Unlike Miss Vague whose relationship with that particular beast is a little more...complicated. She suffers a pain known only to hikers, joggers, and distance runners: shin splints. Most folks think of shin splints as any form of pain on the front of the lower leg below the knee. Not true! There can be localized muscle soreness from use like with any other muscle, but shin splints are a quite specific injury. Basically, the WebMD suggests ice, rest, stretching and strengthening. Interestingly, they give a pretty decent explanation of everything but the last. When I had this problem, thankfully only a couple of times, the following two steps worked for me.

1) Immediately after running and cool down, take a whole cube of ice out of the freezer and run it up and down your shin until it is completely melted. Repeat for the other shin. You will want to put a towel down, probably.

2) In order to strengthen the shin so that the muscle adheres to the bone better, stand on your heels with your toes pointed up as high as possible and walkd 30-60 meters a day. We always did this as part of our warm-up just to make sure it got done, and it worked wonders. Calf-raises also help, but they don't help nearly as much as the shin strengthening.

And that is today's random tidbit from my wealth of random knowledge. Go forth and do this in rememberance of me. Or something.

Two hundred thiry years ago a gaggle of terribly flawed individuals embarked upon what, at the time, seemed like an impossible task. In order to guard their own freedoms, having already taken up arms against Britian, they declared themselves a new and independent nation. Men from many walks of life, with myriad reasons, took it upon themselves to cast off the outrageous yoke of tyranny and go forth under a new, post-enlightenment banner. It took another seven years to win independence, and another four after that to form the Republic.

The system of government was likely the best that could've been established at the time: freedom for all men, so long as those men were white and owned land. Slaves counted 3/5 for tax purposes. By 1791 there were 10 amendments to the document, all of which ennumerated specific controls on government and outlined some very basic freedoms for individuals from which all others could be built. Granted, those freedoms were only for white land-owning males, but the ideas laid to paper over 200 years ago still speak to a fundamental need for individual freedom and limits on state power. Fortunately, the idea of who qualifies as an individual has expanded greatly over the last 230ish years.

Expansion of another sort has also proceeded at break-neck speed, which is unfortunate, because the size and power of the central state in the daily lives of the citizenry has become such that one wonders if there will soon be a license to breathe. Like at least every Executive in the 20th century, and like every Congress since 1913, our Dear Leaders have been busy solidifying their own power while using dubious legal precendent to expand the role of the state. What started with the 17th Amendment has culminated with Bush's Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit and McCain-Feingold. Incremental decay over a period of roughly 90 years has left the citizenry complacent, uncaring, and suckling at the teat. While police arrest you for videotaping them on your property and Our Dear Leaders attempt to restict freedom by soiling the very document they have sworn to protect, you have people in media demanding that the government censor the press.

Isn't there a law against that or something?

It has come to pass that we obtain freedom too cheaply, and thus we do not value it. Unlike generations before us, unlike our forefathers, and unlike many in much of the world today, we're born with liberty and face no great struggle in keeping most of it. Or at least keeping enough to go about our daily lives without too much hassle. And parts get neglected, or we don't feel too bad about giving up things at the margin: flashing an ID here, filling out a form there, being searched without cause this other place.... And each transgression taken individually perhaps isn't that much, but taken in sum the results are disastrous. To simply enter into an agreement with a private party to hold our money, we must show two government pieces of identification. To move from one state to another by air, we must show ID and walk barefooted through the airport. It's come to the point where we are not even secure in our homes. Liberty dies slowly while nobody is watching.

What a tragedy that a mere 230 years after a few thousand brave men took up arms against the world's stongest Empire we can barely muster the energy to be upset when the NSA monitors our calls. What a sad state of affairs that only 230 years past the dawn of a new post-enlightenment era, the serious debate is not about whether or not the government should pay for healthcare, but about how and for whom. What American government has become is pathetic, a top-heavy morass of special interests and power-hungry bureaucrats. The Federalists won the day after the Articles of Confederation failed, but the power of the central state serves as a bright beacon of the anti-Federalist's worst fears.

However, I do not believe that all is lost. While the course will be difficult, government can be rolled back. Power can be limited, the individual states can be granted their more powerful role once again. This will not be an easy road, nor one that is likely to move swiftly, but between playing the partisans of the left and right against one another and making the average citizen sick of state interference, it is possible to rebuild what the framers sought: a free nation, where individuals can seek reward in their own pursuits largely free of interference from the state. This is the vision of America that I love, and this is the vision worth celebrating 230 years after a bunch of uppity farmers told King George to stuff it.

Happy Fourth of July, burn a flag in rememberance. And watch Frank Zappa make a fool of John Lofton. Makes me wonder if we ought to ban Christian Rock.

You are one of those bloggers that wants to get published in the newspapers, correct? You are also one of those bloggers capable of writing something that the newspapers would like to publish, yes? However, you don’t know any editors and don’t know how to approach them even if you did.

Excellent, we can help. Here at Nightcap Syndication we have partnered with one of the top 20 newspapers in the USA. The Books Editor is looking for more reviewers and we’re going to run the competition to help him find them.

Yes, we realize, doing a book review isn’t quite what you had in mind, you’re holding out for the New York Times to offer you Paul Krugman’s slot. Or Maureen Dowd’s (please!). However, time for a little reality check here, this isn’t going to happen immediately. It is also true that book reviews have a long history of being a way into the journalistic citadel: the most difficult sale of your writing, the hardest one to ever make, is the first.

So what exactly is it that you have to do? Simple. Write a 650 word review of any book that takes your fancy and post it here at Nightcap Syndication. At the end of July the Editor will read through all of the entries and offer freelance book review contracts to some or all of those who meet his standards.That’s it. There are no entry fees, no reading costs, nothing to purchase and nothing to pay. Simply take a book off your shelf, review it and see if you get a contract out of it.

Details are below the fold.

Details Schmetails.

Book reviews can vary in length but this particular editor likes 650 words. 647 or 652 is fine, 600 or 700 is not. For non-American writers (and there is no problem with your being outside the US. I have just been hired to write for this paper and I’m English and live in Portugal: globalization you see!) please make sure you set your spell-checker to US English. There is more to the difference than dropping the occasional "u" from UK English.

You can review any book you wish. Our categories are here. Our general rules for reviews are here. An ironic or satirical review of the Old Testament will show your skills just as well as something on the latest Chomsky. Fiction, non-fiction, business, self-help, whatever takes your fancy.

What will you get if you "win"? Why, in fact, "win", not win? This isn’t really a competition for only one slot. Our partner editor needs a number of reviewers in a number of specialities so he may well decide to take on as many people as show that they have the requisite skills. What you get will be the standard freelance book reviewing contract. No, unfortunately, these don’t actually make anyone rich. The fee is $150 per review and you have to sign over all rights. However, the paper then assigns back to you (for no royalty) all subsidiary rights so that same review can then be sold on to other, more minor papers. If they themselves syndicate it then further payments will be made. You also get a free copy of the book, of course.

We’d like to make sure that everyone understands this point properly. We at Nightcap will have no part of your contract directly with the newspaper nor of any money you make from it . We are offering purely (and entirely for free) an opportunity for you to strut your stuff in front of one of the United States’ first class commissioning editors.

We here at Nighcap are working with ScooptWords to try and build a syndication system that will make such further sales much simpler. That’s going to be a little time in coming.

Finally, please look at this technical note here. When you post your review please do, if you should so wish, add in a link to your Amazon (or other retailer) affiliates account.The purpose of our review section is that writers get a chance to make money from their reviews. As a general guideline you can review anything you like here, not just books, and we’re delighted for you to earn the commissions that result from people purchasing.

So that’s the deal. Review a book, post the review, maybe make a little from your affiliate links. If you’ve got what it takes to do this professionally, we’ve organised a professional, one actively on the lookout for new talent, to look the reviews over and offer proper commercial contracts to those that interest him.

There is no limit on the number of reviews you can submit.

This is probably the easiest way you’ll ever come across to try out for a job on a major newspaper. Good luck and we look forward to reading your reviews!

HOW TO ENTER ON NIGHTCAP

1. Login.
2. Select the Submit Competition Entry from the User Menu at the bottom right.
3. Select the competition that you wish to enter: in this case Book Review 06/06.
4. Please note on your entry, which of our Book Review Categories best fits your review (this will make it easier for us to reassign it when the competition is over).
5. Write your entry and then click the Disk Icon.
6. Come back and write some more!

In fact, get rid of the whole bullpen besides Wheeler. I realize that things will get better when Backe gets off the DL, but if the damn bullpen gives up nine runs in two innings, that's a bit of a problem. You should win games that you're up 9-2 in the 7th. Even against the White Sox. Lidge hasn't been impressive since NLCS versus St. Louis last year, he got rocked in the World Series and I don't think he ever came back from it mentally. Get the hook, a closer can't be giving up homeruns.

Maybe get rid of Ausmus in favor of a catcher who can hit, too. Geeze.

I am no scientific expert, but there are some basics that need to be gone over, and those are not that hard to understand, frankly. First of all, what's the difference between High Fructose Corn Syrup and sucrose (table sugar)? Frankly, when it comes to soda sweetening, not all that much. The HFCS used in colas has a fructose/glucose sugar ratio of 55/45, by contrast sucrose is a disaccharide that's 50/50. The other main difference is that in sucrose the fructose and glucose are bonded together, whereas they're already separated in High Fructose Corn Syrup.

HFCS at that proportion can also taste sweeter than sucrose. It's on the order of 1.3 times as sweet as sucrose at that concentration, at the 42% fructose concentration it tastes about the same and at the 90% fructose concentration it is much sweeter. The industry site linked above claims that HFCS-55 is taste-equivalent to sugar and can be substituted on a 1:1 basis.

I've seen the 1.3:1 number in more places than the 1:1 number, so for what follows that's what I'm going to use. In the extended entry I will do the same sort of calculations for the 1:1 ratio of HFCS to sucrose. I'll get along to how the nutrition would work out differently with taste-equivalent amounts of sucrose versus HFCS in a minute, but first I want to talk about the sugar proportions of a popular substitute for soda: apple juice.

As an example, Tropicana 100% apple juice has 25g of sugar per 8oz serving, 48g in the 15.2oz container that you find standard in most convienience stores. In a 100% apple juice product, there is roughly a 2:1 ratio of fructose to glucose with sucrose composing 10-20% of the total sugar, meaning that somewhere between 58% and 70% of the total sugar in a commercial 100% apple juice product will be fructose. Meaning that of the 48g of sugar in the aforementioned container of apple juice, something like 27.84g to 33.6g is fructose.

Over a 12oz serving there are 37.5g of sugar in that apple juice, which translates to about 21.75g to 26.35g of fructose per 12oz portion. If you compare this with the 39g of sugar in a Cocacola Classic 12oz can, which is 55% fructose from HFCS and thusly 21.45g of fructose, you can see that by-and-large on an equivalent serving basis the apple juice and soda have about the same amount of fructose. In some cases the juice might, in fact, have quite a bit more. Granted, the apple juice has a few nutrients that are, well, rather lacking from the soda, but on a purely sugar basis the amount of fructose in each is roughly equivalent.

In the context of banning soft drinks in schools, to replace them in the vending machines with juices, this won't accomplish much. Even if one concedes, out of sportsmanship, that fructose is somehow worse for you than glucose, apple juice will provide the same more fructose than soda on a unit-volume basis. Citrus juices are about 50/50 fructose/glucose, and so on a unit-volume basis will provide slightly less fructose than soda. Tropicana Pure Premium Orange Juice (original), for instance, has 33g of sugar per 12oz serving, half of that is fructose, so it's 16.5g of fructose per 12oz serving. Does a 4.95g difference? Maybe, but being that your just swapping fructose for glucose, and the metabolic processes aren't too different, I'm going to guess not. The difference works out to about 4 lbs of fructose replaced by glucose, assuming one traded one 12oz serving of soda for one 12oz serving of OJ everyday of the year. Not really all that much, when you think about it.

Now that's out of the way, let's move on to examine what would happen if all of the HFCS in soda was replaced magically, overnight, by sucrose. If HFCS is 1.3 times as sweet as sucrose, that means that the 39g of sugar in Coke from HFCS will be replaced by 50.7g of sucrose to achieve a taste-equivalent level of sweetness. So, of those 50.7g of sugar, 25.35 of them would be fructose. Thusly, not only would your total sugar intake increase by 30%, but your intake of fructose would increase by 18%. If fructose is worse for you, it is hard to see how this might be an improvement*.

This all leads to one very obvious conclusion, even from a guy who only understands the basics of chemistry: that switching to sucrose from HFCS for the purposes of sweetening soft drinks is unlikely to have a large effect on the amount of fructose one consumes. Further, at worst, it could increase total sugar consumption fairly substantially. So, Dave's of the world, please relax and have a nice cold soda. Put it on my tab.

Hardberger's proposal is similar to ordinances adopted by other cities seeking to limit the number of so-called formula restaurants. Large chains — those whose restaurants have the same decor, uniforms, architecture and menu — would be prohibited from spreading on the River Walk.

Essentially, in order to maintain his aesthetic preferences, Hardberger is willing to use the city's zoning laws to restrict what property owners can do with their space. Granted, the River Walk is supposed to be a "local" attraction, but this sort of nonsense is part and parcel of why San Antonio is simply not as vibrant and interesting a city as Austin, Houston, or the dreaded Dallas.

And, to be honest, the River Walk is less of an attraction than most of the locals would have you believe. As I work downtown, I spend an awful lot of time in the few affordable, decent restaurants in that area and most of the River Walk winds through parts of town you wouldn't really want to spend too much time in at night. The whole of downtown is dangerous a lot of the time, not Philidelphia dangerous, but dangerous enough. But, aside from that, the river smells bad, the attractions are boring, and aside from the Alamo it isn't anything you can't find in Boerne or at the airport gift shop.

If that environment is what Hardberger is trying to avoid, a silly zoning law isn't going to work. Downtown would need to be a much more attractive place to do business for the River Walk to be anything other than a vagrant-populated pit and, frankly, that doesn't seem likely at this juncture. The main reason for that is the deep, deep divide between the North and South side of town in what feels like that bad ballet dance/fight from the opening of Westside Story. Anything that's perceived as good for the "rich" people on the North side is immediately opposed by the representatives of the South side. And so it goes.

Not that I'm advocating a re-development plan of any sort, but it's pretty clear to even the casual observer that while the River Walk isn't particularly great it's really the only thing going downtown aside from The Alamo. Sure, we have the world headquarters of AT&T (bet you didn't know that) and the world's first air conditioned building (huzzah), but there is virtually nothing of interest downtown and Hardberger is doing absolutely no good at all by trying to put a strangle hold on the one, small, bad-smelling glimmer of hope.

My dad grew up all over the midwest, he was born on a dairy farm in Minnesota, where he lived for awhile. It's been said, by my mother, that he didn't speak anything but German until he was about four or five and started attending kindergarten, I have no way to verify this and dad doesn't speak any German now. In any case, Dad's life started in a rural Minnesota town, my grandfather was a travelling salesman. At one point it was ice machines for restaurants, I've no idea what else during his career, but he drove all over the midwest for work. I believe they moved from Minnesota to South Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio and then finally Texas before my dad finished high school.

My grandfather made enough to support his family (dad, his brother & sister, my grandmother), but they weren't wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. At one point my grandfather sat Dad and his sister down, told them there was only enough money to help one of them, and that it sure wasn't going to be Dad.

My grandmother, who I unfortunately did not know well before she died of Parkinson's, was college educated and a dietician. After my father's family moved to Houston in the late 1960s she taught at Rice, in high school Dad got into many NCAA football games for free by carrying lunches to the players.

After graduating from high school my dad was pretty much on his own in Houston, because his parents moved immediately (the same day, in fact) to Denver because they thought the dry air would be better for my grandmother with her Parkinson's. Dad first enrolled in Stephen F Austin University in Nacadoches, but after a couple of semesters it was too expensive so he quit and transferred to University of Houston. During college he worked any number of jobs: Sears, UPS, waiting, pretty much anything to put himself through school and pay the bills. He spent a couple of semesters in Denver living with his parents and going to school to save money, but he hated being that far from my mother (who he was dating at the time) and moved back to Houston to finish school.

My mother's upbringing was a little bit different than Dad's, she was quite a bit more priviledged, frankly. My mom's father grew up in Henderson, Tennessee. His uncle was Dorsey Hardeman. My grandfather attended Georgia Tech for all but one credit of a structural engineering degree after graduating high school at 16 in 1942. He attended Georgia Tech for a few semesters before joining the Navy, I believe he was stationed in the Pacific for the latter part of the war, always has said he didn't really see anything interesting.

After returning from his small bit in the war, he eventually earned a JD from Vanderbilt (where he met my grandmother). After graduation he moved to San Angelo and joined a law practice with his uncle, Dorsey. In 1969 he moved to Houston with my grandmother, mother, and her brother. As he's never really been one to talk about himself, I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but I know he was with Bracewell & Patterson (now, much to his chagrin, Bracewell & Guiliani) for quite some time, he was general counsel for Houston Natural Gas, etc etc. I don't really want to get into tedious, boring details, but the man had a quite distinguished career in oil & gas law.

Mom went to Texas A&M for a few semesters, then transferred to University of St. Thomas in Houston after taking a year off from school to find herself or something. She met my father because they were neighbors in Houston and his shady roommate hit on her first.

When I was six we moved out of Houston to Lake Oswego, Oregon, where I mostly grew up. I often joke that I grew up on the rough, needle-covered streets of Lake Oswego. If you're familiar with the Portland area or Oregon more generally you'll know that Lake Oswego is, perhaps, the whitest suburb of the whitest city in the whitest state in the country. I could count the number of non-white people I knew on one hand up until high school, then it took one hand for the non-white & non-asian students. In addition to being incredibly, boringly whitebread, it had extremely low crime and an awful lot amount of money.

When my parents moved there in 1988 they did it because the school district was good, and it was. We lived in a nice but not anywhere near extravagant home in a part of town called Lake Grove. This home would nearly double in value during the 12 years my parents owned it, and they had to sell in a bit of a slump. My dad started with Bank of California, then after a few years moved to US Bank. He was there through two mergers, the second of which drained every last bit of what had been good about working there. After I graduated from high school, my parents moved to San Antonio for dad to take a better job opportunity.

On the whole my childhood was easy, largely free of major hardship, and safe. My mother never worked outside the house while I was growing up, I lived in one of those safe suburban neighborhoods where you have 15 sets of parents and the kids pretty much have free run of the place so long as they don't hurt anybody or break anything.

School was boring, unchallenging, and full of shallow dullards. One thing my parents and grandparents instilled in me, at great length over many years, is that the amount of money a person has or makes isn't at all connected to how good a person he or she is. Many people in the suburbs don't seem to get this, and it really bothers me. I don't have a problem if people have a lot of money, or if they like to buy expensive stuff, but I have a real issue with lording it over people like it makes you some sort of superior being. This was a common happening from about junior high on, it got worse in high school.

I heard exactly the following in my high school, more than once: "You know I really like the [name of ridiculously expensive car here, often 'Land Rover'] my parents got me, but it just isn't the right colour." I am not kidding. That's crazy, ungrateful, and vain, frankly.

Full disclosure: my parents bought me a brand new car when I turned 17, it was a 1999 honda civic, I first got the key when it had 9 miles on it. Hell of a birthday gift, $15,000 car, I thought they'd lost their minds, and as I still drive that car today I couldn't be more thankful for it.

But, anyway, it may seem odd that if I feel so strongly about how condescendingly and put-down the poorer kids in my high school were treated and yet I ended up a libertarian. I don't really think it's much of a conflict: I see government handouts as condescending, almost saying "there, there, you're too dumb to shift for yourself so we'll help you." I sincerely do not believe this is the case. The vast majority of the poor could shift for themselves, but I think many have become habituated to the handouts...in short I subscribe to the pathology view. I also think people can be judged by the choices one makes, and if you repeatedly make bad choices I lose sympathy pretty damn quick. See: my feelings about beggars, drug addicts, and urchins with expensive piercings/tattoos.

But, I'm not kidding myself, most of the people in my high school were not in any way poor in absolute terms. Even the least affluent of them had at least one decent, employed parent and enough food to eat. There were some exceptions, sure, but I honestly didn't know too many of them personally.

In high school I was one of those kids who was bored, tended to disrupt class a bit too often, and didn't work very hard. In hindsight, I don't actually think this hurt me much. Firstly, high school is mostly a useless series of jumping through hoops any fool with half a brain can master. Secondly, had I attended some big-name college instead of University of Oregon I'd have just been surrounded by the same jackasses I went to high school with. And, like everyone else, I'd have ended up with the same entry-level job in the same city my parents live in because free rent looks damn good when you graduate.

After high school I attended University of Oregon, with the intention of becoming a journalist and thinking of myself as a left-liberal. By the end of my Freshman year I'd changed my major and my politics. In winter of my that year I took EC 201 to satisfy a J-school requirement for economics...by the end of the term Ron Davies had me convinced that the J-school could suck it. I spent the rest of college working for a conservative/libertarian magazine and taking as many econ classes as I could pack into my schedule. I think I took 80 something hours of economics, I really don't remember. Trade, International Finance, Multinational Corps, Econometrics (420, 421, 423), Intermediate Macro and Micro theory, Advanced Macro and Micro theory, Public Economics (441) that first section of Peter Lambert's Taxation & Inequality class, Money & Banking, Game Theory, Evol. Econ Ideas...I ran out of time and never got around to taking Industrial Org or anything from Bill Harbaugh like I meant to. C'est La Vie.

Unlike Mark Thoma I missed quite a few classes but never a party, the magazine had a lot to do with this. Had I a do-over I'd have spent a fifth year shoring up my middling, completely my fault GPA so I could've gone to grad school right away.

As it is, I have a decent job that I like most days at a bank. I'm the analyst and administrator on an incentive comp plan designed by people who know a lot more than I do about banking, but think in a less economic fashion (yay, perverse incentives). I'm starting up some work on our commercial loan portfolio, and the deposit mix, but I still wish I did more math (and was better at it) than I do.

On the whole, though, my life has been easy and I've very little to complain about, and a lot to be thankful for. I owe a lot to my parents' strong values, especially of self-reliance and finishing what one starts. They worked hard to get where they are, and made my easy life possible. Would that everyone could have the same sort of opportunity, and with less government intervention in their lives I bet they could.

I'm guessing that it might: Ag prices in the US are largely propped up by government subsidy and import restriction, this means that more food is grown every year than we're going to use...a lot of it gets left around to rot, a lot gets dumped on the world market to wreck the agricultural sectors of third-world countries. Practical upshot is that agricultural companies have more money than they otherwise would, and need more people to harvest crops. Who harvests crops? Mostly unskilled Mexicans*. If farmers had a narrower margin, and were only producing as much food as was demanded of them, it seems logical that elimination of ag subsidy could reduce the amount of unskilled labor needed and thusly reduce the incentives to come here illegally.

Just a thought, I'm for freer border crossing anyway.

*Yes, Mexicans. People from Mexico.

Basically, the headline is all I wanted to say. There is not a single member of Congress who is worth the space he or she takes up. We should can them all, make them get real fucking jobs, and stop dicking around with our money. Between the baseball hearings and now this, they've definitely gone past the clearly defined powers of their elected office.

So, Dear Congress, Fuck You.

Dear FBI/NSA: Kiss my white, libertarian ass. I've commited no crimes, I'm pissed that you feel the need to monitor the phone calls of US Citizens on US soil and I'd be a happier man if both of your agencies were disbanded tomorrow. Go to hell.

I also have a very, very low tolerance for children acting up in public. I've told parents to keep control of them, I've told kids to shut up, I've talked to managers to have children who were causing a disturbance removed. There's no excuse for it, none. If you're going to take your kid out in public, keep your kid sitting at the table quietly (or at least not any louder than the rest of the patrons) or leave. I know this is possible, I see it all the time. Sometimes I have the urge to go compliment good parents on the way they keep control of their kids in public, but that'd be taken as creepy, I'm sure.

Anyway, tonight I went to grab a burrito at the local Freebirds with my sister. We order, and as we're moving down the queue some little mop-headed blonde thing is running around screaming. I look at the kid and tell him, "shut the hell up". This is SOP for me and yelling kids, maybe "the hell" is a bit unwarranted, but it's a public place and I'd have gotten slapped into next Tuesday for acting up like that in public. I don't think keeping the little genespawn quiet is too much to ask.

Enter the kid's father. The dude, dressed in a polo shirt (collar up!) and shorts, can't be any older than I am, comes up to me all aggressive with his finger in my face. Something like the following transpired:

Now, were I the type to spawn and were some other fool to swear at my spawn in public, maybe I'd get a little aggitated. I can't really blame the guy for wanting to have words with me about dropping "the hell" on his kid. I mean, maybe PG-13 rated language isn't okay in public or something. But this is the first time that a complete and total stranger has wanted to fight me over something so utterly stupid. I can see saying, "hey, you know, there's no need to swear at my kid, you should've just asked me to get control of him." Fine, cool, whatever, but offering to fight me? That's just weird.

The other thing I really take issue with is the statement that "little kids are just like that". No. They aren't. Little kids whose parents are either too lazy or too stupid to discipline them properly are like that. I know how my parents would've responded, even at two, by making my sit on my hands in a chair. I'm just sort of confused by the whole situation. First time for everything, I guess.

With his wild-haired Charles Manson look and a long history of delusional thinking, self-inflicted injuries and gibberish speech, Steven Kenneth Staley, when off his anti-psychotic medication, is the picture of madness.

Found guilty in 1991 of murdering a Fort Worth restaurant manager during a botched holdup, Staley, 43, has spent much of the past 15 years on death row, in and out of a schizophrenic haze.

Claiming doctors are trying to poison him, he regularly refuses to take his medicine, leaving him with a shaky grasp of his legal circumstances.

The state, however, is trying to force him to take his medication. So that he's competent to be executed. As a death penalty opponent, and a person who's generally against forcible medication, this is doubly appalling. Not only does the state want to use its ultimate authority to kill a man, which it certainly does not have the right to do, they want to forcibly medicate him for the express purpose of making it legal to put a needle into his arm. Disgusting.

I suppose that whether he was competent to face the death penalty at the time of the murder is a relevant question, and as he was found guilty it seems that question has been answered in the affirmative. However, according to state and Federal precedent, he must be competent at the time of his execution. He obviously isn't, and the state wants to force him into competency for the express purpose of causing his death. Prisoners may only be forcibly medicated when they pose a danger to themselves or to others, Staley has not been reported as either (aside from the obvious murder conviction, which he was competent for), and therefore the state doesn't have a compelling reason to force medication upon him. Other than the bloodlust of the Tarrant County prosecutor, that is.

Staley's case doesn't make a good one for death penalty opponents to hang our hats on, but it does demonstrate the pernicious lengths to which the state will go just to make sure some people end up dead.

Texas is considering, as part of a tax-reform package, a measure that would charge sales tax to used automobiles based on the "value" of the vehicle rather than its sale price. This is, quite frankly, insane.

Aside from the obvious enforcement problems -- and the lovely proposal that if a buyer objects to paying taxes on the blue-book value of the car he or she can pay to have an assesment done by a dealer or an insurance adjuster -- it seems that our lovely duly elected representatives in Austin don't understand that the sale price of the care is, in fact, the value. It's quite simple: a buyer and seller negotiate and come to an agreement about how much the car is worth to each of them, money is exchanged, and LIKE MAGIC, the title changes hands. This is how markets work, and I can think of no better example of a purely voluntary market than private seller used cars. Quite nearly perfectly competitive, lemons be damned, and relatively free of interference. It's plainly obvious that consumers will hate this, adjusters will hate it, and sellers will hate it: why on Earth, then, would our dear leaders want to go through with such a proposal?

"Dealers have to disclose things that private individuals don't," said Bill Wolters, president of the Texas Automobile Dealers Association. "With individuals, there is less of a paper trail, less verification and less regulation."

And there's the answer, a powerful interest group wants to "level the playing field". Of course! And how fearful we should be that people can buy or sell used cars on their own without some government gate-keeper to regulate every step of the deal. Where there are not forms, there's chaos!

Oy. Vey.

Why? Well even if, as Professor Cowen expects, Wal-Mart is run much more efficiently than most banking firms (and I have some doubts about that, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me), I doubt Wal-Mart will actually be any good at lending.

First of all, there are a billion and a half rules that they'd have to follow just to make commercial loans or accept certain kinds of depository relationships.

Secondly, and I think this presents a bigger issue, there's a bit of a disconnect between low low prices and the sorts of folks who will go to Wal-Mart for a commercial loan instead of a more established bank. Wal-Mart's customers tend to be, well, poor. Wal-Mart also pays low wages for unskilled labor for the most part. Outside of executive management there's very little that requires any degree of skill done at any given Wal-Mart on any given day. That is to say, that the person you run into at the photo counter at Wal-Mart pretty much represents the dregs of the labor market: cheap, unskilled, easily replacable.

If, and this is a big if, this sort of model goes into management, it's safe to assume that Wal-Mart gets the dregs of the management labor market as well, etc. Presuming that, I wonder if Wal-Mart would be able or willing to pay sufficiently high wages to attract extremely good commercial lenders. As frustrating as I find them sometimes, those folks are sharp, well-educated, and well trained. They are also quite well paid. Trust me, I know how many we have and what our incentive comp plan cost last year. And it wasn't cheap, but the ROI on it was well worth the cost. Of course, we have good lenders and strict lending requirements.

If Wal-Mart cannot or won't pay the money needed to attract really crack-shot lenders, what role does Wal-Mart's customer base play? Well, you see, poor people present a significant credit risk. For significant credit risks banks tend to charge higher interest rates and more fees...but that sort of undercuts "low low" prices for Wal-Mart's target audience. It might be that they'll prefer a three year C&I at prime+2% or more to not getting a loan at all, but they'll still pose a significant risk to the bottom line of the company. Sure, they'll likely be small loans, but enough volume makes a big difference and Wal-Mart is well-known for dealing in volume.

The point is that if you have mediocre lenders making credit decisions out of a pool of applicants most other banks wouldn't touch with a stolen loan memo it's going to be hard to make money. Now, maybe Wal-Mart can afford to lose some money until it establishes a foothold and gains some traction in the market. I can also see them doing pretty well on some sort of referal basis specializing in high-risk loans, perhaps. On the depository side, unless they can revolutionize ACH overnight, I doubt ATM fees will come down.