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.
Carroll LeFon, who blogged under the pseudonym Neptunus Lex, was killed in a plane crash.
David Foster first told me about Lex and I have read Lex’s blog on and off for years. He was one of the best bloggers and was obviously a first-class person in many ways, as well as being a highly talented writer. My sympathies to his family. Alav hashalom.
[O]ur culture is the most important front. And the three most important pillars of that culture are Hollywood and pop culture, along with education and the media. Those three are absolutely controlled by the left.
We must recapture or replace the “commanding heights” of the culture.
It is long overdue. The Right-O-Sphere is but a first step.
Otherwise, merely political gains will be built on sand.
Be happy.
Fear God and dread nought.
It can be done.
UPDATE:
Also this:
Family is what motivated Andrew. I know someone must have known him without Susie, but not I. It has always seemed to me like they have been together forever. He dedicated his most recent book to his kids, writing: “Too many people fought to create this country” for us “to squander it in a generation. . . . I cannot stand on the sidelines as you and your generation are being handed the tab.”
From K-Lo at the Corner. RTWT.
RIP. My sympathies to his family and friends. His death is a great loss to the cause of freedom.
One of humanity’s oldest forms of national economy is the “palace economy.” Under this system, the king would have the harvest brought into a central granary for storage. In Genesis 41, Joseph interprets Pharoah’s dream as predicting seven good harvests and seven poor ones, and says: “Let Pharaoh do this, and let him appoint officers over the land, and take up the fifth part of the land of Egypt in the seven plenteous years. And let them gather all the food of those good years that come, and lay up corn under the hand of Pharaoh, and let them keep food in the cities. And that food shall be for store to the land against the seven years of famine, which shall be in the land of Egypt; that the land perish not through the famine.”
Egypt, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, the Minoans, and the Mycenaean Greeks all had similar arrangements. It was a command economy, with subsistence farming as a base and the excess over bare necessity taken into the care of the government. Many examples of early writing are simply accounting records for the acquisition, storage, and disbursement of grain, wine, and olive oil. In theory, the stored food would be redistributed to the poor and, in times of shortage, to the people in general. In practice, it put the weapon of hunger into the ruler’s hands.
Politically, the ruler was the representative and near relation of the gods, and was invested with divine attributes. That may or may not have included shooting 18 holes-in-one in a single round of golf.
Is any of this starting to sound familiar?
Good riddance to the god-king of North Korea. I hope his fellow god-king Stalin has saved him a seat by the fire.
To me the Cold War is very real, perhaps because my family was involved in various ways and, towards the end, I was, too. The news of the great men and women of that fight dying comes with very special sadness and also with many conflicting thoughts. Vaclav Havel, for instance, was a great symbol of that struggle against Communism but as a politician he did not live up to that and so one see-saws between various opinions.
I have tried to sum it all up on Your Freedom and Ours (though the posting starts with the death of Kim Jong-il). I may get beaten up (figuratively speaking).