Did you remember that it came toward the end of a Monday Night Football game? Below is a well done retrospective by ESPN Outside the Lines. Well worth the 10 minute watch.
ABC’s Announcement of John Lennon’s Murder
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Art DeVany on The New Evolution Diet
Clear Thinkers favorite Art DeVany (previous posts here) is preparing for the release of his new book, The New Evolution Diet: What Our Paleolithic Ancestors Can Teach Us About Weight Loss, Fitness and Aging (Rodale Dec. 21, 2010), so he presents his basic ideas on nutrition and exercise in the trailer for the book below. Russ Roberts’ longer audio interview of DeVany from earlier this year can be listened to here and Patrick Kiger provides an excellent overview of DeVany’s ideas on nutrition and exercise here.
Richard Epstein on Obama
Reason‘s Nick Gillespie recently interviewed Richard A. Epstein (previous posts here), who explains how misdirected governmental programs under both Republican and Democratic administrations are having a devastating impact on economic growth and prosperity.
The entire interview is well worth watching. However, the initial portion of it (excerpted below) is particularly interesting because Epstein passes along his personal observations about Barack Obama gained from his experiences with Obama while both served on the University of Chicago Law School faculty.
While certainly not as bad as this, Epstein’s portrayal of Obama is but not particularly reassuring, either.
The challenge of managing a business profitably
Most people underappreciate the difficulty of managing a business profitably. This video explains a big part of the problem well.
Braeburn Country Club
As the warm autumn days of southeast Texas give way to the cooler days of winter, I want to pass along some photos that I took earlier this fall of the Braeburn Country Club golf course, which is one of Houston’s oldest and most interesting tracts.
A group headed by Houston’s legendary PGA professional Jimmy Demaret developed Braeburn on what was then a suburban piece of property off of Bissonnet Road in the the mid-1920’s. The group hired well-regarded architect John Brademus (Colonial in Ft. Worth; Memorial Golf Club in Houston) to design the course, which turned out to be a short but challengingly tight tract.
Unfortunately, as with many clubs developed during the Roaring 20’s, Braeburn fell on hard times after the stock market crash of 1929 and was sold at a foreclosure sale by the bank that had financed Demaret’s group. Jack Burke, Sr. – then the pro at Houston’s River Oaks Country Club – formed another group that purchased the golf course from the bank in the early 1930’s.
Interestingly, Demaret and Burke’s son – Jack Burke, Jr. – went on to develop Houston’s storied Champions Golf Club 25 years later in the late 1950’s.
But the defining moment for Braeburn came almost 60 years after its creation when the club entered into a creative deal with the Harris County Flood Control District in which the district allowed the club to use almost $2.5 million in funds earmarked for flood control to renovate the course in a manner that transformed it into a flood runoff area for a nearby bayou during periods of heavy rains.
The club hired the late Carlton Gipson to oversee the renovation of the course and the result was a masterpiece that ranks among Gipson’s best. Gipson had his crew move over 300,000 cubic feet of dirt in creating the flood retention areas and, in so doing, transformed what had previously been a flat-land Houston course into one that has numerous elevation changes that are rarely seen on Houston-area golf courses.
So, say good-bye to autumn by taking a tour of Braeburn in the slideshow below or download an MP4 version of the slideshow here. Enjoy!
Another good commercial
In this blog’s continuing series of innovative commercials from over the years, here is another excellent one from Turkish Airlines with help from Manchester United.
200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes
Plotting life expectancy against income for 200 countries since 1810, Hans Rosling shows the enormous impact that the increase in wealth has had on the world (H/T Don Boudreaux).
How WikiLeaks is like the office holiday party
Inasmuch as I believe the hoopla over the WikiLeaks disclosures is mostly overblown, I’m not going to post much on it. Except to point out again that the FT’s Gideon Rachman really has the right perspective toward it all:
It’s amusing for the rest of us to read US diplomats’ frank and sometimes unflattering verdicts on foreign leaders, and it’s obviously embarrassing for the Americans.
It’s a bit like somebody getting drunk at a party and making bitchy comments in too loud a voice. Nobody is incredibly shocked that such things happen. But it’s still awkward to be overheard by the person you are talking about.
A lesson on using other people’s money
Well, maybe it’s not all so bad after all that the Harris County Sports Authority used junk debt to finance construction of Reliant Stadium. Check out what’s going on in St. Louis (H/T Craig Depken):
Eight years ago, as the St. Louis Cardinals aimed to build a new baseball stadium, team owners signed an agreement with the city worth millions of dollars a year in tax breaks.
In exchange, the team agreed to a series of annual perks for the region’s residents – 100,000 free tickets, 486,000 seats for under $12 and $100,000 in donations to recreation for disadvantaged youths.
The Cardinals also agreed to give the city a cut of profits made if any portion of the team was sold.
Then, last year, owners sold a sizeable chunk of the Cardinals – more than 13 percent. Now, a group of anti-public-stadium advocates is alleging that the team owes the city hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And, despite another multimillion-dollar budget gap anticipated for the coming year, the city isn’t checking into it. City officials acknowledge that they have never really kept tabs on the agreement.
. . . Several city officials, including Barb Geisman, the former deputy mayor for development, said there was no reason to double-check. They trust the Cardinals.
Which reminds me of what the late Milton Friedman used to say about the dynamics of using other people’s money:
“There are four ways in which you can spend money.”
“You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.”
“Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.”
“Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!”
“Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get.”
“And that’s government . . .”
Defending WikiLeaks
Although my view of the latest WikiLeaks disclosures is much the same as FT’s Gideon Rachman (I mean, really, who would have thought that Silvio Berlusconi is feckless and vain?), my sense is that Will Wilkinson’s initial analysis correctly identifies the importance of these disclosures:
To get at the value of WikiLeaks, I think it’s important to distinguish between the government-the temporary, elected authors of national policy-and the state-the permanent bureaucratic and military apparatus superficially but not fully controlled by the reigning government. The careerists scattered about the world in America’s intelligence agencies, military, and consular offices largely operate behind a veil of secrecy executing policy which is itself largely secret. American citizens mostly have no idea what they are doing, or whether what they are doing is working out well. The actually-existing structure and strategy of the American empire remains a near-total mystery to those who foot the bill and whose children fight its wars. And that is the way the elite of America’s unelected permanent state, perhaps the most powerful class of people on Earth, like it. [. . .]
If secrecy is necessary for national security and effective diplomacy, it is also inevitable that the prerogative of secrecy will be used to hide the misdeeds of the permanent state and its privileged agents. I suspect that there is no scheme of government oversight that will not eventually come under the indirect control of the generals, spies, and foreign-service officers it is meant to oversee.
Organisations such as WikiLeaks, which are philosophically opposed to state secrecy and which operate as much as is possible outside the global nation-state system, may be the best we can hope for in the way of promoting the climate of transparency and accountability necessary for authentically liberal democracy. Some folks ask, "Who elected Julian Assange?" The answer is nobody did, which is, ironically, why WikiLeaks is able to improve the quality of our democracy.
Of course, those jealously protective of the privileges of unaccountable state power will tell us that people will die if we can read their email, but so what? Different people, maybe more people, will die if we can’t.
Reminds me of the debate that occurred as a result of similar disclosures over a generation ago.