The proprietor of this site, Ed Roesch, lives in tidewater Virginia where he owns and operates a small business that fabricates precision metal parts for electronic enclosures. Started by Mr. Roesch in 1981, the company has grown from two to almost 100 people. All without memos, meetings, or mission statements. However, like many small business people, Ed understands God put him on the earth to “fund an ever-increasing break-even level.”

He loves freedom and marvels at the accomplishments of people in voluntary cooperation when they are unfettered by government’s dead hand. Pickings started as a clipping service for his six children. Interesting items were copied and mailed in an effort to expose them to ideas about free people and free markets. Although he often said, “If you have an open mind, someone will come along and fill it with garbage,” what he hoped to give them was a chance to fight back.

He also wished they would grow to understand, ‘there ought to be a law’ is perhaps the most dangerous phrase in our language. Mischief and tragedy grow out of those thoughts. The wiser course is to find and repeal the bad laws that created the problem in the first place.

A good example is our third party pays medical system. During WWII employers, seeking to evade wage and price controls, offered medical insurance as a fringe benefit. They went to congress to make sure the expense was deductible but would not be added to their employee’s taxable income. So we have ended in a situation where we all think someone else is paying.

Imagine, if you will, the savings that would accrue from people treating their medical insurer with the same care they give to the company that carries their car insurance. Now new laws are nearly certain to compound the current healthcare morass.

In fact, the phrase is so dangerous, maybe there should be a law prohibiting its use.

Then came the Internet.

Now he had the tools to terrorize his children with greater volume and velocity. The emails were called Pickings from the Webvine and since he was the head picker, Mr. Roesch called himself Pickerhead. Family and friends asked to be added to the distribution list. More family, friends, colleagues, reporters, teachers, pundits, radio hosts, politicos, (liberals and conservatives alike) benefited from Pickerhead’s curious mind and insatiable appetite for surprising and ingenious commentary. The list grew to two hundred and the time came to launch this site.

The goal is to find interesting background to the news that busy people might overlook and the main stream media ignore. Although sources frequently include many right and center-right blogs and publications, the weeks preceding launch in May 2007 saw items from The Nation, Village Voice, and Salon. We try to have fun without being snide, sarcastic or cynical.

Pickings is posted five days a week and the archives go back over one year.

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• May 6, 2007 (word)
• May 6, 2007 (pdf)

In 1927 the writer Eugene Lyons sailed with his family to Russia, “the land of our dreams.” They returned in 1934 and three years later he published Assignment in Utopia, one of the most courageous, perceptive and honest accounts of the early Soviet Union. And the end of Lyons’ love affair with it. For example;

People under dictatorships, it has been well said, are condemned to a lifetime of enthusiasm. It is wearing sentence. Gladly they would burrow into the heart of their misery and lick their wounds in private. But they dare not; sulking is next-door to treason. Like soldiers weary unto death after a long march, they must line up smartly for parade. …

Our selection today for May Month Grinding People Down With Stupidity uses a passage from Solzhenitsyn to illustrate a lifetime of enthusiasm.

… “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!” …

Power Line and Roger Simon comment on Royal’s late inning tactics in the French elections.

Corner post on Sarkozy’s win.

… Sarkozy just gave his acceptance speech, in which he uttered the somewhat astounding—and from a political point of view, needless—line: “…and let me say to our American friends, they can count on our friendship.” …

Amazing. Germany, and now France. Not bad for having a moron in the White House.

Tenet’s book allows Charles Krauthammer to remind why we went to war.

… Outside of government, the case for war was made not just by the neoconservative Weekly Standard, but — to select almost randomly – the traditionally conservative National Review, the liberal New Republic and the center-right Economist. Of course, most neoconservatives supported the war, the case for which was also being made by journalists and scholars from every point on the political spectrum — from the leftist Christopher Hitchens to the liberal Tom Friedman to the centrist Fareed Zakaria to the center-right Michael Kelly to the Tory Andrew Sullivan. And the most influential tome on behalf of war was written not by any conservative, let alone neoconservative, but by Kenneth Pollack, Clinton’s top Near East official on the National Security Council. The title: “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.” …

Judging by re-enlistment rates our soldiers didn’t need to be reminded. Instapundit has the details.

Kathleen Parker comments on the reactions to Broder’s column on Harry Reid.

… Broder’s point, provocative but hardly incendiary, was that American lives are on the line and that Reid’s remark didn’t help matters. Rather than provide encouragement to our enemies, Broder suggested that the Senate leader might do better to heed the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group report and seek common ground toward both military and political solutions. …

Strategy Page says Islamists are losing control of women.

…Thus in most Islamic countries, the women are having fewer children, and making more noise about economic and educational opportunities. This resonates with some of the better informed Islamic men. One reason the West, and other parts of the world, have enjoyed much better economic growth than the Moslem countries, is that they have added large number of educated women to their work force.Losing control of the women is something that makes Islamic conservatives very angry. Murderously angry. This is a vicious, lethal battle taking place largely out of the media spotlight. But, long term, it is destroying the source of Islamic terrorism.

G. Schoenfeld posts on Carter’s diplomacy.

James Taranto posts on Pelosi’s diplomacy.

The Captain posts on a typically sneering NY Times reference to W.

The Weekly Standard reviews a book on the wind farm proposed for Nantucket Sound.

David McCullough’s face contorted with anger.
That is the first line of Wendy Williams’s and Robert Whitcomb’s account of one man’s possibly misguided attempt to build a wind farm off Cape Cod. My first thought was: Oh, goody. Something snippy about Saint David. I am going to enjoy this.
On page one, McCullough is fulminating about Cape Wind, the 24-square-mile, turbine-powered electrical power project that energy entrepreneur Jim Gordon wants to build in Horseshoe Shoal, not far from McCullough’s Martha’s Vineyard home. McCullough sputters in fine company, with Walter Cronkite, Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, and all manner of Kennedys. Because, as everyone knows, it is one thing to speak out in favor of homeless shelters, affordable housing, and “clean” energy projects. It is quite another thing to gaze at them from your front door. …

Toledo Blade with a piece on Pickerhead’s alma mater.

Arnold Kling in Tech Central on how to cure poverty.

… The point of this essay is to simply state the obvious. If you look at poverty from the broad perspective of international and historical comparisons, the solution to poverty is decentralized entrepreneurial activity under capitalism. …

Imus’s suit against CBS will claim the dump button was available to censor his remarks. Slate’s explainer tells us how the “dump-button” works at.

Dilbert’s here.

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• May 3, 2007 (word)
• May 3, 2007 (pdf)

The Captain has an interesting post on developments at the LA Times and CNN. Seems like the media is tearing itself loose from the fools in the Reid Pelosi camp.

Yesterday, CNN reported on the disastrous consequences that a precipitate American withdrawal would create for Iraq. Today, the Los Angeles Times follows suit, describing the delicate process of training a national army from scratch, and the collapse that would ensue if America bugs out …

Hugh Hewitt interviews Mark Helprin. Mark has long been a critic of the Iraq war. He doesn’t like precipitous withdrawal either.

… if we simply withdraw according to the timetable that they offered, it would be a terrible disaster. And people say that, but they don’t explain why. It would be a disaster because it would energize every enemy of the United States throughout the world, and cause much greater pain and suffering, and danger, than we’ve had up to this point in this war. …

More on salaries at the World Bank.

French presidential debates are real debates. Power Line posts.

John Fund reports on undeclared pres candidates and their strategies.

Longish but well written article from Knoxville on one of those undeclared – Fred Thompson.

It was a scorching summer day in 1993 at the Sevier County fairgrounds. I was standing around with four other political junkies with nothing better to do and we were laughing about Congressman Don Sundquist’s ardent pursuit of the goodwill of Congressman Jimmy Quillen.
Quillen, the boss of the heavily Republican First District, had torpedoed the candidacy of Winfield Dunn, the last serious Republican candidate for governor. Quillen was playing hard-to-get that summer with his back bench colleague, Sundquist, who would be running for governor in 1994.
Quillen and Sundquist were inside a big tent and the crowd was whooping it up, in anticipation of capturing the governor’s office after eight years of Democratic Gov. Ned McWherter.
We looked over the fairgrounds to see a tall fellow we recognized from the movies wandering around like he was lost. He evidently didn’t get the memo about it being a casual event. He had left his suit coat and tie in the car and had rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. He wandered up, sweating like a pig. …
… Fred Thompson, on his first campaign appearance in East Tennessee, assumed (not incorrectly) we were a group of local rednecks. We surrounded him like a bear in a ring and started peppering him with questions. …

“Tell us what you really think” Michael Graham has words for Tenet.

If there’s a bigger buffoon or more gutless weasel in the intelligence world than George Tenet, he’s being hidden in a black ops prison on Guantanamo Bay. Tenet, a poster child for “The Power Of Positive Brown-Nosing,” has hit a new low, even for Washington. Having worked his way up the political ladder by leaving no back unslapped, on the way down he’s leaving no back unstabbed.

George Tenet is the Barney Fife of the spy world. Every bad guy got away, and he never took his bullet out of his pocket.

Screwing up the pre-Iraq war intelligence alone makes him a failure. Utterly missing the 9/11 attacks and having not a single CIA asset in the Taliban or al-Qaeda at the time earns him “Worst CIA Chief Ever.” …

The latest problem in Brit health care; they’re short 3,000 midwives.

Great post from Right Coast on how local gov folks apply loving care to military contractors.

New discovery may make less expensive solar panels possible.

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• May 2. 2007 (word)

• May 2, 2007 (pdf)

Following along on the theme we emphasized yesterday, NY Sun editors write on Broder’s column.

Instapundit posts on the Sun editorial.

We get a look at the quinquennial farm bill which proves Bismarck’s dictum; Men should not know how their laws and sausages are made.” This comes to us two different ways; a LA Times editorial on sugar tariffs and an article on the farm bill from NY Times.

A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery. He wanted to figure out why it is that the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person’s wealth. For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods — dairy, meat, fish and produce — line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice. …

… The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow. …

Neal Boortz posts on the Bush veto.

Any discussion of the president’s veto of the Democrats surrender bill must begin with the realization of one simple, basic, incontrovertible fact. The Democrat leadership of this country awakes every single day with one desire on their mind: They want a day of bad news from Iraq. Those Democrat leaders who actually pray are praying for our defeat in Iraq. Every bit of bad news from Iraq brings smiles to Democrat faces. Every bit of good news brings sadness.

Tony Blankley writes on Muslim hatred of the West.

Mark Steyn with a Corner post on the same subject.

David Boaz was in Tech Central with our May Month Remembrance of the Victims of Communism. He wants to know where the anti-communist movies are?

The Hurwitz jurors explain their verdict for John Tierney.

John Stossel writes on the school choice wars.

NY City bans aluminum bats. WSJ has an editorial.

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• Pickings :: May 1, 2007 (PDF)

• Pickings :: May 1, 2007 (word)

Once again we see the Dems heading down the primrose path with their friends in the main stream media. The mutual admiration society never alerts Reid, Pelosi, et al to trouble ahead.

The first to break ranks from the MSM was David Broder whose piece was in last Thursday’s Pickings. Now Lawrence Kaplan of the New Republic has a piece subtitled; Congressional leaders are illiterate on Iraq.

… What is going on here? There are two possibilities: First, Reid and Pelosi could be purposefully minimizing the stakes in Iraq. Or, second, they don’t know what they’re talking about. My guess is some combination of the two. Political maneuvering certainly contributes to the everyday pollution of Iraq discourse. But a lot of the pollution derives from legislators being functionally illiterate about the war over which Congress now intends to preside. …

Ed Morrissey, the proprietor of Captain’s Quarters has a number of illustrative posts.

First off, “Good News In Anbar.”

Just as the Democrats have raised the white flag on Iraq, the New York Times reports that the surge strategy has started paying off in Anbar. …

Then a post on Broder.

… David Broder took Democrats to task for allowing an incompetent like Harry Reid to rise to party leadership, pointing out several of the Senator’s foolish foibles as examples. This column sent the netroots into a tizzy, with many of them declaring Broder as irrelevant and past his expiration date. The Senate Democratic caucus even sent him a letter, signed by all 50 members, extolling the virtues of Reid and lauding his “straight talk” — apparently all endorsing the notion that we have lost the war in Iraq. …

Next a post on the possibility Sunni’s have killed the al Qaeda leader in Iraq.

The last is “Dude, Where’s My Bill?” Seems Bush wants to veto the appropriation bill, but he hasn’t got it yet. Why’s that? Because Nancy hasn’t read it. You can’t make it up!

Rich Lowry at NR writes about all this.

WSJ thinks there’s a chance we wouldn’t have beat the Japanese if Murtha had been around.

Mr. Murtha has good intentions, but he’s got it exactly wrong. If U.S. forces lack the equipment or training they need, it’s his job, as the chairman of the one subcommittee specifically responsible for originating defense appropriations, to make sure they get it.

If legislators really don’t believe we should continue in Iraq, they need to come clean, shut down the war–and accept the risks, and take responsibility for the consequences. Otherwise, they need to provide U.S. forces the means to carry out their missions.

Marty Peretz reacts to the NY Times Sunday piece on Anbar province.

… The kissing and dancing of the Democrats when they won their date-certain resolution was simply disgusting. Do they really want to have the terrorists win a free and murderous hand in Iraq?

NY Times with an Op Ed claiming congress should support the surge.

Ilya Somin at Volokh notes we might be ignoring the drug war in order to succeed in an Afghan operation.

He then posts on a May Day that would memorialize the millions of victims of communism.

Two years ago Pickings took the month to honor communism’s victims. We repeat one of our first posts. It is about Walter Duranty, Pulitzer Prize winning liar, who was the NY Times man in Moscow in the 1930′s.

Bret Stephens of WSJ has more on Wolfowitz.

A Corner post on same.

Power Line posts on a NY Sun story of a jobless conservative academic.

Mark Moyar doesn’t exactly fit the stereotype of a disappointed job seeker. He is an Eagle Scout who earned a summa cum laude degree from Harvard, graduating first in the history department before earning a doctorate at the University of Cambridge in England. Before he had even begun graduate school, he had published his first book and landed a contract for his second book. Distinguished professors at Harvard and Cambridge wrote stellar letters of recommendation for him.

Yet over five years, this conservative military and diplomatic historian applied for more than 150 tenure-track academic jobs, and most declined him a preliminary interview. During a search at University of Texas at El Paso in 2005, Mr. Moyar did not receive an interview for a job in American diplomatic history, but one scholar who did wrote her dissertation on “The American Film Industry and the Spanish-Speaking Market During the Transition to Sound, 1929-1936.” At Rochester Institute of Technology in 2004, Mr. Moyar lost out to a candidate who had given a presentation on “promiscuous bathing” and “attire, hygiene and discourses of civilization in Early American-Japanese Relations.” …

Another environmental legend bites the dust. No longer is a Galapagos tortoise the last of his species. John Tierney who communed with the beast has the details.

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• April 30, 2007 (word)
• April 30, 2007 (pdf)

John Fund says campaign finance laws inhibit free speech.

Campaign finance laws are increasingly becoming a tool to suppress political speech, and the courts are finally waking up to the danger. …

A Brit pamphleteer says there are now 266 ways a government creep can enter homes in the UK.

In January I reported a bizarre drama that unfolded on a farm in the Forest of Dean, when 22 agents of the state – two state vets, eight trading standards officials and 12 policemen – descended without warning on the owners of a pet Jersey cow, Harriet, to kill her. On that occasion the officials, acting under EU law, were persuaded to back off until the case went to judicial review (and on March 23 Harriet, sadly, had to be put down after developing kidney problems). But the episode helped inspire a pamphlet published today by the Centre for Policy Studies entitled Crossing the Threshold: 266 ways in which the state can enter your home. …

AdamSmith honors tax freedom day, in the U. S., 32 days to go in England.

George Will writes in Newsweek about the dem campaign to bring back the fairness doctrine.

… Supreme Court justice and liberal icon William Douglas said: “The Fairness Doctrine has no place in our First Amendment regime. It puts the head of the camel inside the tent and enables administration after administration to toy with TV and radio.” The Reagan administration scrapped the doctrine because of its chilling effect on controversial speech, and because the scarcity rationale was becoming absurd. …

OK! It’s George Tenet’s turn. First Chris Hitchens.

… Tenet knows how the kiss-up and kiss-down game is played. And, for a rather mediocre man, he did well enough out of the arrangement while it lasted. …

Roger Simon.

… This is the former DCI we’re talking about here. Is he a moron or a liar or both? …

The Captain; Ed Morrissey.

… Tenet has yet to see his book hit the stores, and it already has serious credibility issues. He misidentifies a Defense Department analyst as a “naval reservist” in an attempt to belittle her credentials. Tenet can’t seem to understand that Iran-Contra involved arming the mullahs, not the dissidents. It’s a great display of why the CIA seems to have been rather incompetent during the years of his leadership. If the boss can’t get his facts straight, how can he have advised two presidents with any degree of competence at all? …

The Captain finishes with a post on Carl Bernstein’s new Hillary book and leads us to his post on the subject in the HeadingRight blog.

WSJ editorial with more on Wolfowitz.

… Ms. Riza will also get her first hearing today in this kangaroo court, and she ought to blast them for the way the bank has violated its own rules in leaking details of her salary and damaged her career — all in the name of preventing a “conflict” that was no fault of her own. The real disgrace here isn’t Mr. Wolfowitz or Ms. Riza but the bank itself and its self-protecting staff and European directors. Their only “ethic” is to oust an American reformer so they can get back to running the foreign aid status quo.

Shorts from John Fund.

Michael Barone with a good gun-law summary.

If you have, or know, a child applying to college this year, this piece in the NY Times by a Harvard grad is for you.

Hugh Hewitt comments on declining newspaper readership.

Humor section starts with a Chi Trib column on the accents of Hillary and other pols.

… America might finally be ready for a white Yale Law School graduate from Park Ridge who is fluent in Southern Woman and various dialects, including Granny Clampett and Black Female Preacher. She commands many different voices — and uses them without blushing — as you may see for yourself on YouTube. …

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• April 29, 2007 (pdf)
• April 29, 2007 (word)

Mark Steyn’s Sun-Times column juxtaposes changing light bulbs and voting for defeat in Iraq.

… In Khartoum, Tehran, Moscow and elsewhere, the world’s mischief-makers have reached their own conclusions about how much serious “work” America is prepared to do.

Charles Krauthammer gives his Yeltsin send-off.

… Yeltsin is not the first great revolutionary to have failed at building something new. Nonetheless, it is worth remembering what he did achieve. He brought down not just a party, a regime, and an empire, but an idea. Communism today survives only in the lunatic kingdom of North Korea, in Fidel Castro’s personal satrapy and in the minds of such political imbeciles as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who can sustain his socialist airs only as long as he sits on $65 oil.
Outside of college English departments, no sane person takes Marxism seriously. Certainly not Putin and his KGB cronies. In the end, Yeltsin succeeded only in midwifing Russia’s transition from totalitarianism to authoritarianism with the briefest of stops for democracy—a far more modest advance than he (and we) had hoped, but still significant. And for which the Russian people—and the rest of the world spared the depredations of a malevolent empire—should forever be grateful.

Couple of good posts from Power Line.

WSJ and then Amity Shlaes at Bloomberg News with more on Wolfowitz. You will not believe the World Bank Ms. Shlaes shows us.

The Captain gets us up to date on some of Jimmy Carter’s benefactors. The Captain quotes Alan Dershowitz.

… Recent disclosures of Carter’s extensive financial connections to Arab oil money, particularly from Saudi Arabia, had deeply shaken my belief in his integrity. When I was first told that he received a monetary reward in the name of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, and kept the money, even after Harvard returned money from the same source because of its anti-Semitic history, I simply did not believe it. How could a man of such apparent integrity enrich himself with dirty money from so dirty a source? And let there be no mistake about how dirty the Zayed Foundation is. I know because I was involved, in a small way, in helping to persuade Harvard University to return more than $2 million that the financially strapped Divinity School received from this source. Initially, I was reluctant to put pressure on Harvard to turn back money for the Divinity School, but then a student at the Divinity School, Rachael Lea Fish showed me the facts. …

And if you’re wondering what to think about Tenet’s book, the Captain posts on one of Tenet’s critics, Michael Scheuer.

… Scheuer offers this contemptuous evaluation of Tenet as CIA chief:
‘Still, he may have been the ideal CIA leader for Clinton and Bush — denigrating good intelligence to sate the former’s cowardly pacifism and accepting bad intelligence to please the latter’s Wilsonian militarism.’
And now Tenet can sell the American public what it wants to hear.

Shorts from National Review.

John Tierney gives us the verdict for Dr. Hurwitz.

Want to clean up the environment? You must industrialize.

While the modern environmental movement often portrays capitalist industrial societies as the world’s biggest pollution problem, Forbes notes something interesting about the top-25 cleanest cities in the world: Most of them are in wealthy industrialized democracies. Turns out, all that industrialization created wealth which, in turn, buys the things (mass transit, especially) and pays for the policies that create a cleaner environment. …

Taxes around the world from Greg Mankiw.

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• April 26, 2007 (word)
• April 26, 2007 (pdf)

AdamSmith.org notes the anniversary of the publication of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.

… From the Greeks onward, many philosophers had argued that virtue was largely a matter of utility. Actions are good if they are useful to those involved. We praise actions that help people or promote the human community, and condemn those which cause harm. Smith’s innovative view was that morality is not in fact so calculating. Human beings are social creatures, born with a natural empathy (Smith says sympathy) for others. We feel some of the pain, or the happiness, of others. To avoid that empathic pain, we avoid causing distress to others, and condemn those who do. To enjoy that empathic happiness, we actually help others, and praise those who do likewise. …

VDH with a piece that could have been in yesterday’s Pickings.

David Broder takes off after Harry Reid. Like all libs, before criticizing a dem, he must first trash someone from the GOP. No card carrying member of the MSM is allowed to have a stand alone column dumping on a democrat. That just isn’t done. In this case Broder picks on Gonzales. We’ll take ‘em where we can get ‘em.

… Hailed by his staff as “a strong leader who speaks his mind in direct fashion,” Reid is assuredly not a man who misses many opportunities to put his foot in his mouth. In 2005, he attacked Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, as “one of the biggest political hacks we have here in Washington.”
He called President Bush ” a loser,” then apologized. He said that Bill Frist, then Senate majority leader, had “no institutional integrity” because Frist planned to leave the Senate to fulfill a term-limits pledge. Then he apologized to Frist.
Most of these earlier gaffes were personal, bespeaking a kind of displaced aggressiveness on the part of the onetime amateur boxer. But Reid’s verbal wanderings on the war in Iraq are consequential — not just for his party and the Senate but for the more important question of what happens to U.S. policy in that violent country and to the men and women whose lives are at stake. …

Hugh Hewitt posts on Reid.

Ryan Sager posts on the Court’s look at campaign finance reform.

While on campaign finance and resulting free speech issues, The Institute for Justice today reported on an important decision in Washington state. IJ started as champions of economic liberty, added school choice, and eminent domain, and now are working in areas of free speech.

David Brooks with an interesting Obama interview.

An AdamSmith post indicates how poorly the Brit health service is performing.

John Tierney continues his coverage of the pain doctor’s trial. The jury is now in the 5th day.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, Commentary senior editor, has three great posts at Contentions. He covers Naomi Wolf’s silliness, Yeltsin, and our some of the foolishness in our economy.

While we are on the subject of the USSR—Boris Yeltsin’s death was the subject of one of my posts here yesterday—it is a good moment to remember that one of the very best things about the now defunct Soviet Union was its centrally planned economy. If nothing else, it could be counted on to produce an endless series of amusing anecdotes. In the topsy-turvy world of the five-year plan, factory managers and workers were rewarded not for profits but for maximizing other success indicators, like gross physical output, often with bizarre results.
Nikita Khrushchev famously complained about the immense size and weight of chandeliers. It turned out that workers at a Moscow lamp factory were awarded bonuses for production measured in tons. The chandeliers they produced grew ever heavier until they led to a rash of ceiling collapses.
The United States has a market economy—but we also have a huge government sector, where amusing Soviet-style distortions often creep in. Yesterday’s Washington Post reported on the “Metrochek” program in Washington D.C. …

Perhaps the most important item tonight is news Wal-Mart is creating in-store medical clinics. Carpe Diem has the details.

Village Voice with a great obit for Grambling’s Eddie Robinson.

Because parchment was costly, past writers would erase and reuse. BBC reports on the discoveries from “peeling” back those layers.

Dr Noel said: “There is no more important philosopher in the world than Aristotle. To have early views in the 2nd and 3rd Century AD of Aristotle’s Categories is just fantastic.” “We have one book that contains three texts from the ancient world that are absolutely central to our understanding of mathematics, politics and now philosophy,” he said. “I am at a loss for words at what this book has turned out to be. To make these discoveries in the 21st Century is frankly nutty – it is just so exciting.”

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• April 25, 2007 (word)
• April 25, 2007 (pdf)

Have we lost in Iraq? If we have, is that so bad? Some of our favorites have thoughts.
Tony Blankley is first.

… It would appear that the great divide in both public opinion and between politicians is not Republican-Democrat, liberal-conservative, pro or anti-Bush, or even pro or anti-war (or, in Europe: pro-or anti-American). Rather, the great divide is between those, such as me, who believe that the rise of radical Islam poses an existential threat to Western Civilization; and those who believe it is a nuisance, if, episodically, a very dangerous nuisance. …

Transterrestial Musings on the dems.

… The problem is that they won’t start acting in the national interest until, to paraphrase Golda Meir, they start loving their country more than they hunger for power and hate George Bush.

WSJ editorializes on the dem ownership of defeat.

… The stakes in Iraq are about the future of the entire Middle East–and of our inevitable involvement in it. In calling for withdrawal, Mr. Reid and his allies, just as with Vietnam, may think they are merely following polls that show the public is unhappy with the war. Yet Americans will come to dislike a humiliation and its aftermath even more, especially as they realize that a withdrawal from Iraq now will only make it harder to stabilize the region and defeat Islamist radicals. And they will like it even less should we be required to re-enter the country someday under far worse circumstances. …

Hugh Hewitt interviews the New Yorker contributor who wrote the book on the rise of al Qaeda.

What does the European left think of the dems idea of quitting Iraq? The Captain spots a piece in The Guardian.

The Guardian (UK) has relentlessly opposed the war in Iraq for the past four years and more, giving its readers on the Left a steady diet of bad news and angry opinion based on its editorial policy. British newspapers have an open editorial bias, and readers expect news from a point of view. Guardian readers may find themselves surprised today, however, to find a detailed explanation of all the reasons why the nations in the Middle East do not want an American withdrawal from Iraq …

Jim Taranto closes out the section.

Jonah Goldberg with a Corner post on jargon. From that he links to a 2002 column. We have that too.

… I think the strategic conceit of creating new buzzwords and jargon to protect bureaucrats, consultants and ideologues is one of the more fascinating constants of the human condition (I think Vaclav Havel wrote a play on this and Orwell was obviously a hero in the battle against this sort of thing.). If you don’t know the lingo, you’re on the outside. But often the only thing that justifies you’re outsider status is your ignorance of the lingo. Intellectuals, obviously, are the greatest culprits when it comes to using words as bouncers (I wrote a column about it here a long time ago), but as we move deeper into the New Economy, it’s only going to get worse. …

Tech Central has an item on Milton Friedman that morphs into a short history of The Foundation for Economic Education . FEE is a little known, but effective, group of free market scholars. Pickerhead grew up in New York reading the Times and The Saturday Review of Literature and was on his way to becoming an obnoxious north-east liberal. Until by chance, at the age of 15, discovered a FEE published copy of The Law by Frederic Bastiat.

Some of the things in the Tech Central piece did not ring true so we consulted a Pickings reader who was executive secretary of FEE for 15 years. His thoughts are here too.

It’s FEE night at Pickings. John Stossel’s column on the environment links to The Freeman published by FEE.

… John Semmens of Arizona’s Laissez Faire Institute points out that Earth Day misses an important point. In the April issue of The Freeman magazine, Semmens says the environmental movement overlooks how hospitable the earth has become — thanks to technology. “The environmental alarmists have it backwards. If anything imperils the earth it is ignorant obstruction of science and progress. … That technology provides the best option for serving human wants and conserving the environment should be evident in the progress made in environmental improvement in the United States. Virtually every measure shows that pollution is headed downward and that nature is making a comeback.” (Carbon dioxide excepted, if it is really a pollutant.)
Semmens describes his visit to historic Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, an area “lush with trees and greenery.” It wasn’t always that way. In 1775, the land was cleared so it could be farmed. Today, technology makes farmers so efficient that only a fraction of the land is needed to produce much more food. As a result, “Massachusetts farmland has been allowed to revert back to forest.” …

Riehl World warns of a new global warming scam.

Division of Labour has ideas for Africa from NY Times’ Thomas Friedman and Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek.

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• April 24, 2007 (pdf)
• April 24, 2007 (word)

“The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” Harry Truman said that and it’ll serve to introduce and justify a somewhat long article by Christopher Hitchens about our country’s first confrontation with the Islamic world.

… it is certain that the Barbary question had considerable influence on the debate that ratified the United States Constitution in the succeeding years. Many a delegate, urging his home state to endorse the new document, argued that only a strong federal union could repel the Algerian threat. In The Federalist No. 24, Alexander Hamilton argued that without a “federal navy . . . of respectable weight . . . the genius of American Merchants and Navigators would be stifled and lost.” In No. 41, James Madison insisted that only union could guard America’s maritime capacity from “the rapacious demands of pirates and barbarians.” John Jay, in his letters, took a “bring-it-on” approach; he believed that “Algerian Corsairs and the Pirates of Tunis and Tripoli” would compel the feeble American states to unite, since “the more we are ill-treated abroad the more we shall unite and consolidate at home.” The eventual Constitution, which says nothing about an army, does explicitly provide for a navy. …

John Fund on Ward Connerly.

As noted before, a Muslim cleric in Johnstown, PA has called for the killing of Ayann Hirsi Ali. Mike Rappaport of Right Coast wants to know where the outcry is.

Anne Applebaum sends off Boris Nikolayevich.

… Though we hailed him as a democrat, Yeltsin did not leave behind anything resembling a functional democracy. And he knew, at some level, that he had failed: When he resigned from the presidency, on New Year’s Eve of the millennium — the second momentous resignation speech of his career — he wiped away a tear and apologized to the Russian people for “your dreams that never came true.” …

John Tierney continues to follow the “drug doctor” trial in Alexandria.

John Edwards’ $400 haircuts have attracted Maureen Dowd’s attention.

… Americans have revered such homely leaders as Abe Lincoln. They seem open to balding pates like Rudy’s and flattops like Jon Tester’s. They don’t want self-confidence to look like self-love.
John Edwards has reminded us that even — or especially — in the age of appearances, you must not appear to care too much about appearances. …
… All the haircuts in the world may not save John Edwards from a blowout.

Dean Barnett posts on Edwards too. This includes a photoshopped view of John with a facial. Barnett also posts on her perkiness.

Dilbert’s here.

Good news! Chuck Hagel might get challenged and Chuck is already behind in the polls.