Get a Hip Replacement in India, and Take in the Taj

The latest thing is health tourism. Go to India to get your procedure done
at 25 percent, 50 percent, maybe 75 percent off prices in the US. And maybe you will recover from
your hip replacement
enough to take in the sights before you come home. An elephant ride in Jaipur,
perhaps.
Val McQueen
has your tickets ready. Maybe the night sky will soon be rumbling with squadrons
of gigantic Airbus A380s flying wingtip-to-wingtip from Europe to Delhi, full of
geezers like you and I.

The Real History of the Filibuster

So you thought that the filibuster was a 214-year tradition of the good old Senate now being threatened by evil theocratic Republicans? Not exactly.

Lee Harris traces its actual history, through the pre-civil war rantings of John Randolph, the pre-World War I anti-war speeches of Senator Robert M. La Follette, Sr. and “the willful 11,” onto the segregationist filibusters of the 1940s and 1950s. In each case, the Senate rules were changed to de-fang the filibusters.

Still, the judicious Harris opines, one should be very reluctant to stiff-arm a vociferous minority. It leads to bad blood. The history of the filibuster shows that each talkathon crisis led from
confrontation to compromise. But what would be an acceptable compromise this time?

See No Evil, Hear No Evil...

Remember the good old days when liberals thundered their moral outrage to
the reverberate hills? (A little bit of Shakespeare for you DWM aficionados.)
When they were unafraid and bellowed truth to power?
Well things are different now, at least in the modern, tenured, $40,000-per-year-tuition university.
Confronted with the outrageous grading
practices of a departmental college, here’s how a modern, scholarly academic responded,
according to provocateur
David Horowitz:
“`I don’t want to hear it,’ he said, and walked away.”

Once you have surrendered the moral high ground, liberals, you will find
that you will be surrendering other things too, sooner than you think.

And here is something to ponder. What happens when the young generation
raised on X-Box’s “Halo” starts flexing its muscles in natural,
testosterone-fueled rebellion against a flaccid, enervated academy?

When Hayek's Extended Order Goes Virtual

What will the media world be like in 2014? A couple of journalists,
Matt Thompson of the Fresno Bee and Robin Sloan of Current, a new cable news channel in San Francisco, have
produced a “mockumentary” called “EPIC 2014,” that prophesies the dominance of
Googlezon, a merger of Google and Amazon. There won’t be any media as
we know it. Googlezon will customize news and features for each customer in
its new feature EPIC, the “Evolving Personalized Information Construct,” gathering news
and video from millions of, well, “us,” and then distributing it back to—us.

Here is a transcript
of the video and here is a url to the video itself.

There is one thing missing, of course, and it is what you would expect journalists to miss.
It’s the trust factor. No doubt that “At its best, edited for the savviest readers,
EPIC is a summary of the world — deeper, broader
and more nuanced than anything ever available before,” and at its worst, they say,
is will be trivial, shallow, and untrue. (You mean just like media today?) But the amazing success of eBay, which
runs on trust, shows how the future media world will operate. It will operate on trust,
just like eBay.
Googlezon’s EPIC will
allow its customers to build ratings on its content providers and its editors, just like
eBay does today. That will build trust into the Googlezon media empire. The whole
issue of trust, and how the Hayekian “extended order” is built on
trust, is something that our modern media chappies just do not understand.

And that’s ok, isn’t it? Because it means that they just don’t get it. Heh.

Steyn: It's The Bars Over The Windows, Stupid

Even though the Brits are highly taxed, they don’t seem to feel it. But
what you can see, by reading the local newspaper and taking a stroll down
a British High Street is that it’s the world capital of crime.
“That’s post-socialist Britain: materially prosperous,
but civically impoverished; wealthy villages and
upscale suburbs full of frustrated and impotent citizens.”
Mark is offering this aperçu to all evil
right-wing politicians, free of charge.

Lefty Naomi Klein Mourns End of Ration Program in Iraq

Lefty activist and author of anti-globalist bible No Logo
Naomi Klein
sees the Iraq invasion as a dark plot to sic the American Enterprise Institute
and the Cato Institure on the Iraqi people so they could practice their radical
free-market ideas on them. Now Iraq is shackled to the IMF
and World Bank that are “demanding the elimination of Iraq’s
food ration program,
upon which 60 percent of the population depends for nutrition,
as a condition for debt relief and for the new loans that have
been made in deals with an unelected government.”

I think the idea, Naomi, is that as the Iraqi people get jobs, it would
be a good idea to free them from direct dependence on the government for
the very food they put in their mouths. They could end up like Americans and
left-wing activists that
go to the store to buy their food.

Bigotry: You'll Find it on the Left

Conservative Jewish pundit
Don Feder
wonders why, if Democrats are anxious
to open a dialog with religious Americans, they are piling on the hate speech
against the “Religious Far Right,” the “far-right fundamentalists,” and so on.
He observes that:

“The cover story in the May issue of Harper’s Magazine screams
of `The Christian Right’s War On America.’
Try to imagine a reputable publication doing a story
about `The Jews’ War On America’ or `The Hispanic War On America.’ ”

Good point. You’d be on your knees to Katie Couric in a moment. But
if you were publishing “The Hasidic Jews’ War On America”
or “The Pentecostal Hispanic War On America,” maybe that would be ok.