This is all about public safety, of course. HT: Bryan Caplan.

A sure way to temporarily flag employee moral is to call an employee meeting. “What’s this about?” “I’m busy getting things done, is it really required?” Even when a meeting is for the best intentions of exploring ideas and working on problems, egos clash and time is wasted as participants go off on tangents. David Sherwin spells it out in a piece for the Atlantic; group discussions kill creativity.

For instance, Ayn Rand was a passionate smoker. None of the principle characters in Atlas Shrugged: Part I smokes.

This outstanding book was ten years in the making, but it is finally here and the result is startling. It is a pocket edition, super economical, 525 pages of Turgot - the bulk of his life’s work, all beautifully organized. He might have been the key influence on Jefferson but, in any case, he certainly was the great French liberal of the 18th century, not only a proto-Austrian but also a fantastic defender of human liberty. You will find yourself wrapped up in his worldview and thinking like a liberal French aristocrat of the time.

Here’s a great video from Reason.tv on “The Top Five Environmental Disasters that Didn’t Happen.” I have asked, seriously, why people still pay attention to hysterical scare-mongers like Paul Ehrlich. I’ve been told it’s because they “raised awareness” of environmental issues, but after reading The Population Bomb and other screeds–and I use that word deliberately–by the more radical elements of the environmentalist movement, it’s pretty clear that Ehrlich and others have not “raised awareness” of global environmental challenges.

Weird Al was nice enough to ask Lady Gaga if he could so this, but the fame-drunk starlet said no, and hence the song will be kept off his next album. No, this isn’t an IP problem as such – satire is legal, thank goodness, for whatever reason – but it illustrates the absurdities that the culture of IP has instilled in artists. The very notion that they imagine themselves as the sole owner of something like ubiquitous song – inherently malleable and infinitely distributable – is preposterous on its face.