My friend messaged me recently, saying “I don’t think I can finish this article,” followed by the section that stuck:

“Democrats will respond that Thomas, Alito and their allies on the Court are the true judicial activists who are working to return us to the dark laissez-faire days before the New Deal.”

Of course, the Democratic distortions of history should be irrelevant to a principled constitutionalist, but we all know that principled people of any sort are few and far between. Consequentialism rules, literally. And bad history rules among the consequentialists.

“The book’s creative director, Anne Curtis, said the idea that including pigs in a story could be interpreted as racism was ‘like a slap in the face’.”

Three Little Pigs ‘too offensive’
By Sean Coughlan
BBC News, education

A story based on the Three Little Pigs fairy tale has been turned down by a government agency’s awards panel as the subject matter could offend Muslims.

The digital book, re-telling the classic story, was rejected by judges who warned that “the use of pigs raises cultural issues”.

Now, since “having a future time orientation” is also racist, I guess that makes my story “The 3 Austrian Pigs And Their Different Rates of Time Preference” just 2 scoops of bigotry and a side of bacon.

A classic Calvin & Hobbes, forwarded by Mr B:

I learned a lot during the first 35 years of my life. I’ve spent most of the past 5 years doing a lot of unlearning.

Here’s a historical corrective worth passing along:

On January 26, 1893, Abner Doubleday died in Mendham, New Jersey. In 1905, Albert J. Spalding, a former player turned sporting goods manufacturer, established a commission to investigate the origins of baseball. After two years of questionable study (and primarily on the basis of unsubstantiated testimony from an elderly man of doubtful sanity), the commission concluded that Abner Doubleday formulated the essential rules of baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York (the current home of the Baseball Hall of Fame). Even though scholars have totally discredited the claim (Doubleday’s own obituary says he disliked outdoor sports), the myth lives on. In his 1973 book “The Man Who Invented Baseball,” Harold Peterson expressed it all in a beautiful example of chiasmus:

“Abner Doubleday didn’t invent baseball,
baseball invented Abner Doubleday.”

That’s from the weekly newsletter I get from www.DrMardy.com, a website “for lovers of wit and wordplay,” which was recommended to me by a lover of chiasmus.

I just got my first monthly newsletter from Merriam-Webster, included in which was a list of the most frequently looked-up words of December 2007. The one I didn’t know was …

That image is from the dictionary that comes with OS X. It doesn’t quite capture the feel of the word. Here’s Merriam-Webster:

Main Entry: peck·sniff·ian

Pronunciation: ()pek|snifn
Function: adjective
Usage: often capitalized
Etymology: Seth Pecksniff + English -ian
: marked by unctuous hypocrisy : selfish and corrupt behind a display of seeming benevolence : SANCTIMONIOUS, HOLIER-THAN-THOU <pecksniffian cant> <legislation designed to correct injustice and to translate pecksniffian phrases into living realities — Nation> <a censorship that is … pecksniffian suppression — Springfield (Massachusetts) Union>

Seth Pecksniff, by the way, is one of the characters in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, someone memorable enough for an eponym, but not, apparently, for his own page at Wikipedia (unlike many other Dickensian characters).

Why was pecksniffian one of the most frequently looked-up words last month? According to the newsletter, it’s because the word “was used by Bill O’Reilly a few times last year, and his use caused the word to spike in the daily list of words that are looked up online.”

You may think I’m highlighting this particular word as a comment on recent rumblings in This Movement of Ours. Maybe I just think it’s a useful word.

“No collection of Mafia or private bank robbers can begin to compare with all the Hiroshimas, Dresdens, and Lidices and their analogues through the history of mankind. … In fact, the state provides an easy, legitimated channel for crime and aggression, since it has its very being in the crime of tax theft, and the coerced monopoly of ‘protection.’ It is the state, indeed, that functions as a mighty ‘protection racket’ on a giant and massive scale.”

(See also: SEMANTICS)

From John P. Cochran, economics professor and dean of the business school at Metropolitan State College of Denver:

Given all the misguided talk about stimulus and the need to get funds into the hands of consumers, it is a good time to revive the wonderful poem by Patrick Barrington, “I Want to be a Consumer” originally published in Punch two year prior to the publication of Keyness General Theory (issue April 25, 1934) and reprinted in Hazlitt’s The Failure of the “New Economics”, pp. 133-134:

I Want to be a Consumer

“And what do you mean to be?”
     The kind old Bishop said
As he took the boy on his ample knee
     And patted his curly head.
“We should all of us choose a calling
     To help Society’s plan;
Then what to you mean to be, my boy,
     When you grow to be a man?”

“I want to be a Consumer,”
     The bright-haired lad replied
As he gazed into the Bishop’s face
     In innocence open-eyed.
“I’ve never had aims of a selfish sort,
     For that, as I know, is wrong.
I want to be a Consumer, Sir,
     And help the world along.”

“I want to be a Consumer
     And work both night and day,
For that is the thing that’s needed most,
     I’ve heard Economists say,
I won’t just be a Producer,
Like Bobby and James and John;
I want to be a Consumer, Sir,
     And help the nation on.”

“But what do you want to be?”
     The Bishop said again,
“For we all of us have to work,” said he,
     ”As must, I think, be plain.
Are you thinking of studying medicine
     Or taking a Bar exam?”
“Why, no!” the bright-haired lad replied
     As he helped himself to jam.

“I want to be a Consumer
     And live in a useful way;
For that is the thing that is needed most,
     I’ve heard Economists say.
There are too many people working
     And too many things are made.
I want to be a Consumer, Sir,
     And help to further trade.”

“I want to be a Consumer
     And do my duty well;
For that is the thing that is needed most,
     I’ve heard Economists tell.
I’ve made up my mind,” the lad was heard,
     As he lit a cigar, to say;
“I want to be a Consumer, Sir,
     And I want to begin today.”

… are doomed to quote Santayana: