StephanKinsella.com

Many of them can be found here.

The SEC Would Prefer That You Not Mention SEC Games To Anyone

America’s fastest conference is developing a new “media policy” that severely restricts how much audio, video and “blogs,” reporters can dish out during live games. (Hint: Not much.) Oh, and fans in the seats are subject to the policy too.

We all know that you can’t disseminate anything without the express written consent of Major League Baseball, but the Southeastern Conference’s new fan policy seems to suggest that any attempt by people inside the stadium to let people outside the stadium know what’s going on would be against the rules. No Twittering. No Facebook photos. No YouTubes. Nothing. If your friend wants to know the score, he can read the paper the next day.

See John C. Dvorak’s article — Special Report: Is US Chief Information Officer (CIO) Vivek Kundra a Phony? and “No Agenda” piece The Vivek Kundra “Hollow” Deck. It’s also discussed on this week’s TWIT (see also Om Malik’s Dvorak Raises Doubts About U.S. CIO Kundra. White House Calls the Report “Highly Inaccurate” & “a Lie.” Kundra Speaks up). Dvorak seethes with justified scorn at this obvious case of cronyism, where some guy is anointed by the New York Times as some kind of “techno-wiz”. Dvorak says he got suspicious when he heard Kundra talking like an amateur about things like Twitter and Google Docs: “During one of his testimonies before a Congressional committee he even talked about the future being something like the Star Trek holodeck. His clichés and commentary was that of a 18 year-old blogger who just got their first Macintosh.” Hahahah.

When Dvorak looked more deeply into Kundra’s background, he noticed several anomalies: he claimed he was “CEO” of his own one-man company that he ran out of his living room (CEOs manage people; legitimate one-man companies don’t have “CEOs”); he claimed to have received “his master’s in information technology and his bachelor’s in psychology and biology from the University of Maryland,” though, as Dvorak notes. “The biology bachelor’s comes and goes from his bio, but the University has no record of his biology degree either.” Apparently he has no biology degree despite having claimed this in the past. And his psychology degree apparently came from the University’s “University College” location, which is apparently not the same as the University of Maryland itself (more resume fudging?).

But as Dvorak notes, even if Kundra is “squeaky clean he has no business being the USA CIO controlling billions and billions of dollars in government contracts. …He hasn’t done anything to warrant this appointment. There are no great policy papers. There are no books. There is no invention. There is nothing but vague tech positions in city and state governments.” And what has he done so far? Blew $18 million of taxpayer money on the “recovery.gov” website. As Dvorak notes, “What website[] costs $18 million? … The incredibly popular Digg.com, one of the most advanced news gathering sites in the world was initially coded from scratch for between $1200-2500 according to one of its founders. Tools to develop fancy websites have improved drastically over the years and now it costs less for fancy sites, not more. So where is the $18 million going? I can assure you that people who pay attention bugged out their eyeballs at a website expense of $18 million.”

[Cross-posted at LRC]

Michael Shermer, The Case for Libertarianism. Not too bad. Not radical enough, but not too bad.

My comments on the Mises blog post by David Gordon on the death of philosopher G.A. Cohen: Stephan Kinsella

Tom Palmer has made a reputation of being a dishonest smearer of good people–so much so that anyone he criticizes can be presumed to be a good guy. So his criticism here backfires.

Published: August 10, 2009 10:18 AM [continue reading…]

I find that I use a nice blog post quite often as a sort of linkable reference for use in articles and blog posts and comments. So I will throw a lot of information and references in one blogpost, and it can be supplemented from time to time. Then the links to it always link to a nice little mini-article or post with further information to back up the point being made. And I’ll do this also at C4SIF.

see Grok conversation on this and The Louisiana Civil Code of 1825: Content, Influences and Languages; Past and Future: Returning to my Louisiana Roots

Related: All footnotes!

From my friend Manuel Lora.

This is wild. I found this when my 6 year old started telling me about how the Angler fish is one of the weirdest creatures b/c of its mating ritual. He described it but it didn’t sound right, so I googled it-…-sure enough, he was right. I found this list: I think the angler should be #1 not #7. But the octopus, #1, is weird.

My good friend John Wax is an excellent artist. See his prints and artwork here.

Heroic!

Firefox extension liberates US court docs from paywall

A new Firefox extension created by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton aims to tear down the federal judiciary’s PACER paywall. It uploads legal documents to a freely accessible mirror that is hosted by the Internet Archive.

Latest pretentious terms from today’s Slate Political Gabfest (feel free to email me suggestions or leave them in the comments to the main page):

• on Martha’s Vineyard [PG 8-12-09, Plotz–as if everyone knows it’s an island]
• peripatetically [PG 8-12-09, Plotz]