David Frum's Blog, page 61

How Should We Feel About Bloomberg's Soda Restriction Being Tossed Out?

A New York state judge has struck down the Bloomberg administration's ban on large-serving soda. And guess who is excited?

American Austerity Fail

Keynesian economists, notably Paul Krugman, have been calling for an increase in government spending as a means of pulling the country out of high unemployment. Phil Izzo of the Wall Street Journallooks at what the unemployment rate would be had government spending cuts not been implemented in the past few years. [emphasis mine]

The Damage from Day-Trading

High Frequency Trading (HFT) is a method used by financial institutions whereby stocks are traded in fractions of a second. The traditional means of buying and selling required bankers to manually decide whether or not something was a good investment in the (semi) long run.



HFT, on the other hand, is a completely automated process that relies on computers using complex algorithms in order to decide what stocks are lucrative to buy and sell. The catch? The algorithms only look at what is a go...

Hamas, Not the IDF, Killed This Man's Child

Andrew Sullivan's The Dish, outspoken opponent of Israel's ruling coalition, calls out the Washington Post and the BBC for running a story that proved to be utterly fallacious.

History Porn

A few amazing photographs from the first half of the 20th century.

Let's Talk About the 'Guest Worker' Program

Immigration debates often proceed as if high wages for U.S. workers were a problem to be overcome, rather than a policy goal to be achieved. What else explains the survival of the J visa program?

Hamas' Disappointment With Morsi

The leaders of Hamas hoped Egypt's new government would be more helpful than the Mubarak regime. Wrong. As Hussein Ibish writes at the Daily Beast's Open Zion blog:

The Story Behind this Graphic Syrian Photo

I'll put the photo below the "read more" because of its graphic nature, but you might remember the discovery of bodies in a Syrian canal back in January. The Guardianattempts to piece together how this massacre came to fruition:

Partisanship too Far? Republicans Shouldn't Stand With Rand

A reader writes via Facebook to dispute my dismissal of Rand Paul's filibuster.

Finding Humanity in the Darkness

CNN's John Blake directs our attention to the tale of Charles Brown and Franz Stigler, American and German pilots in the Second World War, respectively. Brown's plane was badly damaged in a combat run over Germany in December of 1943. While limping home, Brown noticed a German fighter off his wing. With his tail gunner dead, much of his crew wounded, and his plane badly damaged, Brown assumed death was on its way.