Once again, the baneful influence of big corporate donors has reared its ugly head. What other explanation could there be for Tom Ridge’s advice that Americans take the “duct tape and cover” route?
It’s clearly just the influence of the American Duct Tape Council at work.
Make your own candy valentine.
That’s Japanese for “Wash your way to a great looking body.”
It just doesn’t get any easier than this, folks. Lose weight by taking a shower, using Aoqili, a seaweed soap. Twenty-eight million Japanese can’t be wrong!
According to this highly reputable site, the Wall Street Journal says, “It’s like slow liposuction but with no suffering.” Jeez, first Fortune scopped them on the Enron story and now this.
Unfortunately, there is a downside. The site indicates, “For best results Aoqili Premium Seaweed Soap should be used as a part of your daily health and beauty routine” (my italics). Daily? I’m supposed to shower each and every day?
Ha! With any old health regime I can get away with exercising only three or four times a week. Don’t these people realize how much standing is involved in taking a shower? And don’t even get me started on baths. Relaxing, my foot.
The Japanese are truly a marvelous people. Their teen-agers score well ahead of obese, non-showering American students in math, science and especially Japanese. And certainly only they would have the fortitude to stick to a regimen this rigorous.
No suffering … where’s good old stinky Zen Buddhism when you need it?
The International Society for Individual Liberty has purchased Free-Market.Net, effectively saving it from the wrecking ball.
ifeminists.com wound up with the Independent Institute and Bureaucrash is going its own way. It’s still tough to tell how the Henry Hazlitt Foundation‘s collapse will affect the content, appearance and missions of these Web sites, but it’s good news that they’ve found homes and won’t disappear entirely.
Who knows, they may emerge stronger yet. Here’s to spontaneous order.
First, everyone wanted to check as much baggage as possible to avoid security hassles.
Now that the Transportation Security Administration has banned luggage locks, anyone with any sense is carrying on anything of value — which means longer lines with the rent-a-feds.
Fliers’ angst, and the luggage industry’s design response, is well told in this Tribune story by Kathy Bergen.
Given that young men and women are expected to delay marriage until their mid- to late-20s in lieu of college and career, it shouldn’t be surprising that more of them seek meaningless short-term sexual relationships with partners known colloquially as “fuck-buddies,” as explained in this story by Laura Sessions Stepp.
But the Bowling Green State research study the story takes as its launching point tells us good news about girls:
The Bowling Green researchers were surprised by how secure girls were about their relationships. Girls expressed significantly more confidence than guys that they could refuse a date, for example, or break up with someone they no longer wanted to go out with, or control what a couple did together.
Girls’ sexual confidence shows up in surveys. In the Toledo research, girls were more likely than guys to say they decided how far a couple would go. In a nationwide study soon to be released by the Kaiser Family Foundation, young women ages 15 to 24 were less likely than young men to report feeling pressured to engage in intercourse.
The average age girls go all the way the first time? It’s the same as it is for boys, 16 1/2, according to a separate release from Kaiser. In addition, more young people are turning to oral sex as an alternative to intercourse because it’s safer and carries less risk of pregnancy. While oral sex isn’t fool-proof, that young people are finding ways to have fun sexually in a relatively smart way should be reassuring, not a harbinger of the decline of civilization.
Teen-age pregnancies and abortions are at 10-year lows and HIV has not struck American youth in the catastrophic way it’s torn apart sub-Saharan Africa. The only sad thing is that so many young men and women have decided that careers take precedence over romance. They know that any romantic attachment is bound to be broken once they graduate and move on with their careers.
It shows maturity in the sense that they’re not foolishly jumping into marriages that won’t last. But those years of loneliness must be tough. Even the sex must reinforce that emptiness after a time.
Pays better, has benefits and I get to work from home. I’m the newest addition to the staff of Insurance Journal, a trade magazine for property/casualty agents and brokers. IJ is based in San Diego, Calif., and its print edition is only distributed in the West and some Southern states, including Texas.
But IJ’s online news coverage is international in scope, and I’m the new man in Chicago to cover the goings on in the Midwest. The mag hopes to roll out a print edition for the Midwest by the end of the year, which means this is really a growth opportunity. Since there’s no IJ office in Chicago, I’m working from home. That has its pluses and minuses, but it does mean I can avoid the brutally cold five-minute wait on the “L” platform twice a day.
I flew out to San Diego last week and was offered the job at the end of lunch at King’s Fish House. I met the staff there and everyone was very laid back and friendly. The publisher, Mark Wells Jr., has been in the business for 30 years and was as friendly and nice as could be. I was a bit worried that the job might overwhelm me, seeing as how my knowledge of the industry is not deep. But from meeting some of the other staffers, it’s clear that IJ grooms their reporters into the magazine.
In my job search, I cast a very wide net for practical purposes. Limiting myself to Chicago and not having much experience, I couldn’t afford to be choosy. And I decided to essentially let my next job determine my career path, unless I absolutely hated it. But trade reporting is something that has appealed to me for a while. It allows me to really understand one sector or subject in-depth, to essentially become an expert.
That expertise can be rolled into freelance assignments of all kinds, and it will especially give me a leg up if I ever wound up in the libertarian policy-wonk world, which seems unlikely but one never knows.
I’d expound at length, but … enh.
The same issue of Liberty which published Gene Healy’s awesome piece lauded below also included this gem from its publisher/editor-in-chief R.W. Bradford:
For the past 25 years, Republicans have been more or less committed, in rhetoric, at least, to a more constrained government. When they’ve held the presidency, they’ve blamed the huge growth of government on the Democrats who controlled Congress. When they’ve controlled Congress, they’ve blamed the continued growth of government on the Democratic president.
Now the GOP controls it all. They no longer have any excuse for the growth of government and the erosion of liberty. It’s time for them to put up or shut up. Or it would be a time if politics took place in what we normally view as the real world, a world in which bullshit is not a major currency.
Fantastic!
This makes a lot more sense than getting into bloody street-to-street warfare in Baghdad (link via OneManGang).
Dole has a great kids’ site promoting fruits and vegetables. Each item is made into a cartoon character. To wit: Kevin Kiwi. Each character’s page opens with a full-throated audio greeting which is without fail hi-larious.
My other faves are Cornelius Corn and Kenny Canned Pineapple. Kenny sounds like he’s hopped up on goofballs but makes up for it by telling us his dream of someday being a mechanical engineer.
“My idol is a person named Henry Ginaca,” Kenny writes. “In 1913, Mr. Ginaca invented a pineapple cutting machine. The machine removes the shell, the core, and the ends of the pineapple so that the pineapple can be canned.” Fascinating. And educational, too!
The best argument against the coming war with Iraq, that is, has arrived. Actually, it arrived a while ago, but I’m finally getting around to linking to it.
Gene Healy’s “Iraq: Wrong Place, Wrong Time, Wrong War” first appeared in the January issue of Liberty magazine, but only appeared online as a Cato commentary.
It’s really a fantastic piece, and addresses just about every pro-war argument in a mature, even-handed, intelligent way that doesn’t resort to ad hominem.
While some naifs want Illinois Gov. George Ryan nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for enacting a moratorium on the death penalty in the state and issuing a blanket commutation to all those sitting on death row, Slate’s Chris Suellentrop knows better.
Most folks outside the state don’t know about Ryan’s ugly past, or about his impending indictment. Suellentrop offers a beginner’s version, and also lays out a case for why the same things that drove Ryan to abuse his political power in office also drove him to issue the blanket commutation.
Certainly, the commutation itself skirts the edges of the law, if it doesn’t outright break it. The governor has the power to pardon convicted criminals or commute their sentences based on careful review of each case, but Ryan admits he didn’t base his decision on the merits of individual cases but general flaws in the system. He simply judged that the system as a whole had failed.
That’s probably the correct judgment considering the 13 death row denizens who’ve been exonerated in the last few years. But was it within Ryan’s constitutional power to commute all these sentences on the judgment that the death penalty generally had failed? That’s a legitimate question, and an important one if you care abou the rule of law.
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