Man Up, Kohring


Ex-con, ex-legislator and egregious sniveller Vic Kohring has an opinion piece in the Alaska Dispatch where he alternately denies blame and half-heartedly accepts responsibility for his crimes, blames the Feds, blames Bill Allen, blames the trial judge and whines about the hardships. It’s the kind of writing that makes you want to take a bath…

Patent Medicines and Economics: Making the Patient Worse


The turn of the previous century saw a convergence of snake oil and snake oil salesmen, when patent medicines and the advertising industry combined their dubious skills to bombard America with an array of equally dubious nostrums which made ever more extravagant claims for themselves. Not until 1905, when Samuel Hopkins Adams published an exposé entitled “The Great…