Brian Gongol

The way to keep kids from getting fat is not to prohibit their access to candy bars for six hours a day, 200 days a year -- it's to teach them how to make decisions about what to eat.



But if someone's willing to pay $40,000 for a quarter-acre lot to build a home and it's only worth $3,000 an acre as farmland, why does any regulator need to be involved?


They had been linking only to stories 30 days old or fresher

One side says spam is a matter of free speech; another side says it's a matter of criminal trespass. Either way, the private sector (through spam filtering) has done more to solve the problem than government has -- though Bill Gates's promise to end spam by 2006 doesn't seem to have come to fruition yet.

Death rate for newborns three times the normal rate

One of the problems with parliamentary democracies is that they're inherently less stable than those with regular elections -- because internal leadership struggles are just as likely to bring about new elections as conventional inter-party rivalries.

The strangest part may be that freshmen entering college today were born around 1988, so they're completely without any memories of the Soviet Union or the fall of the Berlin Wall