It appears that the Betchel Group, recent recipient of a lucrative government contract to rebuild Iraq, has a history in the region. In the 50s, they built a pipeline from Kirkuk in Iraq to Syria, and in the ’80s they had plans to build a massive oil pipeline from iraq to Jordan. And who was […]

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One other thought on the Michigan affirmative action case… the university here is claiming that a diverse student body (viewpoint and experience diverse, with race used as a proxy—it’s settled law that mere racial diversity is invalid on face as a state purpose) constitutes a “compelling state interest.” There’s some dicta from Justice Powell in […]

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I just recently saw The Commanding Heights (which you can watch online in full if you follow the link), which is a nice sort of dramatized introduction to this century’s market revolution and the new global economy. They got some impressive folks to comment—Bill Clinton, Indonesia’s president, Robert Rubin, etc. Even my old prof. from […]

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Josh Chafetz is sporting a raging hard-on over all the macho good deeds American soldiers have been doing in his name. (Not in the name of all those limp wristed peaceniks, goddamit!) You’d think he’d marched into Baghdad himself, rather than firing off chest-thumping, cheerleading salvos from his keyboard. Oh, but he does remember to […]

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What’s the point of being a brutal despot if you don’t get your own shagadelic bachelor pad? (Via Brooke.)

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Now, this guy, a counterprotester at the protests outside Augusta National Golf Club, sounds like a misogynist. But I noticed that quite a number of commenters on that post applied the same term to the club itself. This is very silly. Absent special circumstances, it’s pretty reasonable to assume that a club or group seeking […]

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Never let it be said that I’ve grown so jaded that I can’t still be impressed by someone who’s been in space. Having been in space is cool. Having walked on the moon, cooler still. And having been one of the first people to ever do those things… well, that’s on the short, short list […]

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Genius.

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So those on the petitioners’ side of Grutter v. Bollinger, the University of Michican affirmative action case now before the Supremes, have argued (inter alia, as the lawyers say) that the school’s means of weighing race is really a disguised quota—and we all know from Bakke that quotas and set-asides are an equal-protection no-no. The […]

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Henry Farrell posts on the role of transaction costs in sustaining despotic regimes. The idea, in a nutshell, is that there’s a sort of first-mover problem that makes submission to tyrranical governments a suboptimal Nash equilibrium. It’s basically not possible to rule by force a population determined to get rid of you. If the vast […]

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