Tim Blair is dubious. But he has some suggestions nevertheless.

Read it. Note that almost all of the “black holes” are either Muslim or Communist.

Read it. A trend? Maybe so, maybe not. But not the sort of thing your local small business can indulge in.

Read it. The hits just keep on comin’.

Read it. In case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it. A disturbing take on an underappreciated problem.

Read it. Funny how much better we’re doing now than we were back in AlGore’s Preferred Environment.

Read it. And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

Read it. It’s good to see the legal system stumble into some sense every now and then.

Read it. You can lead a kid to knowledge, but you can’t make him think.

Read it. Straight from the horse’s mouth.

Read it. That’s what happens when politically-motivated prosecutions run up against a reasonable legal system. Eventually you have to have some proof.

Read it. Sometimes listening to the experts is a bad thing.

Read it. I’ve got this book on order and haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but this critique seems to be right on the money.

In How Doctors Think, doctors tell us how simply spending more time with patients, asking open-ended rather than close-ended questions, reading “body language,” including patients’ emotions in the picture, etc., improves their diagnostic ability. How much impact do these factors have on diagnostic ability? Do they actually have any impact at all? These questions place Groopman’s book on shaky ground, for his evidence consists primarily of unrepresentative and mostly irrelevant testimonials in which doctors describe various atypical diagnostic adventures they’ve had, and how they think they either emerged victorious or dropped the ball. The problem is, this does not tell us anything about how doctors think, only how they think they think.

Read it. And don’t let the jargon scare you off; it’s explained fairly well, and an interesting notion.

Mencius Moldbug. Need I say more? Budget some time for this one.

Mencius Moldbug is at it again.

Read it.

Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine is a big fan: “Maintaining a virtual office has its drawbacks but so does having to see the goddamned people you work with every goddamn day.” I would have to agree.

We have a new comic strip, Stone Soup, thanks to the guys at Language Log. See the sidebar.

Read it. My, how useful.

Read it. Everything bad is good for you.

I’m waiting for somebody to do a study about the anti-evolutionary effects of radical feminism.

Read it. I’ve cited the Dyson article before, making much the same points. I have to join David in being a “humanist” as opposed to “naturalist”.

Read it. Funny how everybody knows what you ought to eat — and how much — except you. It’s like the Monty Python sketch with “the machine that goes Ping!”, where the pregnant woman who is there to deliver a child says, “What do I do?”, and the doctor answers with a smile, “You don’t do anything, dear — you’re not qualified!”.

Read it. Well, Democrats cost more now than they used to.

Read it. And see if you can make more sense out of it than I can.

Read it.

Well, no. The crime of “murder” is defined by the law. Texas law says that if you’re a perp involved in a crime and somebody dies, you’re a murderer. By participating in a crime that resulted in murder, this guy became a murderer.

This “felony murder rule” has been a part of the Anglosphere common law since the 12th century. Before the socialists took over in Britain, robbers out for a job would search each other first to make sure than none of them was armed, just to avoid this particular happenstance — so the system worked.

Read it. Had I know that economists had this much fun, I’d have studied harder.

Read it. Sometimes you have to wonder which side our government is on.

Read it. But where will he dance when Israel nukes Iran back?

Read it. Wait until they get sued because it isn’t organic and causes ADHD in laboratory rats. Oh, and it probably causes global warming, too. If we can only connect it to the Iraq war, we’ll be home free.

Read it. No, telling AlGore “Bite Me” doesn’t count.

Read it. And sometimes “enforcement” doesn’t work.

Read it. Canadians would be all right if they just got in touch with their inner American.

Read it. I wonder if you have to pay admission to cross the California state line?

Read it. The new Democrat party motto: “It’s always somebody else’s fault, probably George W Bush”.

Read it. The simple answer is that dermatologists compete with other specialist doctors for Botox shots, while they only compete with other dermatologists for mole evaluations. Obviously some of them are competing on the basis of service as well as price.

These people wouldn’t know a free market if it bit them in the butt — and if they did recognize it, they’d try to kill it.

Read it. Wonder how she’ll do in the swimsuit competition.

Episcopalian, of course. Wonder if they every thought about auditioning for Saturday Night Live? They’ve got the parody of a Christian church part down pat.

Read it. I guess enforcement works. Of course, we can expect the usual weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Read it. And so what? If I’m making good money, what do I care that somebody else is making more? Even a whole lot more? I’m not responsible for hundreds of billions of shareholder money, either.

This is an obvious attempt to stir up envy among those (and there are many) who are, in this Self-Esteem Age, just convinced that they’re worth about ten times what they actually are. The Communist News Network strikes again.

Read it. Perhaps you didn’t think that non-fiction books had an implicit theology. Well, you’d be wrong, bookstore breath.

I have a copy of Discover Your Inner Economist, and, although I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, I’ve glanced through it and look forward to digging into it at some point in My Copious Free Time.

Read it. In case you were wondering. I know I was.

The problem with the whole “calorie restriction” thesis is that I don’t see any thin poor people living longer than fat rich people. But maybe it’s just me.

Read it. You can almost hear the sneer. Unfortunately for The Pinhead William Grimes, he’s wrong and she’s right.

Read it. More than you ever really wanted to know about Borneo. But the map is cool.

Read it. Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. (And they wanted to send this chick into space? Are there no shrinks on NASA’s staff?)

Read it. Hey, this is America — don’t like something? Sue somebody.

Read it. So the “Yuck!” reaction to homosexuality may have something behind it. (“No, no, we didn’t mean that…!”)

Read it. Aside from misspelling “squeamish”, he presents an interesting question.

Read it. These articles appear infrequently but they are almost always, as advertised, damn interesting.

Read it. I find it curious how quickly the People of the Crust rush to conclude that a brilliant scientist has somehow gone horribly wrong when he does something or comes out with an idea that doesn’t fit their a priori worldview. It never occurs to them that perhaps he was being consistently brilliant and right and they are being inconsistent and possibly wrong.

Mickey Kaus has a great idea.

Better yet, we could have two rounds of primaries. Start with a full roster of non-delegate-selecting ‘beauty contests” in 2007, including in the big states. This would winnow the field. Then, just about the time buyer’s remorse sets in and we wonder if there’s not a better candidate, we could have the second round of real, official, delegate-binding primaries. …The candidates are already campaigning and debating as if its February, so this schedule couldn’t mean that much more work for them. Reporters would love it–they’d get to write about twice as many elections. And the campaigns would probably run out of money, reducing the impact of expensive TV ads! … Win-win-win.