Source: Reason
by CJ Ciaramella

“You know Florida Man. You’ve probably read about him carrying an alligator into a liquor store, or calling 911 to get a ride to Hooters, or hiding boxes of top-secret documents in his bathroom. The Florida Man meme has defined the modern conception of the state as a zoo full of sun-baked party monsters, drunken daredevils, deadly animals, and astoundingly dumb criminals. … the birth of the modern Florida Man meme can be traced to three events. The first was the creation of a Florida tag on the snarky news aggregator Fark.com …. The second was the time a naked Florida man allegedly high on bath salts ate someone’s face in 2012. … The third event was the creation of the @_FloridaMan Twitter account several months after the face-eating incident.” [editor’s note: Actually, it can be traced to one event. The “Florida Man” phenomenon dates to shortly after I moved here – TLK] (for publication 01/24)

https://reason.com/2023/12/03/monkey-herpes-face-eating-and-the-pork-chop-gang-how-public-records-laws-created-the-florida-man/

Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman

“From time to time I come across a pattern of observed behavior that appears inconsistent with my economist’s model of rational behavior. I look for a way of making sense of it that, contrary to the initial appearance, is consistent with, ideally implied by, my model. If I can’t, I try to find a way to make the behavior consistent with the model by adding an assumption neither implied by nor inconsistent with the model. If neither of those works I may have to accept the fact that the model is wrong, that I am observing behavior that cannot be explained as rational. At that point I can either give up on understanding the behavior or switch to an alternative model such as evolutionary psychology, the subject of my previous post.” (12/02/23)

https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/explaining-things

Source: Freeman’s Perspective
by Paul Rosenberg

It has now been two years since the height of the Covid compulsions, and even though some people are clinging to their rhetoric, almost no one is lining up for each new injection. After all, everyone got the disease regardless. The Covid vaccine (‘You won’t get or spread Covid’) was, in modern parlance, an epic fail. And so I’d like to examine what happened to us, then find a way back to living with each other in decency and in peace.” (12/02/23)

https://freemansperspective.com/the-covid-calculus/

Source: Racket News
by Matt Taibbi

“I know I said I wasn’t going to dwell on this, but some things are too funny. In yesterday’s surreal House hearing on censorship, the Democrats’ witness Olivia Troye denied to North Carolina congressman Dan Bishop something she’d said in her opening statement. It turns out the time between Troye statements a) ‘Instead of continuing to spread conspiracy theories about government censorship’ and b) ‘I’ve never said this was a conspiracy, you have not heard that comment from me’ was exactly one hour. That has to be a first of some kind, although one minute would’ve been more impressive. Just an FYI from the train home.” (12/01/23)

https://www.racket.news/p/lol-before-and-after-in-house-testimony

Source: EconLog
by Scott Sumner

“The dire warnings about the effects of pot legalization failed to pan out. But that has not stopped drug warriors from arguing that a soft on drugs approach would be disastrous. … Keep in mind that even if state level drug decriminalization had no effect on aggregate drug deaths in America, you would still expect studies to show an increase in drug deaths in the individual state that decriminalized. That’s because the decriminalization of drugs in a single state will draw drug users from other states. But those external effects are typically not picked up in empirical studies. This means that national drug decriminalization is likely to look even more effective than decriminalization in a single state.” (12/01/23)

https://www.econlib.org/drug-war-propaganda/