StephanKinsella.com

LEAGUE TABLE OF HUMOUR “We asked everyone participating in LaughLab to tell us which country they were from. We analysed the data from the ten countries that rated the highest number of jokes. The following ‘league table’ lists the countries, in the order of how funny they found the [following] jokes […]”. My favorite: “A patient says: ‘Doctor, last night I made a Freudian slip, I was having dinner with my mother-in-law and wanted to say: “Could you please pass the butter.” But instead I said: “You silly cow, you have completely ruined my life”.'”

There’s No Stopping Them: Perpetual motion is alive and well at the U.S. patent office, October 2002 Scientific American.

Scandals lead execs to ‘Atlas Shrugged’, in USA Today, is an interesting piece about a resurgence of interest among business executives in Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged, which is about innovators and businessmen who “become so fed up with the ‘moochers’ who regulate, tax and otherwise feed off of those who achieve, that the achievers go on strike. They withdraw their talents from the world, threatening to send it back toward the Dark Ages.”

In these post-Enron days of corporate scandal, some of the millions of copies of Atlas Shrugged that have been sold over 45 years are being dusted off by executives under siege by prosecutors, regulators, Congress, employees, investors, a Republican president, even terrorists. Executive headhunter Jeffrey Christian says many of his clients are re-reading the 1,075-page novel to remind themselves that self-interest is not only the right thing to do from an economic standpoint but is moral, as well. CEOs put the book down knowing in their hearts that they are not the greedy crooks they are portrayed to be in today’s business headlines but are heroes like the characters in Rand’s novel.

Excellent Mises.org article, by Tibor Machan, Intellectuals Rediscover Absolutes.

In my October 2001 LewRockwell.com article, New Israel: A Win-Win-Win Proposal, I proposed relocating Israel to U.S. public lands such as Utah or the Anwar area of Alaska. As I’ve previously blogged, Ken Layne subsequently published a similar proposal on FoxNews.com, How ‘Bout Relocating Israel to Mexico?.

Now come two more: “Fight World War IV” – Or Let Israelis Immigrate?, by Paul Craig Roberts, VDARE; and from a perhaps more Biblical perspective: Israel’s end-times gamble, by Gary DeMar, WorldNetDaily.com. Hmm. Does this idea have legs?

Funny pop-culture website, JumptheShark.com, chronicles the moment when your favorite TV show has reached its peak and it’s all downhill from here. “The term ‘jump the shark’ […] refers to the telltale sign of the demise of Happy Days, our favorite example, when Fonzie actually ‘jumped the shark.'” For Star Trek, there are votes for “Spock’s brain is taken” and also for “Singing (Spock and the space hippies)”.

For those with a legal bent, I’ve recently posted an e-version of my 1994 Louisiana Law Review article A Civil Law to Common Law Dictionary. For more theoretical musings on civil law and common law, see my Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society, from the Summer 1995 issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies.

My latest article is Defending Argumentation Ethics: Reply to Murphy & Callahan, Anti-state.com (Sept. 19, 2002). In this article I defend Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s argumentation ethics, in response to Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethic: A Critique, by Bob Murphy and Gene Callahan. The debate can be discussed in this forum.

Great new feature on LewRockwell.com: THE PASSING SCENE, a paleoblog of sorts, edited by Mises Institute senior fellow Ralph Raico. It’s sure to become a huge hit in the paleo/libertarian/conservative movement.

Updated in this post.

Off-topic, I know, but Enstrom‘s Almond Toffee is so good I busted my weight-watchers diet for it yesterday. Some evil friend sent it to me as a gift. Makes a great gift. Jesus, it’s good. And no, I don’t own stock in them.