Belgians forbidding the wearing of burqas is as backwards as Saudis forbidding the not wearing of burqas. Both constrain the civil liberties of women.

Interestingly, various Democratic Congressmen expressed outrage at the insurance companies for reading the law carefully and trying to figure out what they are and are not required to do. There’s no report that the Congressmen are angry at themselves for their carelessness.

More than two months after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, at least 30 survivors who were waved onto planes by Marines in the chaotic aftermath are prisoners of the United States immigration system, locked up since their arrival in detention centers in Florida. … Their “crime,” by the way, is not having proper visas. Some were pulled from the rubble of the earthquake and none have criminal histories.

…we, as a society, have stopped taking seriously the idea that the federal government is a government of limited powers. In this respect, I think the courts have followed, rather than led. But maybe the tide is turning. The Tea Party movement is at heart a call for limited government and a restoration of the Constitution. With the unprecedented accumulation of federal power taking place in the Obama administration, there is a growing sense that a final battle over the proper role of our national government must be fought. So who knows? Maybe the case for limited government has a chance.

One would think that the advocates of Keynesian stimulus would admit failure, but like most fundamentalists, they are more interested in doctrine than results. We now see that they are panicking because their policies aren’t working. Paul Krugman recently recommended that we erect a tariff wall against Chinese goods in order to force them to devalue to yuan and make U.S. exports more competitive in the world market. In effect, he is asking us to declare the economic equivalent of WW III. The devastation to the world’s economies would be catastrophic. Wow. But that’s another economic fallacy.

In 1982, Motorola produced the first portable mobile phone. It weighed about 2 pounds and cost $3995. Within a very few years they were much smaller, much cheaper, and selling like hotcakes. Today there are some 4.6 billion mobile phones in the world, and counting, or about 67 per every 100 people in the world. The newer ones allow you to carry in your hand more computing power than the computers that put Apollo 11 on the moon. You can cruise the internet, find your location with GPS, read books, send texts, pay bills, process credit cards, watch video, record video, stream video to the web, take and send photos — oh, and make phone calls from just about anywhere. Unimaginable just a few years ago. And to celebrate this incredible achievement, Slate and the New America Foundation are holding a forum titled “Can You Hear Me Now? Why Your Cell Phone is So Terrible.” This is an old story. Markets, property rights, and the rule of law provide a framework in which technology and prosperity soar, and some people can only complain.

The US public debt alone suggests a problematic long-term viability for the US Government. I would point to institutional inertia as keeping the USA and the Catholic Church around–enabling them to rejuvenate (a promising thought!)–though it is also true that the USSR empire fell rather quickly, as did Bear Stearns, AIG and Lehman Brothers, without many people predicting their demise coming so quickly. There must be a threshold point where institutional inertia (and momentum) suddenly lose out and even giant institutions implode in a relatively short period. Where that point is, and where we are, are points on the map that has not yet been drawn. Perhaps that is a task for the twenty-first century. To do so, the map-drawers will have to let go of the last century. To be sure, it is hard to let go of the dead. If only there were more of an instinct for moving forward–for not dragging our heels as time marches on–we could afford to borrow from the past without its weight.

Magnets can alter a person’s sense of morality, according to a new report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using a powerful magnetic field, scientists from MIT, Harvard University and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are able to scramble the moral center of the brain, making it more difficult for people to separate innocent intentions from harmful outcomes…. Magnetic fields made people judge outcomes more than intentions. The effect was small and temporary but no less disturbing especially if the effect could be made to operate at a distance. Perhaps the tin-foil-hat-people have had it right all along.