MY esteemed friend (who I talked into blogging I might add) Paul Cella wrote an interesting piece at TCS on Bush's call to "bring it on" over in Iraq. Is the pres adding to the violence?

Another great libertarian piece that appeared just prior to the 4th of July proposing a new declaration for independence day.

My sense of this libertarian majority is based on no polling. That’s part of its strength, it doesn’t have to be validated by focus groups. Liberty is a founding principle of the country. It’s that simple. If you need anecdotal evidence that people actually want to be free, start listening to the vox populi making itself heard on weblogs. Or better yet, write a weblog of your own.

I propose that the motto of this movement be the Thoreauvian chestnut, “That government is best which governs least.” Or maybe we should quote Douglas Adams: “We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!” Whatever. The plan is to legalize almost everything and let adults be adults.

Liberty is going to have to mean letting other people do things you don't approve of. If you want to smoke dope and your neighbor wants to smoke cigarettes and the guy across the street wants to give a gun to his boyfriend as an engagement present before their lavish church wedding, nobody can be telling the others what they can and can’t do. Respect everyone’s privacy and maybe you’ll end up treating everyone with respect.

Richard A. Epstein opines on why he is a libertarian.

So what then is the core of my libertarian beliefs? Here I would organize these around some very familiar watchwords: individual autonomy, as self-rule but not unconstrained by the rights of others; private property, with an eye to the commons; freedom of contract, with an eye to externalities; limited government, with a fear of excessive concentrations of power. But on most ordinary social interactions, including the full array of two-party relationships – buyer-seller, landlord-tenant, employer-employee, insurer-insured; partner-partner – contract should ordinarily be king. And while we have to tolerate the use of state coercive power to build highways, we should work hard to keep government out of private employment and property transactions. No minimum wages, no (or very few) safety regulations; no anti-discrimination laws; no labor statutes; rent control; little (strictly guarded) zoning; no crazy-quilt subsidies to peanuts or raisins; no trade barriers against low-priced imports, and the like. This is a small world government relative to what we do today. At a guess we can cut out well over half of government functions and curtail or contract out many others. All this leaves us with a state that is larger than many defenders of a pure libertarian order might wish. Police and military remain; roads, sewers, telecommunications and electric will all have some level of government ownership or control; the inevitable tax, motor vehicle, voting, and land, copyright and patent lists will need constant upgrade and servicing; intellectual property. But the hope is that a small government will yield more sensible interventions of these key areas.

Mobile blogging conference kicks off in Tokyo. Also of interest is how the word moblogging will be pronounced. Will this be the next big thing and will this be the death of big media (hmmmm they already died for me...).

The moblogging conference is evidence that the culture of street bloggers I anticipated has sprouted in the real world, although that name for the activity never occurred to me -- Adam Greenfield, one of the conference organizers, coined the term "moblogging" in November 2002.

Greenfield decided that the word should be pronounced with the "mob" part sounding like the word "mobile," but others, like Joi Ito, another conference attendee, pronounce it to sound like Smart Mobs. Because the name was invented in print (and online), the legitimate pronunciation can't be known until one emerges from common usage.

Now, by subscribing and linking to online sources we trust, the consumers of blog content are becoming a kind of collective editorial system. The more attentively we sift and analyze and share our discoveries online, the more the writers of blogs (and whatever blogs evolve into) can grow a social intelligence: personally tunable but collectively produced sense-making and way-finding. At least that's a plausible ideal.

For all its entertainment and social networking value, the most important promise of blogging is that it could help revivify the moribund public sphere that is as essential to democracy as voting. The petitions, letters to the editor, pamphleteering that preceded the American and French revolutions were essential enabling institutions for the experiments in self-government that followed.

But the arrival of political public relations and the "massification" of mesmerizing media have degraded the public sphere to the point where vituperative talk radio has married the brutal fascination of television wrestling with the verbal venom of online flame wars.

There are signs that after more than a decade of political insignificance, the democratic potential of the Internet is being realized by more people every day.

B-School becoming easier to get into, but harder to get a job after.

FOR THE FIRST two years of the current downturn that pattern largely held. But this year, business school is suddenly less of a draw. Applications for the B-school Class of ’05 — the students who will hit the books this fall — have fallen by as much as 30 percent at some top schools compared with last year. The University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, for example, has received 27 percent fewer applications for the autumn term than it did in 2002.

My new summer Ab workout. Try it out.

Abdominal work is different from other forms of training because only you can make the exercises effective; if you don't focus on fully flexing the abdominal muscles on every inch of every rep of every movement, you're selling yourself short! For an ab training regimen to produce optimal results you absolutely must flex your muscles at all times, there's no way around it.

This NYT piece asks the question "How much does it cost not to go to the gym?" Note this is an economic article, not a health related one. (via Mises Blog)

Health club memberships offer a particularly clear case study, probably because they offer two opportunities for excess optimism. First, people overestimate the number of times they will make the effort to get to the treadmill or the weight room. Then they congratulate themselves for seeming to save money by buying an expensive gym membership that rewards frequent visitors.

Stefano DellaVigna, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, and Ulrike Malmendier, an assistant professor of finance at Stanford, recently collected data at three health clubs in New England. Like many others, the clubs offer three basic membership plans. People can pay about $10 a visit, a monthly fee of about $70 or an annual fee of roughly $700.

Relatively few people pick the annual contract, leaving them with what seems like a fairly simple comparison. If they expect to go to the gym at least seven times a month — or about twice a week — the monthly package makes sense. Any less of a gym rat should pay $10 each visit.

This seems a good place to pause, set aside feelings of financial superiority and ask yourself how often you go to the gym. The answer for this overconfident consumer, who pays a flat monthly fee at his gym, is about once a week.

In the study, monthly members go about as often and, as a result, pay the equivalent of about $17 a visit. Only one in five members saved money by buying the monthly contract, the professors found when they studied the clubs' records. Over a six-month period, the average member would have saved more than $150 by paying for each visit.