StephanKinsella.com

Patent Absurdity: Ending a drug company scam, by Ronald Bailey (ReasonOnline, October 23, 2002) describes the clever manipulation of the patent and federal drug regulatory system by drug manufacturers to fend off competition from manufactuers of generics. Other IP articles and resources available here.

Nothing political catches my eye lately for me to comment on–so I’ll pass along a fantastic recipe, Chicken Big Mamou Pasta. This is a great dish I had many times from the now-defunct Magnolia Cafe cajun restaurant in Philly (yes, Philly). The recipe was published in a local paper and I have used it many times. The copy linked above has a few of my own modifications I’ve made to the recipe over the years.

1. GoToMyPC.com: lets you access your home (or work) PC from any other PC having an internet connection; works very well, and is faster than PCAnywhere. About $20/month.

2. mail2web.com: A great (and free) way to access your email on the road. Again, all you need is Internet access, your email address, and your email password. Mail2web figures out the POP3 etc. stuff.

3. j2.com: For emailable/web-accessible faxing. You can get a free fax number on which to receive faxes (which are then instantly emailed to you as an attachement). The free service gives you an out-of-area-code fax number, but who cares? If you pay about $5/month for j2lite, you can send faxes too, from email, from the web, or from the “print” function of most applications. It’s great.

Steve Gillmor’s latest InfoWorld “Ahead of the Curve” column, We the People …, contains some provocative thoughts on the legitimacy of intellectual property–comparing it, in some ways, to Prohibition. IP has outlived any usefulness it once had, the author quoted by Gillmor argues.

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.