Author Archive | David Post

It’s quite spectacular, when you think about it, that we have reached a nationwide consensus and near perfect unanimity on at least one thing: Republicans are red, Democrats blue. It’s incredibly useful – pretty much every web site I’ve looked at with election coverage uses the same colors, and it allows the graphic design to […]

Now that the VP Debate is behind us, I’m actually relieved that it produced no stunning gaffes or garbled nonsense from either candidate. Biden was solid, and Palin did not sound as hopelessly out-of-her-league as she did when talking to Katie Couric. Good. We can, perhaps, take a collective deep breath. We all know what […]

Co-conspirators Ilya Somin and Eric Posner are having an interesting debate (see chained posts) about what the market’s near-collapse does, or doesn’t, show about the perceived virtues of the bailout bill. It’s an interesting epistemological question — a question about how we know what we know about the world from the evidence presented. On an […]

OK, it’s only wishful thinking — but there’s something of a drumbeat building up on this one. Here’s Kathleen Parker in the National Review — the National Review! — on the question, and Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek and the Washington Post. I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. Right […]

Joe Malchow sums it up early on in the evening: I was just about to write that this is the single most depressing political event I have ever witnessed—that these two men are as fools, aping their caricatures with absurd tested phrases and crude, insulting psychological links (like Obama’s “tax cuts for oil companies”). Joe’s […]

Co-conspirator Eric Posner writes: Meanwhile, right now niceties of statutory construction must be ignored because the people who drafted the statutes did not anticipate the nature of this emergency though of course they knew that emergencies could happen. Back in 1932 (the most recent amendment was in 1991), Congress apparently believed that the Fed could […]

Today is, of course, the final game for

As you probably heard, they switched on the Large Hadron Collider yesterday deep in the ground under the France-Switzerland border, and notwithstanding some predictions, no black hole was created, and the universe, as far as we can tell, continues to exist. [The Telegraph lists 10 other days when the world was supposed to end but […]

I used to think that I (like everyone else) basically understood the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. It wasn’t until I re-read the original story a couple of months ago, though, that I actually got it. [I’ve been slowly making my way through a volume of collected Hans Christian Anderson stories in Italian – […]

Mosaic Records — one of the truly marvelous specialty re-issue houses that have sprung up in recent years, specializing in jazz recordings of the ’30s through the ’50s — have just released a 4-disc set of the Lester Young/Count Basie sessions (1936-40) that is a true marvel of nature. Lester Young, for my money, was […]

There’s an interesting little cyber-law connection to the Bloomberg f***-up that sent out the (false) news that United Airlines had entered Chapter 11, and that sent United stock tumbling in a matter of minutes on Monday (wiping out more than $1 billion in shareholder value in less than an hour before trading was halted). According […]

I know it’s probably too late, since you’re already deeply embroiled in your first year classes (and have given up, among other things, trolling through the Volokh Conspiracy), I did want to pass along two thoughts in response to master conspirator Eugene’s calls for our thoughts on the matter, for what they’re worth. The summer […]

What has surprised me most (and depressed me some) about my recent postings(here, here, and here) questioning Sarah Palin’s qualifications to lead the country was the vehemence of the reaction from commenters. I’ve made many suggestions and comments here on the VC over the years that some have considered wrongheaded and obtuse – in fact, […]

Bad news for you McCain supporters (including those of you who took me rather forcefully to task for having the temerity, in earlier posts, to suggest that Sarah Palin is grossly and perhaps even grotesquely under-qualified to be President of the United States): The Iowa Electronic Market, which is a real-money futures market allowing individuals […]

My earlier posting on Sarah Palin generated some interesting (and pointed) comments, some of which I tried to respond to directly, but I thought that perhaps it called for a more thoughtful response. I think the choice was both bad and (probably) stupid. Why It’s (probably) Stupid. It’s probably stupid because it will gain McCain […]