Read it. There was an article about jatropha in the Wall Street Journal (alas, behind the subscription wall) describing it as an interesting new product:

By some estimates, the per-barrel cost to produce biofuel using jatropha — about $43 — is about half that of corn and roughly one-third that of rapeseed, two other leading materials for alternative energy. At those prices, jatropha biodiesel would be competitive with fuel made from crude oil without significant government subsidies.

That sounds very promising. The top article, although it sounds a cautionary note, doesn’t really have anything negative to say about it.

NYT. Hey, maybe enforcement works.

NYT. Remind me again — Who is the “party of the rich”?

NYT. That’s what Wi-Fi is all about. Come on down … and bring your laptop.

NYT. Another must-read.

LGF. I have to admit that I’m on Spencer’s side here, but Derb is one of the Patron Saints of Dyspepsia, so I’m really torn.

Engadget. Not good news. Another supposedly secure lock that can be defeated by common household stuff.

Pogue has some good points to make about products that have demand but no supply. Here are two I especially like:

The great cellphone carrier. When the iPhone came out, everybody grumbled and moaned about how Apple had chosen AT&T as its exclusive carrier. I grumbled along with them—and then it hit me: Whom wouldn’t people have grumbled about?

 The touch-tone alarm clock. The modern clock radio can play CDs, wake up two people at different times, and even beam the current time onto the ceiling. So why do we have to set the time using the same controls cavemen used in the Stone Age?

Techdirt raises an important issue: The tendency, primarily by politicians but also by ordinary citizens, to go after the most convenient target rather than the root of the problem. If you think that this doesn’t have wide application, think “campaign finance reform”.

Pogue points to an interesting notion. Not sure I buy it, but it’s worth thinking about.

Engadget. The Library of Congress in your hand. Or close enough….

NYT. This is silly. If the kid gets hungry enough, he’ll eat. If not, he’ll die. Either way, problem solved.

Techdirt. Some people ought not to be allowed to reproduce.

WSJ. “Environmentalism” is one of the great mental disorders of our time. Unfortunately, our legal system ecourages wackos to be wackos.

Engadget. These look very interesting.

PowerLine. It’s good to call things by their proper names, even if one has to construct a new one.

NYT. Surprising to see sense appearing in the Times. Of course, it’s an op-ed contributor rather than one of the Times’ own editorials, so I guess it’s just a Token Grown-Up thing.

For this purpose, warrants are utterly beside the point. As Judge Richard Posner has put it, “once you grant the legitimacy of surveillance aimed at detection rather than at gathering evidence of guilt, requiring a warrant to conduct it would be like requiring a warrant to ask people questions or to install surveillance cameras on city streets.” Warrants, which originate in the criminal justice paradigm, provide a useful standard for surveillance designed to prove guilt, not to learn the identity of people who may be planning atrocities.

A lot of people forget that the Fourth Amendment applies only in the domestic criminal context, not to espionage or other matters related to intelligence-gathering.

It’s also fairly amusing when the people who are most up in arms about “government snooping” don’t seem to mind when it’s in pursuit of some program they like.

Read it. Religion of peace, sure.

LanguageLog. I’ll go ahead and be snarky for all of us: It’s appalling that these people purport to be professionals when they can’t do a mathematical operation that’s taught in elementary school. No wonder the country is going to the dogs.

Read it. Think you could be President? A lot of unlikely people think they could.

Read it. And worry.

WT. I’ll refrain from making the obvious political joke here.

Read it. Bureaucracy will get you if you don’t watch out.

EconLog. Good stuff, Maynard.

Engadget. Ah, Steve, Steve. When will you learn? No group of us is as smart as all of us.

Read it. Well, it’s like schools and water and sewage and garbage collection — politicians are elected to Do Stuff, and Doing Stuff is what keeps them in office. Most people grew up with government Doing Stuff, and so they can’t conceive that there might be another (and better) way.

EconLog.

I wonder what would happen if you took the government subsidies out of education. Would the losers disappear from campus? Or would colleges become so dependent on tuition that they would move in the direction of accommodating the losers?

Now there’s a hole with no bottom….

Techdirt. I was waiting for somebody to think of this. What’s the next step — simulating nuclear weapons?

Engadget. This would be useful in a number of contexts — I’m thinking of secure government facilities, right off the bat.

Engadget. The question that immediately leaps to mind, of couse, is: Why?

Engadget. This is just cool.

NYT. Well, some people collect stamps, some people DNA-map marijuana. Everybody’s got to have a hobby.

NYT. Interesting stuff, but I wonder about the firm and definite statements concerning something that happened millions of years ago. I’d be more confident if they were a little less confident.

Thomas Sowell points out an inconvenient truth: For the left to win, people must lose.

Progress in general seems to hold little interest for people who call themselves “progressives.” What arouses them are denunciations of social failures and accusations of wrong-doing.

NYT. Unfortunately, the English language is inadequate to express the contempt that this White House has for Senator Leahy. Can’t say that I blame them.

NYT. Oh, we are marching to Eurabia … Eurabia … Eurabia….

Read it. Truly, you cannot make this stuff up.

NYT. This is outrageous. And it’s one of the many absurdities that an “income” tax leads to. And it could be fixed — if our legislators weren’t too busy getting special breaks into the tax code.

LanguageLog. If that didn’t grab your attention, I don’t know what will.

NYT. There must be a rule at the Times that reviewers have to be substantially clueless about a book’s subject matter. The “Dangerous” in “Dangerous Book for Boys” represents the danger to modern political sensibilities, not to the kids themselves. This person is obviously a metrosexual who waxes his back hair.

LGF. Gee, they’re all connected. Whoda thunkit.

What’s really amusing is that the leftie fringe wackos who will overturn heaven and earth to prove that corporations (who want to provide us with stuff we need) are interconnected, while putting their hands over their ears and shouting “NEENER NEENER NEENER!” in the face of evidence that Islamist organizations (who want to kill us) actually are interconnected.

People will do the stupid thing more often than not, given the slightest opportunity.

FuturePundit. Just so you know.

Want to cut your transportation death rates much further? Don’t travel. This applies to both short and long trips and it also saves time. Schedule trip activities to do them in batches so that you make few trips. Take jobs closer to home or move closer to your job. Telecommute. Use teleconferencing and email rather than road trips.

Hear, hear!

Paul Graham.

Stuff is an extremely illiquid asset. Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it’s “worth?” The only way you’re ever going to extract any value from it is to use it. And if you don’t have any immediate use for it, you probably never will.

One of the hardest lessons that anyone can learn. Some never do.

And unless you’re extremely organized, a house full of stuff can be very depressing. A cluttered room saps one’s spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there’s less room for people in a room full of stuff. But there’s more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what’s around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.

I have yet to find an effective way to get this through the skulls of the untidy people among whom I live.

WSj. They’ll need the footbaths to wash of the droppings from all of those pigeons coming home to roost.

FuturePundit.

NYT. Well, at least this shows some sense.

FuturePundit. Well, that would explain why socialists act like arrested adolescents.

NYT. Notice that this is the same argument used by proponents of the dysfunctional public schools: If people are allowed the freedom to choose something else, there won’t be enough left for the political pressure needed to fix the existing system.

NYT. Everything you probably didn’t ever want to know about bridges.

NYT. Getting in touch with your fashionable-minority roots. The search for a ticket to a government affirmative-action program.