Reuters today reported that an internet player on EVE — a popular virtual world game — stole virtual money, cashed it in for real money and now is banned from the game.
According to the rules of the game, if the player, Ricdic, had stolen only the online money he wouldn’t have been thrown out. His venture into the real world for real cash got him excluded. Here’s that part of the story:
Ironically, if Ricdic had merely stolen the online money he…
It is truly amazing to me that some people who call themselves “liberal,” “progressive,” and “tolerant,” are so irrationally afraid and intolerant of anyone who holds a differing viewpoint to the degree that they feel the need to lash out, discredit and attempt to purge them from the intellectual discussion of ideas. Recently, I was shocked to discover that such people were trying to accomplish this by employing methods I thought hadn’t survived beyond the Nuremberg trials.
I saw this spectacle…
Not content with repealing welfare reform through the job-killing stimulus package, and proposing a massive marriage penalty in the tax code, Obama and his Congressional allies are now planning to make married and widowed taxpayers subsidize benefits for which they are not eligible, such as payments to households with out-of-wedlock births. For example, they are pushing a bill that will allow even households that receive tens of thousands of dollars a year in child support to demand food stamps.
“With support from President Obama, Senator…
President Barack Obama rode into the White House promising open and honest government. So why did his administration bully a career official at the Environmental Protection Agency into silence?
Last week, the Competitive Enterprise Institute released a 98 page report written by Alan Carlin, a 38 year veteran of the EPA, on the shaky science employed by global warming alarmists. Mr. Carlin had submitted the report to his superiors for the EPA to consider as it deliberated whether or not carbon…
CEI President Fred Smith yesterday expressed all of our condolences on the death of Washington Times Commentary editor and veteran Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mary Lou Forbes.
I was a colleague of Mary Lou’s when I worked at the Washington Times’ magazine Insight. She could always tell a great remembrance of her 50 years in Washington journalism. She mentored Carl Bernstein and others at the now-defunct Washington Star. In a future post, I will relate her explanation about how FCC rules banning the ownership of…
So many people declare that they want to “save the world!” A candidate for Miss Universe declared that to be the main purpose of her life, a candidate for the presidency announced that to be his top priority goal after the election, et cetera. Recently, 219 congressmen who voted in favor of the Waxman-Markey energy bill H.R. 2454 on Friday seemed to be driven by the best intentions of making this planet a better place to be as well.
Ambitions to…
Since the beginning of his presidential campaign, I noticed something about Obama’s style of oration (and I’m not the only one). He has sweet, flowery, and yes, powerful words, but they are devoid of substance. His locution is very much in the vein of the daily newspaper horoscopes, which are so vague that they can apply to just about any reader–depending on how the reader interprets it. Obama care is everyone’s everything.
He has stated, correctly, that people on all…
If you were a tourist, would you like to come to a country where you could be tried twice for the same crime — even if you were found innocent the first time around? Not me. But the Senate will likely attach a bill that promotes such reprosecutions to the Travel Promotion Act, reports the Christian Science Monitor. Liberal Senators plan to amend the Travel Promotion Act, a bill to attract international tourists to the U.S., by combining it with a…
Rapidly-rising Medicare spending already threatens “to crush the federal budget,” and much Medicare spending is wasteful, yet the Obama Administration claims it can somehow save money by creating Medicare-like programs to cover all Americans. In the New York Times, economics professor Tyler Cowan calls it “the new voodoo economics.” Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson concludes that Obama’s health-care plan “is naive, hypocritical or simply dishonest. Probably all three.”
Obama is firing an inspector general who exposed wrongdoing by one of his supporters, and previously…
Sin taxes are often justified by claiming that the item/behavior taxes costs the taxpayer money. By applying a tax, the government claims it can pay for the public services that the behavior produces a need for as well as increasing the cost of the behavior thereby discouraging continuation. The most obvious example is the cigarette tax. Increased prices supposedly incentivize smokers to quit or at least temper their addiction, while revenues from the tax can pay for health services.
But what…
If you’re searching for a good piece of bizarre, whacked-out political “analysis,” look no further than William Greider’s latest column in the Nation. Greider, a veteran journalist, is known for coining the term “Nader’s Raiders” in the late ’60s, and for authoring a book on globalization, One World, Ready or Not, which even the progressive economist Paul Krugman described as “a thoroughly silly book.” Greider’s column is really just another bad sales pitch for his latest train-wreck tome, Come Home, America, but it should…
I don’t think there is anything that pisses off eco-socialists more than a free market answer to their problem of climate change. They simply don’t know how to respond. Since capitalism is their true antichrist it certainly can’t be the answer to their ostensible reason for whining.
Take for example CEI adjunct scholar Dan Sutter’s proposed plan of action which is both free market and would achieve some of the environmentalists’ stated goals. In his recently released paper, Sutter argues that allowing insurance…
Last week, in nominating Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, President Obama praised judicial qualities that are directly relevant to the courts that will now oversee the bankruptcy of General Motors. The president said that the qualities he most respected in judges were, ”a commitment to impartial justice, a respect for precedent, and a determination to faithfully apply the law to the facts at hand,” as well as “an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live.”
As…
Most of the $800 billion stimulus package has yet to be spent, but it’s already harming the economy, both by triggering trade wars that have cost at least 40,000 jobs, and by driving up interest rates for businesses that need to borrow money to expand or create jobs. (The government is keeping down interest rates on its own debt by printing vast sums of money to buy its own bonds, in order to finance the exploding national debt, which will result…
That may seem counter-intuitive, because burning ethanol merely puts back into the air the carbon dioxide (CO2) that corn crops recently pulled out of it, whereas burning gasoline liberates carbon that had been stored in geologic deposits for millions of years.
But other factors come into play, such as the fossil energy inputs required to produce the corn, turn it into ethanol, and deliver the ethanol to market.
In addition, as EPA argues in its proposed rule to implement the renewable fuel standard program established by the…
Whatever happens with the confirmation of President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, one thing is clear: she will not be the first hispanic or Latino to serve on the Supreme Court. This is a historical — and not a predictive – statement.
The reason Judge Sotomayor will not be the first hispanic on the Court is that the first justice of hispanic origin was already nominated — by a Republican President — and confirmed by the Senate to serve on the…
The Onion reports that “Government advisers are developing menus to combat climate change by cutting out ‘high carbon’ food such as meat from sheep, whose burping poses a serious threat to the environment.”
Oh, wait — that article was actually in the Times of London. It isn’t satire. At least, not intentionally.
(Hat tip to Drudge)
Most media coverage of H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES), focuses on the bill’s cap-and-trade program and the free rationing coupons (emission allowances) that the bill’s co-sponsors, Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA), had to hand out to utilities and other interests to secure their support for the legislation.
But the cap-and-trade program occupies only one of four of the bill’s main sections (”titles”). Other titles contain a host of mandates and “incentives” (carrots and sticks) to…
At some point today, the EPA and the Department of Transportation (DOT) will propose a first-ever joint regulation to establish first-ever greenhouse gas (GHG) emission standards for new motor vehicles. The new standards, covering model years 2012-2016, will raise federal fuel economy standards to 35.5 mpg in 2016.
This is considerably more stringent than the standard Congress adopted in the December 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA), which would boost average fuel economy to 35 mpg by 2020.
This is bad news for three…
Maryland does not have enough money in the budget to pay for the publicly funded programs they have built into the system over the last decade. Politicians are unwilling to cut programs and they don’t want to raise taxes lest they incur the ire of voting residents.
What is the solution to this apparent paradox? Well, for many years, Md. politicians have pushed legalizing and taxing slot machines as a way to bridge the gap. One of the newest rhetorical weapons…
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