A specter is haunting America: the specter of profit. We have become fearful that somewhere, somehow, an evil corporation has found a way to make lots of money.

- Yale Law Prof. Stephen Carter in today’s Washington Post.

Read the whole thing.

Shelby Steele says affirmative action is a distraction:

We blacks know oppression well, but today it is our inexperience with freedom that holds us back almost as relentlessly as oppression once did. Out of this inexperience, for example, we miss the fact that racial preferences and disparate impact can only help us — even if they were effective — with a problem we no longer have. The problem that black firefighters had in New Haven was not discrimination; it was the fact that not a single black did well enough on the exam to gain promotion.

Ilya Somin proposes getting rid of the bar exam, or at least exposing its utter uselessness.

Richard Posner takes Paul Krugman to task for … ignoring Keynes?

But Krugman’s passionate support for the Administration’s health-care program suggests that he has not absorbed one of the central elements of Keynes’s theory, which is the role of uncertainty in depressing investment spending and, both by depressing investment and by increasing passive savings, in depressing consumption spending as well.

In defense of Michael Vick:

But just because pro athletes have careers we covet doesn’t mean those careers come with further obligations than ours. Society’s approval is not part of the job description any more than it is for a banker.

Ann Coulter:

If politicians and employers had guaranteed us “free” food 50 years ago, today Democrats would be wailing about the “food crisis” in America, and you’d be on the phone with your food care provider arguing about whether or not a Reuben sandwich with fries was covered under your plan.

• Obama says healthcare “shouldn’t be political“.
• Rich Lowry discusses why exactly Obama’s playing the Urgent Politics of Now.
• Greg Mankiw points to opposition of left-leaning Bill Gale at Brookings and Clintonite Jeff Frankel of Harvard as proof that healthcare reform has swung too far left.
• Americans now trust Obama 54%-42%.  That’s still 30 points higher than Tim Geithner’s numbers.

• No one knows where Roy Halladay’s going to end up.  My guess is Philadelphia, if he gets traded.
• Borders is trying to cash in on teen readers.
• Half-Blood Prince sells $160 million in 5 days worth of North American tickets.  And it hasn’t even hit IMAX yet.
• You should read Janet Maslin’s hillarious review of Ben Mezrich’s latest pseudofiction.
• Harvard Econ prof is also semi-pro powerlifter.

• Adam and I were discussing use and misuse Twitter, and today the WSJ suggests that companies are beginning to use Twitter effectively.
• 25% of Britons believe the moon landings (all of them) were faked.
• An Open Letter to the Obama Administration from Central and Eastern European leaders.
• In USA Today – Americans disapprove of Obama’s handling of healthcare and the economy. (52% say they call for too much expansion of government power)
• Re: Obama’s Healthcare Plan, Mickey Kaus tries to remember a time that a President effectively campaigned for an issue while in office.
• Finally, why Japan’s awesome cell phones haven’t made it overseas.

This blew my mind:

X-Men Origins: Wolverine has leaked online in unfinished form.

This brings up a good question about copyright and intellectual property.  Surely, even for those who seek to eliminate copyright laws and IP protection, it makes sense that artists should retain possession of their work until they deem it complete?

Ross Douthat attacks the prevailing notion that the Church’s anti-condom policy hurts Africans.  I’d tend to agree with him, on the basis of the following two arguments.

First, the argument from adherence:

Premise 1: Only some (fairly religious) Catholics will follow the Pope’s suggestions on condoms.  Non-Catholics obviously will not.

Premise 2: As a tenet of Catholicism, premarital abstinence falls much higher on the heirarchy than condom use.  The types of Catholics who will know the Pope’s teachings on the matter will be far more likely than average to live a lifestyle of premarital abstinence.

Conclusion: People will not have unprotected sex with multiple partners because of anything the Pope said.

To blame the Pope for the spread of AIDS is like a teenager blaming his parents for buying him a car when you get drunk and hop behind the wheel  – it’s pretty obvious that selectively following the rules leads to ruin.

Second, the argument from culture:

Premise 1: The availability of condoms (and other contraception) contributed to the widening of the so-called sexual revolution and normalized the maintenance of multiple sexual partners.

Conclusion 1: Cultural barriers to engaging in high-risk sexual behaviors – such as societal disapproval and community ostracism – have been lowered as an effect of the availability of condoms and contraception.

Conclusion 2: The normalization of high-risk sexual behaviors has encouraged the spread of HIV/AIDS.

The Nico on the TSA blog suggests it’s a bad idea to fly with home-made electronic devices because altoid tins with wires in them look pretty suspicious when packed into someone’s luggage.

He’s right, but he completely misses that anyone with half a brain can put their altoid tin inside the shell of an external hard drive.  I’ve often wondered how screeners at the TSA can tell the different between the legitimate devices and plastic shells with dangerous innards.  The reality is that they probably can’t make the distinction.  I was once asked to take my iHome alarm clock out of my backpack for additional screening – they simply did a cursory physical inspection of it and would have missed anything non-typical about it.  Even if the TSA can see inside electronics, they will be limited by their knowledge of electronics.  So although they might know what the innards of a Macbook look like, they might not have a clue as to what a wireless router, Sega Saturn, or Keepon looks like on the inside.