Will Chi’s S. Side Chatham neighborhood — “Pill Hill” for its many physician residents — get a Wal-Mart or won’t it?  Where do consumers come into the labor-union-solidarity picture anyhow?

Arnita Mock Harris, [a] resident, said she and her mother travel to Evergreen Park and Lansing to shop at Wal-Mart and would rather shop in the city if they could.

“We don’t shop in our neighborhood,” said Harris. “The prices are too high. We go to the suburbs.”

It wouldn’t be the first time black shoppers had to go suburban to find prices, not to mention goods.  But in this case, it’s unions that would be sending them there.

Moan and groan, groan and moan.

“I see Craigslist as a negative-editorial product,” says Seattle Times editorial page editor James Vesely (excerpt by Romenesko, your best source for what mainstreamers are thinking).

“Why? Because it claims the profits normally shifted to the newsroom. Without the obligations of journalism, e-commerce becomes the anti-newspaper. Media companies, especially newspapers, are by default nearly the lone agents of the democratic form of government.”

When will they learn?  When will they ever learn?  It’s capitalism, stupid, which has supplied your bread and butter for your whole life but now has places to go and new ways to supply the demand.

Thomas E. Woods explaining why he’s a Catholic libertarian:

It’s not always easy these days to tell which of our two major political parties is the Stupid Party and which the Evil Party. But it remains true, as a conservative wag once said, that from time to time the parties collaborate on something that’s both stupid and evil and call it bipartisanship.

It’s hard to go wrong after a start like that, and he doesn’t.  He slams Republicans for doing nothing to scale back government, named Dept. of Ed as plan for doing from Washington what is better done at home.

Dem candidates have nothing but plans for “looting the American population.”  He doesn’t blame the Dem voter, however:

I can hardly blame someone who believes we owe our standard of living to labor unions and federal regulation: After hearing no other perspective on American history year after year, what else can the poor fellow be expected to think?

Etc.  Beware, he’s a paleo, but like others of that stripe, he’s very stimulating writer — and talker: I heard him weeks back at DePaul and he’s a hot, hot lectern-user, let me tell you.

Who he is, in part: first-place winner in the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Awards for his book The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy. I’m reading this: he’s wonderful on working over Catholics’ so-called social justice mantra.

He also has New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History plus The Church Confronts Modernity, and, most recently, 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask.

For a look at a chapter of his How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization see ThomasEWoods.com. 

Between woman preferring pink and their being better shoppers, “the connecting theme”

is that in the division of labour that forms the primordial bargain of human hunter-gatherer societies, it is the men who do the hunting and the women who do the gathering

says The Economist in a foray into evolutionary psychology provocatively titled “Sex, shopping and thinking pink.”

Furthermore, “There is a fair amount of evidence that men are better than women at solving certain sorts of spatial problems, such as remembering the locations of topographical landmarks,” says Dr. New of Yale (no Dr. No, he).  Can’t agree more: when I think map coordinates, the lady of our house goes by mostly unerring instinct while picking our way on country roads and city streets.

Dr. No, I mean New, studied performance at a farmer’s market, the nearest thing we have these days to gathering.  He found women remembered better where the most nutritious food was found, in which stall.

Two other doctors, Hurlbert and Ling, of Newcastle U., found “a biological, rather than a cultural, explanation for colour preference,” in this case going for the red stuff, which is more nutritious.

Their ancestors in cave women days got it into their system that red (and pink) is where the vitamins are, and the rest is pre-history.