Feeding Frenzy

It's rare to get such a clear demonstration of our primate heritage:

 





The WalMart scuffle was apparently caused by the announcement of $2 waffle makers. Gotta have it!

Occasionally I find myself playing the SWPL game of sneering at WalMart and its customers, then catch myself and feel guilty for it.  Then I see something like this...

 (via tbogg and Balloon Juice)

Don't let us get sick

So bad living caught up with me and I am typing these words from a bed in the cardiac unit of Stanford Medical Center...kind of a shock since I don't think I've spent a night in a hospital since I was 3 years old. No particularly trenchant observations from this experience...except that it is very jarring to transition from being a relatively autonomous person to an object for all sorts of people to probe, poke, examine, and manipulate. Reminds me that the grammatical term patient is the opposite of agent, "the participant of a situation upon whom an action is carried out".

Also that if you do have a serious or mysterious medical episode it is definitely a good idea to have it near a topnotch hospital, and having that at hand is one of the benefits that the high cost of living around here pays for. My father had the presence of mind to have his heart attack on the street just outside the U of Chicago Medical Center, in front of a group of docs coming back from lunch.

Anyway, having perplexed the local would-be Houses here for awhile, they seem to have me figured out and stabilized and I may get out of here in a day or two.

[[update: I passed my stress test yesterday (a rather ridiculous affair where they have you bicycle while lying down, while hooked to an EKG and an ultrasound tech poking at you), which means my heart can do stuff, so they sent me home where I am recuperating. Thanks for all the good wishes. ]]

Libertardian

Libertarianism has a slick new website, funded by Cato, ie the Kochtopus. I couldn't find anything obviously mock-worthy on a quick overview, and I have to applaud their including a whole list of pointers to anti-libertarian writings. OK, so the fact that it is titled "Critics of Liberty" rather than "Critics of Libertarianism" is pretty laughable. As is the listing of Ayn Rand, Thomas Sowell, and Murray Rothbard in a list of "major libertarian thinkers"...oh well, I don't want to get started here, because I have a new place to do it.

I will take this opportunity officially launch a side-microblog I've had for a little while now, Libertardian. I started this because my obsession with libertarianism is boring but I seem to be unable to give it up, and because so many of these freedom-lovers censor comments on their blogs (anyone else who has been banned from EconLog or elsewhere is welcome to be come a contributor). I have no real excuse for this, and people are giving me a hard time about the name, but what the hell.

I also wanted to investigate what micro-blogging was all about, and I admit to being baffled, because the features of Posterous seem only slightly different from a full-blown blogging platform like Blogger. Maybe inability to percieve these niches is why I'm not a successful web entrepeneur.