1. Advice to Hillary for 2016 from an anti-interventionist: Please just lie to us? Apologies for the pseudo partisan snark, but if anti-war candidates from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama can't seem to keep our country out of war it seems odd to think that pressuring a known element to modify their rhetoric will have any real impact.
2. College admissions and sports - 20% of admissions at Ivy's and small liberal arts colleges are recruited atheletes. And it isn't just the big sports, Harvard has 39 intercollegiate teams. Are esoteric sports that are rare outside of wealthy school districts the easiest ways for colleges to discriminate in favor of wealthy and/or legacy admissions? This is probably why preferential admission for college athletics lacks many of the critics that are directed at affirmative action. While the plight of the college football players who aren't ready for college might get some notice, the rich, relatively athletic but otherwise average student who gets into their Ivy of choice because of lacrosse or crew isn't given a second thought.
3. This defense of large US braodband companies by the Mercatus Institute is interesting because it challenges the current zeitgeist, but it misses the point on quite a few marks. First, they add in media taxes that EU citizens are paying anyway for owning television and radio and use this to erroneously suggest that this makes US broadband costs equivalent to rates of other developed countries. More generally, arguing for an institutional structure that encourages and rewards investment is correct, but most of these companies are also holding local monopolies which need to be addressed.
4. Sometimes, low investor confidence is an opportunity that needs to be taken advantage of rather than a problem that needs to be solved. Kinder Morgan's gigantic M&A transaction shows how connected businessmen can capitalize on control of their companies when faced with doubters. The Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LP was trading at a discount to peers after it looked like the bulk of its future gains would go to the general partner and not the limited partners of the MLP. This made the economics of the general partner KMI buying out the LPs favorable to everyone relative to the status quo.