Whitebergs noter

Charles Murray’s Irving Kristol lecture on Human Happiness. Life in a social democracy might be pleasant, but it is rarely satisfying, and therefore lacks happiness.
What to do about the Danes and their high happiness? The key to the Danes’ happiness might be their low expectations.
I’m reading Charles Murray’s book What It Means To Be A [...]

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“Earmarks” are items on congressional spending bills where the funding goes to specific, localised projects in either one state or a few states (more bridges for the Ohio river) or for a very specific group of people (one-legged teenage moms in Nebraska). The “Earmark” is typically either a “pet project” of a specific lawmaker or [...]

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Reportage from a country where the women actually have a reason to complain: Iran. Read Syma Sayyahs report.

Since I first thought like a woman many moons ago I have honored this day, which women have celebrated since 8th March 1909 in New York. The one thing I so deeply admired about them is the fact [...]

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Christopher Hitchens on the new U.N. resolution on Defamation of Religion:

Rather than attempt to put its own house in order or to confront such other grave questions as the mass murder of Shiite Muslims by Sunni Muslims (and vice versa), or the desecration of Muslim holy sites by Muslim gangsters, or the discrimination against Ahmadi [...]

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Denmark in the news! Interesting article here from Reason Magazine on the fate of Christiania and the legal battles the Freetown faces. I don’t know enough about the issue to correct Reason (except for some spelling errors), but I do have a certain sympathy for the Christianites, at least the settlers of yore. Let’s find [...]

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Nice one by Jonathan Jarvis.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

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New Tax Reform: The Government fails to lower the marignal tax from 63 %. However, new taxes are issued on everything from computers to gummi bears.
The reform shuffles some taxes around, but fails to address the two main problems: The general level of taxation and the high marginal taxes. The American economic policy seems quite [...]

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WSJ editorial on Barack Obama’s Address to Congress (which I found both impressive and vague).
Mr. Obama clearly believes the recession has created a political moment when Americans are frightened enough to be open to a new era of expanded government. The question is whether his vast ambitions will allow the private economy to grow enough [...]

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I’ve many times criticized Barack Obama on this blog, and I still do think many aspects of his economic policies will be harmful. But his opening speech at the “Fiscal Health of the Nation Summit” was candid, and in a lot of ways very “conservative”. Although words like these are much easier to say than [...]

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