1. Shannon is visiting my sister in Houston and Jacob is sick, so the papers I'm within epsilon of finishing will remain between epsilon and delta of being finished until later this week. Fortunately, there are things (like blog posts) I can work on in fits and starts.

2. Via Arts & Letters Daily, here's a review of David Kessler's The End of Overeating by Jacob Sullum. I share leftist and foodie concerns about American dietary infrastructure, but I don't share their apparent conviction that serving people food they want to eat at prices they are willing to pay is part of an evil conspiracy to manipulate us. Instead of fuming about McDonald's and Oreos, a much more constructive endeavor for health advocates would be to try to identify the subsidies and regulations that have produced the mountains of junk food that masquerade as our daily bread.

3. That said, I'm going to indulge my inner teenager for lunch (Shannon is on to me). Jacob and I are going to take a walk in a bit, and I plan to swing by Taco Bell. It will be one part culinary experiment (is the Black Jack Taco any good?) and one part economics experiment (will they let me pay with a ripped-up dollar bill?).

4. I want to thank the kind people at Inter-American Products for making Everyday Living Disinfecting Clean Up Wipes, the people at the store where Shannon bought them (Walmart? Target? Kroger?), and everyone else throughout the production process for their willingness to help us in an hour of need. They don't know who we are. They might not even care. And yet they were willing to provide us with something I've found indispensable in the last few hours. All they wanted in return was a few dollars with which to accomplish their own goals.

5. While I'm thanking people, I also want to thank everyone involved in the production and distribution of the fancy "memory foam" pillow Shannon bought for me a few days ago. I've been waking up with back and neck pain for a while, and the memory foam pillow has helped a lot. It leads me to question criticisms of capitalism and consumerism. Sure, people buy a lot of junk (see 3, above), but it has also produced a world in which I can buy a pillow that helps me get out of bed without feeling like I've been kicked in the neck. From my perspective, that's hardly trivial.

6. On the subject of anti-capitalism, here's a back-of-the-envelope modification of the Drake Equation:

P*S*C*L*[G+T]*[1-(HA+MES)] = B

P = population, S = fraction of the population living within walking distance of a Starbucks (or any place that sells lattes), C = global supply of Che Guevara t-shirts, L = fraction of the population owning a Laptop, G = fraction of the population with Google Blogger accounts, T = fraction of the population with Twitter accounts, HA = fraction of the population that has read Human Action, MES = fraction of the population that has read Man, Economy, and State, B = non-ironic blog posts or Tweets denouncing capitalism on a given day.

7. Speaking of capitalism, here's Don Boudreaux's latest letter to the editor, a response to this WSJ piece arguing that we ignore Mises at our peril. Boudreaux points out that Keynes dismissed Mises's Theory of Money and Credit but then later all but admitted that his German wasn't good enough for him to really understand the ideas in the 1912 German edition.

8. FTC-mandated disclosure: I've received no valuable consideration in exchange for talking about these things.