortune that the more jaded twentieth century can scarcely conceive of.

Tim Lee, the post’s author, finds the last sentence of that passage out of step with today’s reality, but I disagree. The spirit of innovation and invention that swept America in the 19th century far surpasses the isolated pockets of innovation that exist in today’s America, and I think there are two reasons.

First is that innovation today is somewhat more difficult to detect: packing more information on a microchip or creating a cell phone that can take pictures is hardly an improvement in quality of life on par with the improvements afforded by electricity, light bulbs, telephones, elevators, steam engines, and yes, the dishwasher, which was invented by an Illinois socialite. Change is less dramatic today, and thus, there’s less opportunity for fame and fortune of the kind that 19th century inventors enjoyed. Who knows the name of the dude who invented the cell phone camera or the halogen light bulb? No one. But we all know Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. Of course there are occasional exceptions and notable inventors and innovators–like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, the Google dudes, etc.–but mostly people tend to think of them as the figureheads of multinational corporations, not rugged individualist inventors in the mold of their predecessors.

Second gets more at the mention of Calvinism in the passage. In addition to there being less of a sense of urgency about the physical need to invent things to make life better, the decline in religiosity is likely a significant contributor to the decline in the spirit of invention. I, for one, would work far harder in my secular vocation if a.) I believed in god and b.) I believed that god would prefer it if I worked harder. That’s sort of why I dig Calvinism, except for the whole austerity thing. No matter what you do in life, God has already chosen the elect, those who will be saved and get to chill in heaven. But to be a good Calvinist, you have to put a lot of zeal into proving to others that you’re part of the elect, by working as hard as you can in the name of God in this life. Now as a non-believer, keeping up appearances for the sake of others and showing that I’m part of the modern-day elect (read: the cool kids) is most of why I do the basic minimum to hold down a job. But hells yeah, if I thought god cared and wanted me to do better (and more importantly, if I thought I’d go to hell if I didn’t do better), maybe I’d put some effort into it.

Anyway, the relationship between protestantism and the roots of modern capitalism is pretty interesting: you should work hard, but not live lavishly–so what to do with your hard-earned pennies? Invest them in the means of more production! Jebus lubs investment in productive capital. If you’re interested and haven’t read it, Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a pretty quick read, and it’s available for free online. Ironically. Religiosity declines and all of a sudden books are free! World gone mad.

Comments Off
Filed under: The Dismal Science, Consumerism Rulez, Jesus is Magic, Pop! Goes the Culture