Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Via Milo we get this fascinating video of two athletes going at each other with sabers.
It seems that the video was taken from a flip book that was printed circa 1880. Looks great!
Take a look, everyone. 19th Century media translated into video we see on The Internet. Why didn’t I just embed the YouTube video here? Because the guy who worked on bringing us this short video deserves some traffic.
Anyone who doesn’t think this is neat as all get out has no sense of wonder.
There is a fascinating yet repellent movie called “The Rules of Attraction” that I end up getting sucked into every time I see it on TV. The movie features an entire cast playing against type including Fred Savage shooting heroin into his foot (now he is part of “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia”, so we were probably seeing the REAL Fred, after all).
One part of the movie features the “hero” or a better word is “protagonist” of the film when he visits a local, unhinged drug dealer to whom he owes money. The protagonist tells the dealer that he “needs” him, because he can help move the drugs on campus at a big markup. With this line, the dealer says…
“I Need You Like I Need an A**hole on my Elbow” (you can probably guess this is the still from the movie).
And why is this on Chicago Boyz? Because THIS is an accurate summary of what Obama is going to do to the left wing blog-erati that helped get him elected. He does not NEED them anymore, and he is going to prove it. Many of the left-wing folks are jabbering about the fact that Obama is keeping Gates as defense secretary and appointing a Wall Street lifer as secretary of the Treasury, and seeming to be bi-partisan rather than lashing out at people like Lieberman who seemed to side with the Republicans.
Obama is smart enough (hopefully) to know that those people are useful on the way up, but listening to them now is political suicide. The country is wide in the middle, and shallow on the ends, and where are these people going to go, anyways?
Obama also has the advantage that he isn’t a white male Democrat, not from a union or other known power base. Those people, like Edwards and Kerry, have to keep “proving” how liberal they are from time to time, like a litmus test. For obvious reasons, Obama doesn’t have to “prove” anything to anyone about how liberal he is.
So, in the immortal words of the drug dealer in “The Rules of Attraction”, he needs them like he needs an…
Robert Avrech went to a script conference the other day, and ran straight into the Inquisition.
My friend Nathan and I differ greatly in our perspective of how and when film crews ought to be allowed to close off parking in the maze that is Manhattan’s Chinatown. You can catch some of our debate here and here.
What it comes down to for me, as a libertarian, is that the film studios are using the coercive power of the state to force (see if the police won’t clear away any protests before you object to my use of the word “force”, especially if the protestor is a lone businessman) the neighborhood into accepting something that will benefit the private film company, and a minority of the businesses there. The difference from the Suzette Kelo case is only a matter of degree.