Links

• I have to say that the strongest argument I’ve ever heard against putting Paul Ryan in the (pivotal) Vice Presidential Throne (there’s a throne right?) is that he professes to like Rage Against The Machine’s music. Anyway, as anyone vaguely familiar with Tom Morello might guess, it appears that Tom Morello is not amused.
• Michael Totten interviews Benjamin Kerstein on Chomsky. Seems like a good time to air my pet Chomsky theory which is that a key part of Noam Chomsky’s appeal is that he is named ‘Noam Chomsky’. If this guy had been named, like, ‘Jimmy McAllister’, his stuff would have never taken off like it did.
• Cobb on Breaking Bad. Relatedly, this week’s episode marked the turning-point (everyone has theirs; mine appears somewhat later than most) at which I stopped being on Mr. White’s side.
• Matthew Yglesias in defense of stimulus hypocrisy:
  

  But if it passes anyway, they ought to do everything they can to make sure their district gets as many contracts as possible. [...] So no hypocrisy here. To whatever extent a member of Congress thinks deficit-financed government spending can’t bolster short-term growth in a recession, he ought to put more time and energy into porking for his district not less.

  This is a good point. It is also part and parcel of an argument against ‘stimulus’ in the first place, not that ‘stimulus’ fans (like Matthew Yglesias) will see that.

• Seth Roberts, More Dairy Fat, Less Heart Disease. My first thought here was, don’t Indians get heart disease? Presumably whatever effect there is may be only first-order…
• More dog-bites-man info on Volcker rule effects: large corporations’ share of borrowing increases compared to smaller corporations. Wow who would have predicted. Congrats guys, making it harder for smaller corporations to borrow money. That’s good volcking, Volcker.
• But at least the Volcker rule will help prevent banks from wasting taxpayer money, right? That’s totally what goo-goo types totally care about above all else, not wasting taxpayer money? Which reminds me, see this article on goo-goo critics saying the HAMP (or something) program didn’t stop enough foreclosures (or something) for a claim that
  

  Some [current and former officials] said they tried too hard at first to protect taxpayers from unnecessary losses.

  It’s bad to try ‘too hard’ to protect taxpayers from ‘unnecessary’ losses, you see. Let’s not get all overzealous about unnecessarily losing taxpayer money, guys.

• I haven’t closely followed the saga of a guy who seems to have once worked for Mitt Romney, and then had a very bad medical event happen to his family several years later. I just chalked it up to yet another reason to vote against Mitt Romney, because clearly in order to win my vote Mitt Romney should have made all employees who worked for him for any nonzero period of time to have perfect lives forever after. That goes without saying. But he didn’t, so what a jerk. (Fortunately, prior to becoming President, Barack Obama never employed a single person in his life, so doesn’t have this problem.) Anyway, I did like Don Boudreaux’s letter to the editor on the subject.