George Will points out the silliness of listing as “endangered” a species that is increasing its numbers.

Because of restrictions on hunting, polar bears might be more numerous today than ever and might be twice as numerous as they were three decades ago — when the media were fanning frenzy about global cooling. (Science magazine, March 1975, reported “the approach of a full-blown 10,000-year ice age.”)

But it’s not about the polar bears — it’s about cancelling the Industrial Revolution.

Want to build a power plant in Arizona? A building in Florida? Do you want to drive an SUV? Or leave your cellphone charger plugged in overnight? Some judge might construe federal policy as proscribing these activities. Kempthorne says such uses of the act, unintended by those who wrote it in 1973, would be “wholly inappropriate.” But in 1973, climate Cassandras were saying that “the world’s climatologists are agreed” that we must “prepare for the next ice age” (Science Digest, February 1973). And no authors of the Constitution or the 14th Amendment intended to create a “fundamental” right to abortion, but there it is.

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Can you say “Darwin Award”? I’m sure you can.

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Old Seinfeld reruns will do the same thing and cost less. But we’ll give them credit for a good effort.

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As of February 2008, white law requires an Obama 08 bumper sticker to be placed on the back of every Prius.

They come from that factory that way. It is not a pretty sight.

If a white person does not feel like supporting a candidate, they will likely select a bumper sticker that tells other people what to do.

And that’s the truest thing you’ll read today.

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Earlier today I linked to the Wikipedia page about the band The Decemberists, to point out that in addition to warming up for Barack Obama in Oregon, the band is known for using the National Anthem of the Soviet Union as an introduction to their concerts.

That section of the Wikipedia page has now gone down the memory hole.

Gee, in the old Soviet Union, they used to shoot revisionists. Perhaps the fears about Obama being assassinated are well-placed.

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I would have no problem with that if, in turn, we could declare certain activists to be chimpanzees.

I mean, fair is fair.

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Or ought they to be barred from the Olympics entirely? After all, they’re as bad as the apartheid South Africans, and that precedent ought to be good enough for the Politically Correct.

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Why a lot of the people in college ought not to be there.

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The problem isn’t just with Muslims.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Watch it.

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Mugabe, like so many post-colonial sub-Saharan African leaders, was a successful rebel leader. He was also a professed Marxist. In 1979 Mugabe’s Shona tribe-based rebel organization and allied rebel groups (the coalition referred to itself as the Patriotic Front) overthrew the white-run Republic of Rhodesia (formerly Southern Rhodesia). However, in 1980, with the aid of North Korean military advisers, Mugabe (a member of the Shona tribe) turned on his former allies in the Matabele tribe. From seven to ten thousand Matabele died in that brief war. No one has stepped forward to finance another armed resistance. Guns cost money, and no one sees Zimbabwe worth getting involved in. So Mugabe and his well armed Shona allies have kept control, without armed opposition.

With what result?

Once a major regional food producer, today a substantial number of Zimbabweans go hungry or leave. Since 2000 an estimated three million Zimbabweans (nearly a quarter of the population) have fled the neighboring nations, with South Africa a preferred destination. Zimbabwe’s economy is wretched beyond description. In late 2007 the Zimbabwean government’s own inflation data put the inflation rate at 7,600 percent a year. Economic analysts outside of Zimbabwe rated it as high as 15,000 percent. An IMF “forecast” said the real rate could reach 100,000 percent or more. The statistical differences were meaningless. Staples like meat, bread and cooking oil are not available in retail grocery stores.

Gee, overthrowing the colonialist white regime really worked out well, didn’t it?

\Any apologies from those who promoted this scheme? Of course not.

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The EFP is nasty because it can penetrate the armor on just about anything but an M-1 tank. An EFP is a precision weapon, not an ad-hoc assemblage of explosives (like most roadside bombs). Your typical EFP is a cylindrical device, the optimal one often described as similar to a coffee can. But the cylinder metal must be thicker. You fill about 60 percent of the “coffee can” with explosives (C4, also known as plastique will do). Then you insert a detonator on the closed end of the “coffee can” and a concave copper plug that is pushed into the plastic explosive. The tricky part here is that the depth of the concave copper part, and the thickness of the copper, have to be just right. It requires someone expert at math and the chemistry of explosives to make those calculations. You can make a mould for casting the copper plug, but you must make sure you get the thickness just right. The more precisely the copper plug is made, and the EFP assembled, the more armor the device will penetrate, and the more damage it will do inside the target vehicle.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Arnold Kling stands conventional wisdom on its head.

In my view, macro seriously undermines sound economics. It treats work as scarce and consumer wants as insufficient, which is the opposite of what we teach in micro. Macro treats saving as contractionary and international trade deficits as contractionary, which is contrary to general equilibrium micro. Most people with no economics training intuitively believe that jobs are scarce, that they help the economy when they spend rather than save, and that trade deficits are bad. In general it is the job of economists to explain why those views are fallacies.

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1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in California.

Megan McArdle dishes the dirt.

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Truly, you can’t make this stuff up.

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Government by Picard: “Make it so.” (Gee, it always works on television….)

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Wide Scope = Pork.

But you knew that.

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Hey, mom — get a clue. Move out of California.

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Yes, Jay, especially for you.

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Another event from early 1992, still reverberating today: On January 10, a container holding almost 29,000 plastic bath toys spills off a cargo ship into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and breaks open. The unsinkable toys, which were en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma (Washington), include a lot of iconic yellow rubber ducks that have since been caught up in the world’s ocean currents and continue turning up on the most improbable shores. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer, saw from the beginning how valuable the rubber duckies could be in tracing ocean currents, and correctly predicted their trip through the Northwest Passage.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Cool map.

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And what would Ellsworth Toohey’s favorite magazine be able to do about it?

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More than 20 states have procrastinated in meeting the No Child Left Behind law’s requirement that all students reach grade-level proficiency by 2014 and will be hard-pressed to make needed improvements before the deadline, a report released today shows.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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Perhaps they’re sick and tired of living in Yobistan.

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Well, you know, they don’t make doomsday cults the way they used to….

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And draw your own conclusions.

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And where are the environmentalists complaining that we’re tampering with Mother Gaia?

Just sayin’.

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We have the technology.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

What makes Zimbabwe so unsexy compared to Darfur is that in 1965 the British Colonial Office tried to give the colony of Rhodesia to its black majority. But its white population declared independence and for 15 years resisted an international trade embargo, building a substantial manufacturing base. Finally, in 1979, Margaret Thatcher organized the handover of the country to Robert Mugabe.

The new President devoted the next decade to slaughtering his tribal enemies, largely leaving the white farmers alone to feed the country. In 2000, however, Mugabe began to reward his supporters by telling them to drive out the white minority and steal their land. Not surprisingly, his bully boys proved to be worthless farmers and the country has teetered on the brink of starvation ever since. Mugabe’s government has responded to the shortages it created by printing money, driving the annual inflation rate up to 165,000% in April 2008.

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Still no explanation for rap, though.

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Let’s just say I’m not convinced. Although it does have its moments of unintended humor.

This turns out to be a controversial point for economists, surely members of the only profession that could argue about whether smoking is rational.

And there is nothing necessarily irrational about deciding to embark on a course of action that many find enjoyable but that is painful to reverse. Otherwise, marriage would be irrational too.

Kaus has the goods.

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In virtually every activity at the school, administrators say, the goal is to help create “a new man,” instilled with communal values, filled with love for the republic and ready to battle “internal or external aggression” against Venezuela.

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I find this particularly amusing:

This scandal should blow over very quickly, since the minister in question is not a powerful figure whose name is easy to link to GOP politics.

Parts I find appalling: A congregation with 26,000 members (I’ve lived in towns smaller than that); a congregation with over 40 ministers (can you say “impersonal”?), and a minister specifically in charge of a narrowly sliced demographic (“married adults, ages 42 to 58”).

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There, don’t say I never put in anything useful here.

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And they bitch about the title of Jonah Goldberg’s book, Liberal Fascism, even while their every action demonstrates its theme.

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I suspect that there’s also a difference in the quality of the “college education” that each side gets. I’d love to see an analysis of the difference in attitude matched to the majors and types of courses taken.

No doubt two people who spent their college years studying “queer theory” and Aristotle, respectively, are going to differ on their responses to the available scientific evidence regarding man-made climate change.

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Who knew that a bicycle is a martial arts weapon?

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Once again, the private sector does the jobs that the public sector fumbles.

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But all of the Usual Suspects are wringing their hands about Club Gitmo, so nobody gives a shit.

Tell me how much Zimbabwe is better off than it was under Ian Smith. Try to do it with a straight face, and without your nose growing by a meter.

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Mobs are legal entities here. Their fan magazines and comic books are sold in convenience stores, and bosses socialize with prime ministers and politicians.

When reading a science fiction story, I never account an alien species convincing unless they are stranger than the Japanese.

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David Friedman asks some obvious questions, which don’t appear to have made it into the dinosaur media.

Having held them in Texas until they had their children on the unsupported, and now concededly false, claim that they were minors, the state is now claiming custody over their infants.

The question, to which someone who knows law better than I do may have an answer, is whether the victims of this abuse of legal process have any legal recourse. On the face of it, the state of Texas either deliberately or negligently violated the rights of both women, holding them prisoner without any legal justification for doing so.