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Question: Who ought to have the authority to “approve” a genetically engineered animal? Note that the FDA is here approving, not the animal, but the drug the animal is allegedly engineered to produce. So if you’re not producing a drug, do you have to get anybody’s “approval”?

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In case you were wondering. I know I was.

Of course, they don’t mention “drowning in left-wing bullshit”, since that would be giving the game away….

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Government action is urgently needed to address this monstrous injustice!

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Think about that one for a while.

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Waitress Maria Murray, 41, had warned her children that was unlikely to be able to buy them Christmas presents before winning £1million on a £5 Merry Millions scratchcard.

And there it is.

The father of her children, mechanic Tim Hunt, 48, has reportedly told friends he would like a share of the jackpot.

I’m sure he would.

But lawyers are said to have advised Miss Murray that she owes him nothing since they split up over a year ago.

Ha!

Read it.

Or don’t. Your choice. I haven’t watched television since they took FIREFLY off, and I can’t say that I’ve missed it.

Bryan Caplan is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

In hindsight, I’m amazed that people who don’t think twice about killing conscripts (or even civilians) are so reluctant to justify violence against serial killer statesmen.  What could be less objectionable than trying to stop mass murder by killing the specific individuals most responsible for it?

Actually, come to think of it, it’s not really a hard question at all. The hard question is, What are these numbwits thinking that are so opposed to terminating psychopaths like bin Laden, Assad, Chavez, Morales, and Achmedinijad? It goes beyond stupid.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

And yet, when you think about it, like medieval noblemen, they really don’t have to be, do they?

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To tell the truth — most of them, it wouldn’t help.

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Further evidence that legalizing recreational drugs isn’t the cure-all that some arrested adolescents would have you believe.

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Well, that depends on which God you have. Nigeria and Sudan have a lot of Muslims who “have God”, and I can’t say that it helps a whole lot.

Jerry Pournelle waxes dyspeptic.

Government can protect some people from bad guys. It doesn’t always do that and never does it perfectly, but it can, sometimes, do that.  It can, sometimes, as Adam Smith notes, undertake projects that have great benefit to all with little benefit to any one person — he had in mind roads and canals and fire departments, not the over-all direction of the economy. Alas, it doesn’t take a lot of bad thinking to expand that list, and everyone does. After all, if we can put a man on the moon, surely we can give every child a world class university prep education, can’t we? Not just in the United States, but everywhere. And guess what: all the university professors, both tenured and wannabe, agree completely, and rub their hands in anticipation — since of course they won’t be paid by those who will benefit from universal university education, but by the taxpayers who won’t be asked what they think about having everyone go to university and get a degree if they want to become a manager at Jack In The Box. The largest joke is that even the taxpayers can’t pony up enough, and everyone who goes to these overpaid institutions will get to pony up a grand a month for the rest of their lives; this in exchange for the pretended education they get in order to get the credentials that prove they are educated and worthy of having a job. Of course that credential can lead to one of the coveted positions among the governing class.

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Darwin Award nominees.

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Sean McMeekin details the staggering thievery of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Not really news, but a useful reminder. Leftoid are distributionsists; they don’t produce anything, they just re-distribute (“steal”) what others produce.

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Why should the tribulations of distant strangers be as important as those of people near and dear to us? What requires us to care about the sufferings of faraway people whom we will never meet?

The answer is obvious: Nothing.

Neither evolutionary biology, nor tradition, nor common sense would dictate any concern for distant peoples with whom we share neither kinship, language, nor customs.

The imperative to empathize with distant alien peoples is an artifact of our times, a product of the strange and inverted moral structure that has emerged out of the wreckage of the twentieth century.

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Recycling is one of the bedrocks of the environmentalist religion. Every local council exhorts us to sort out paper from metal from plastic from glass and put them each in different bins so they can be taken away and turned into something else, failure to do so can result in hefty financial penalties and being named and shamed as a murderer of fluffy seal pups. The problem I have with the religious fad for recycling is that it conflates two distinctly separate points and, at least to some degree, can do more harm than good.

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Perhaps we actually do have the technology.

What’s more, according to the same computer simulations, the cumulative effect of thousands of years of human influence on climate is preventing the world from entering a new glacial age, altering a clockwork rhythm of periodic cooling of the planet that extends back more than a million years.

Of course, all this flatulance about Global Warming is based on computer simulations, too, so don’t get your hopes up.

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Be the first on your block….

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Two words: Engergy density. But read the whole thing.

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Clive Crook doesn’t have a lot of affectoin for Malcolm Gladwell.

Since the first chapter of “Tipping Point” I have been enduring Gladwell out of an increasingly weary sense of professional obligation. This is what they pay me to do, I tell myself. The man has a nose for interesting tales, I grant you, but his unfailing combination of intellectual parasitism, credulity, false modesty, and self-importance repels me.

And he’s no fan of David Brooks, either.

For this premature outburst, blame David Brooks. “Outliers” is an “important” book, he says, in an excess of professional courtesy. (Important to whom?) Further compliments follow. In the end he criticises a little, but quite respectfully. I see no blood on the floor. It’s disappointing.

Baron Bodissey expresses an Eternal Truth.

Other powerful nations don’t expect gratitude. You’ll never catch the Russians or the Chinese asking for gratitude from their neighbors. Britain may have done a service to India by colonizing it, but the British did not expect gratitude from their colonial subjects. Unlike the United States, these empires acted (or act) as empires, that is, in their own interests. Their foreign policy is not based on altruism, so gratitude is never an issue.

Within six months or two years or five years from when the United States finally withdraws its military forces from Iraq, the Iraqis will either revert to their customary ways and install a strongman in power, resort to civil war, or become an Islamic theocracy like Iran. The only way we can prevent such an outcome is to occupy the country for decades — or pave it over.

And, no matter what happens, gratitude will never be forthcoming. Expecting it is utter foolishness.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Here’s an interesting question: How many other Ponzi schemes and similar frauds of which we are as of yet unaware have managed to survive so far due to the trillions of bailout dollars handed out?

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Because people are stupid and seldom think things through? That’s just a guess, mind.

I guess I’d rather give my money to people who are going to use it to try to make more money (i.e. save/spend it in the market system) than give it to people who are going to use it to try and get re-elected.

Yah, sure, you betcha. Wake me up when that actually happens.

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I suggest the name “Moldtown”.

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Professional associations and unions, not employers, ought to be the ones providing health insurance.

Steve Sailer distills the essence.

Obama was trying to follow Washington’s career path (state legislature, House of Representatives, mayor) when he ran for ex-Black Panther Bobby Rush’s House seat in the 2000 Democratic primary. But his rejection by black voters for not being black enough crushed his spirit and plunged him into a depression that he only got out of when he resolved in 2001 to that his future lay not in black districts but with appealing to the Stuff White People Like voting bloc.

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“Farewell and adieu, ye fair Spanish ladies….”

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Can you translate games, in the sense that you can translate languages? More precisely, can you translate an instance of one game — a match or a round or whatever — into an instance of another game, as you can translate a sentence or a paragraph of Chinese into a sentence or a paragraph of English?

This is why linguists are such fun at parties.

The FatBigot has a bone to pick.

So what is a partner? In popular usage it covers those who engage in bodily coupling, those who live together without benefit of clergy (whether or not there is much bodily coupling involved) and those who are in business together. Many a prostitute falls into all three categories. When a government minister uses the term the reality is usually that someone is being (ahem) penetrated by the government although they pretend to be working with their victim.

Brad DeLong of the Cato Institute takes a realistic look at the crisis du jour.

Thus we have an impulse — a $2 trillion increase in the default discount from the problems in the mortgage market — but the thing deserving attention is the extraordinary financial accelerator that amplified $2 trillion in actual on-the-ground losses in terms of mortgage payments that will not be made into an extra $17 trillion of lost value because global investors now want to hold less risky portfolios than they wanted two years ago.

Our current financial crisis remains largely a mystery: a $2 trillion impulse in lost value of securitized mortgages has set in motion a financial accelerator that we do not understand at any deep level that has led to ten times the total losses in financial wealth of the impulse.

Read it.

Actually, it kinda sorta looks like a SteamPunk version of a cellphone. I guess there’s no accouting for tastes.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

One of the oddities of the standard narrative of the Housing Bubble is how it glosses over just how regional it was. In large expanses of America, there wasn’t much of a Bubble at all. The New York Times reports on the economy in North Dakota, where there was no Housing Bubble, no subsequent Mortgage Meltdown, and no Financial Catastrophe … so far.

Texas is doing just fine, thank you. Look at the places that are having the most trouble, and you’ll find their governments, state and city, are run by Democrats. Take whatever action you think is appropriate.

Cringely lets his dreams take shape.

And dream it is:

But what would happen if just one of those companies — say Chrysler — decided that two years from now it would no longer actually assemble ANY of its own vehicles? Instead they’d put out an RFQ to every company in the world for 300,000 Chrysler Town & Country minivans as an example. Now THAT would be a dramatic move. And a good one, frankly, because with a single pen stroke most of the overcapacity would be removed from the U.S. car market. Chrysler would have to shut down all those plants and lay off all those people, true, but doing it all the way all at once would change the nature of the company’s labor agreements such that there wouldn’t be a whimper.

Whimper? No. Nuclear explosion. UAW -> Congressional Democrats -> Chrysler: “No you won’t. The law to make sure that you don’t will be on the President’s desk within fifteen minutes, and Our Boy Barack will sign it if he knows what’s good for him.”

But keep dreamin’. It makes for entertaining reading.

Read it.

Sometimes, the cleverest people are also the silliest. You only need to glance at Sally Adams to see that she is an academic: the Frida Kahlo eyebrows, the socks and sandals, the determinedly shapeless mound of clothes topped by an ethnic hat. You have to be very clever indeed to look this dowdy.

This time, she has a clearer idea of what she wants: a baby with brains. Although she lives in Hampstead, north London, she has placed newspaper adverts in Oxford and Cambridge, in the hopes of attracting a donor of the highest scholastic calibre. “I’m looking for someone who is educated, intellectual and possibly with connections to the colleges,” she says. “Oxford is a very good possible catchment area. I studied at Oxford University.”

Arnold Kling is doing a lecture series. They’re all good.

The nonfinancial sector wants to hold risk-free short-term assets and issue risky long-term liabilities. To accommodate this, the financial sector does the opposite. If the financial sector suddenly contracts, the nonfinancial sector gets stuck with an asset mix that is riskier and more long-term than it wants and a liability mix that is less risky and shorter term than it wants. The reaction to this unwanted mix can cause a recession. That is how the financial sector affects the real economy.

And that’s the best brief explanation of the subject that I’ve ever seen.

Read it.

Many people assume that Canadians enjoy universal healthcare coverage while receiving the same quality and quantity of medical goods and services as Americans. But the alleged superiority of single-payer health care is not consistent with the evidence. The reality is that, on average, Americans spend more of their income on healthcare than Canadians do but get faster access to more and better medical resources.

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The closest comparable experience to what Russia went through when the Communists took over, I think, was the last serious attempt to eradicate Christianity under Diocletian — except that in Russia they government knew who all of the Christian clergy were. Things got pretty grim for a while.

It’s crucial to remember that all of this was taking place only a few generations after the Communists closed 98 percent of Russia’s churches and, in one brief period, killed 200,000 bishops, priests and nuns and then sent another 500,000 believers to die in labor camps. Millions later died in Stalinist purges. KGB records indicate that most clergy were simply shot or hanged. But others were crucified on church doors, slaughtered on their altars or stripped naked, doused with water and left outdoors in winter.

Look up “ROCOR” in Wikipedia for a brief discussion of the issues.

Read it.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

The retailers, in fact, have shoved a lot of their old inventory holding costs onto consumers by, for example, selling them cases rather than individual items. Part of the demand for bigger houses and bigger vehicles that has proven so expensive to us as a society comes from consumers taking on more of the burden of storing and transporting goods.

Read it.

When reading science fiction, I always have a hard time accepting an alien species unless it’s at least as strange as the Japanese.

Steve Sailer welcomes the Washington Post to the reality-based community.

The Hog isn’t doing politics any more. Heavens, no. Wouldn’t even think about it.

Liberalism appeals to coddled ivory-tower eggheads with high IQs and the common sense of lemmings, but it also appeals very strongly to people who are either unintelligent or ill-informed. Like many conservatives, I have had the experience of explaining undisputed, verifiable facts to self-proclaimed liberals, and then having them tell me they agree with conservative positions. Awareness tends to lead to conservative opinions. But we live in a nation which no longer educates its people, and a huge percentage of Americans know almost nothing and make decisions purely on the basis of emotion or a desire for approval from others.

Yup, just religion and cooking and guns and maybe tools. That’s all. No politics.

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Some data that seem incongruous.

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An interesting topic worthy of discussion.

I would buy such a device, and hook it up to my doorbell. But that’s me.

Alex Tabarrok sees the wolf at the door — or, at least, coming down the road.

It’s not just Social Security and Medicare which are underfunded.  State governments have vastly underfunded public pensions.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, has started a new blog for the non-religious right. The linked article is a fine example of what you can find there.

When I said that “Any given theology is of zero interest to anyone outside the tribe,” I meant of interest in the way that a real intellectual discipline — math, biology, history — is of general interest. From the fact that a person wants to study microbiology, I can deduce nothing about his tribe or fictive tribe (e.g. religion). From the fact that a person wants to make a serious, engaged, non-hostile study of Islamic theology, I can deduce with high probability that he is a Muslim.

Further indicia of quality are that Walter Olson and Heather MacDonald blog there. Well worth your time.

Read it.

I love these charts that people create to try to peg others politically.

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As oil prices recede from all-time dollar highs and some of the hot air gets let out of energy policy debates, it’s a good time to remember that here’s a key concept missing from almost every popular discussion of the subject: energy density. Specialist economists get it, but almost nobody else does. It is important to understanding why most forms of “alternative energy” are mirages, and what a sane energy policy would actually look like.

Wisdom. Attend.

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One of the major surprises I received when I moved out of childhood into the real world, was the degree to which the world is stratified by genuine competence.

But entering the real world, I found out that the average mortal really can’t be an executive.  Even the average manager can’t function without a higher-level manager above them.  What is it that makes an executive?  I don’t know, because I’m not a professional in this area.  If I had to take a guess, I would call it “functioning without recourse” – living without any level above you to take over if you falter, or even to tell you if you’re getting it wrong.  To just get it done, even if the problem requires you to do something unusual, without anyone being there to look over your work and pencil in a few corrections.

Read it.

Whenever someone exhorts you to “think outside the box”, they usually, for your convenience, point out exactly where “outside the box” is located.  Isn’t it funny how nonconformists all dress the same…