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Just in case you were wondering. I know I wasn’t.

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The chief difficulty will be deciding which government will step in and confiscate the results of their labors — all in the name of the people, of course.

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It may surprise Americans to discover that the United States is the third-largest oil producer, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia. We could be producing more, but Congress has put large areas of potential supply off-limits. These include the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and parts of Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. By government estimates, these areas may contain 25 billion to 30 billion barrels of oil (against about 30 billion barrels of proven U.S. reserves today) and 80 trillion cubic feet or more of natural gas (compared with about 200 tcf of proven reserves).

An amazing world, in which we look to politicians to solve a problem that was entirely created by politicians in the first place.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

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Note the picture: A pretty girl wearing a keffiyeh, a scarf from a culture that would, if it could, cover her from head to toe in opaque fabric.

How stupid is that? Pretty stupid.

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Fertilizer companies are confident the shortage will be solved eventually, noting that they plan to build scores of new factories. But that will probably create fresh problems in the long run as the world grows more dependent on fossil fuels to produce chemical fertilizers. Intensified use of such fertilizers is certain to mean greater pollution of waterways, too.

Arnold Kling is always worth reading.

After Iain Murray’s talk yesterday, a woman who works for a small libertarian organization in France told me that half of recent French graduates of top universities are currently residing outside of France.

Mencius Moldbug would have us consider undesired government programs, regulations, and taxes as a form of rent that we pay. George Lakoff prefers to think of “membership dues.” Perhaps the rent in France has gotten too high for some of the best and brightest there, so they are moving to the UK and the U.S.

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The New York Times has been taking hits of late for its new policy of boycotting the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

Would that Republican Presidents felt the same way. Why subject yourself to an evening devoted to being nice to people who spend the rest of the year being ugly to you? It’s not as if any of them voted for you, or support your policies. What a waste of time….

(Al Kamen’s Washington Post column is archly entitled “In the Loop” — and for good reason; I can’t think of a loopier person in modern “journalism”.)

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No sign of an apology for the Post’s unwavering support of Marxist rebel Mugabe back in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. That was just so yesterday.

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Fortunately, wolves have been extinct in Britain since the 18th century.

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Oh, sure, that’ll help. When has the U.N. ever done anything other than waste money and bloviate?

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Well, don’t walk there. What kind of moron goes into a field with a bull in it? Sheesh.

Tibor Machan.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

He’s also pretty good at asking pointed questions.

Further thoughts here.

The minimum marriage age was raised from 14 to 16 only three years ago. So a woman who is currently 17 might have been legally married at 14 and had one or more children by now.

A lot of the support for the attack on the FLDS comes from the widely held view that the normal pattern is for girls to be married off to older men shortly after they reach puberty and promptly start having babies. It is hard to see how that can be true if, as the Texas authorities have admitted, only two girls out of 53 in the 14-17 year age group were pregnant. And if that picture is false, that undercuts the whole argument for the extraordinary treatment they have been subjected to.

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Let’s make it mandatory for public officials.

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Interesting times.

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Not sure what this means, but I’m sure it’s significant.

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Why do countries and groups within countries engage in large-scale violent conflict? Social scientists’ knee-jerk impulse is to look for objective conflict of interest: It’s about land, oil, or whatever. But if you watch a standard news channel like CNN, you get a very different explanation: Groups are fighting because they hate each other.

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Alternative title: Why Socialism Can’t and Won’t Ever Work.

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Then ask why the school system sucks. Gee, could it be the quality of the teachers?

One of the most popular objections to home-schooling is that “kids won’t be socialized properly unless they interact with their peers”.

The cure would appear to be worse than the disease.

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Although couched in terms of “those mean policies impose a burden on others”, the real lesson to be learned here is “if things are made difficult for illegal immigrants, they’ll take their parasitical ways elsewhere.”

I guess enforcement works, after all.

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Think about this for a bit.

When district boundaries are adjusted so as to include a greater number of people who find a particular legislator satisfactory, this is somehow “undemocratic”. Gee, I thought that the whole point of the process was to give people as much as possible a representative who, you know, represented them.

So we ought to adjust boundaries so that a little less than half of the people in the district disagree with the policies that their representative is going to push — and whose voices are therefore not going to be heard?

This is the silliest method of argumentation that I’ve ever heard of in my life.

If a representative nominally represents X number of people, then a perfectly representative system is one where each candidate signs up exactly X number of people to vote for him, and it ought not to matter where they live. So-called “Gerrymandering” attempts to adjust our territorial system, based on nothing more than history and an implicit assumption that people living in the same place have the same natural interests, to that ideal system. How is this a bad thing?

In electing local government candidates, there may be an argument for people living in the same place having the same natural interests. But for national government candidates, such as Senators and Representatives, that’s absurd. The only impact “natural local interests” have with respect to federal-level legislators is that it encourages pork-barrel earmarks, and how is that a good thing?

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But you wouldn’t know it from reading this whitewash in the Washington Post.

Note that the authors quote a lot of people who think that Wright is being misunderstood (including Wright, in his TV interview), but don’t look at all at the actual words of the sermons in question. If Wright is being misunderstood or taken out of context, it would seem an obvious thing to cite the actual words in question and point that out. But they don’t. The article boils down to “It’s a black thing. You just wouldn’t understand.”

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“We’re from the government, and we’re here to help. Stick your hands up.”

Steve Sailer pulls the curtain back on Los Angeles.

LA scored near the top only in “Luxury boutiques,” “Shoe-shopping,” and “Jewelry-shopping.”

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“We’re from the government, and we’re here to help. Stick your hands up.”

Inside Politics.

Inside the Beltway.

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“We’re from the governmen, and we’re here to help.” Sure, I believe that.

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Perhaps that’s the answer.

Oh, wait … I keep forgetting that there aren’t any Republicans in prison. (Go ahead, ask them. They’re pretty much all Democrats.)

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See for yourself whether Wright is being “taken out of context”.

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The cubicle has its roots in the cybernetic school of thought that arose in the middle of the last century. The meaning of “cybernetics” has largely been swept up in the exuberant imagery of movies and commercials with their glowing rivers of ones and zeros flowing through the air. However, cybernetics has an older and deeper history, predating both the personal computer and the cubicle. Fred Turner’s recent book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, shows how the cybernetic idea of seeing the world in terms of information flows grew out of government-sponsored World War II military research and into the information technology industry of Silicon Valley. In the 1960s and 1970s, cybernetic ideas brought groups of military-funded computer researchers together with Deadheads, radical environmentalists, and art communards in the San Francisco Bay area. This collection of long-haired eccentrics began to think of everything from bee behavior to dance parties to computer programming as information processes. In doing so, they liberated the images of information and the computer from the clutches of the military-industrial complex, joining them instead to a new cybernetic-counterculture vision of egalitarianism, communal networks, and democratic “people power.”

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Frequently, when a patient goes to see a specialist for the first time, none of the records kept by his primary care physician are accessible to the new doctor. The specialist will typically order a whole new series of diagnostic tests to ensure the file he starts contains records he can trust, even if the same tests were just performed at the request of the other physician. Not only is this duplication costly, it also undermines quality care, as the patient is in danger of getting conflicting treatment plans based on competing and incomplete patient records.

One of the major reasons health care costs are out of control is that it’s so labor-intensive. We’ve brought the efficiencies (and consequent cost savings) of automation to almost every area of human activity — with the glaring exception of health care and education. With health care, people aren’t willing to sacrifice quality, so the cost goes through the roof. With education, people aren’t willing to spend what it takes to ensure high quality, so quality goes in the toilet. The only way to fix these situations is automation. As with automation in the manufacturing sector, the chief obstacle to overcome isn’t technical, it’s social — primarily resistance on the part of the relevant unions (AMA and NEA, for example).

And, of course, the lack of a free market in both areas is crucial.

The primary payers of medical bills are not the consumers—that is, the patients—but rather insurance plans and government programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Consequently, the normal marketplace dynamic of suppliers competing with each other based on price and services is weak, almost nonexistent. Doctors and hospitals do not need to add convenient electronic information to their service provision because their payments will be the same either way. Indeed, most health insurers are mildly supportive of an improved HIT system—so long as they do not have to pay higher reimbursement rates for medical claims.

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I’ve always wondered how regressives could claim to have some exclusive dedication to rationality and science and yet embrace some of the New Age bullshit that they do. Consider somebody with crystals hanging from their rearview mirror who reads the daily horoscope and gets a Tarot reading at life’s crisis points. Guess whether this person’s political views are “left” or “right”. The question answers itself.

Party of Science? Well, I suppose, for sufficiently flaky definitions of “science”.

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Eat your heart out, Lee Ermey.

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Terry Battersby, 53, from Manchester, has been removed from his job as head of information technology at the Brussels-based Centre for the Development of Enterprise (CDE) and placed on a short-term contract.

Battersby uncovered evidence that the agency’s former director, Hamed Sow, who is now the energy minister of the west African country of Mali, approved the award of lucrative European Union contracts to a company in which he had a financial interest.

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As I get older, I become more convinced that hypocrisy and irony must be as blind as a bat, for those who practice it seem oblivious to the fact that they wear it like a clown suit at a formal wedding; plain as day, badly out of place and amusing to boot. This election year, we have provided with a classic example of this phenomenon, as evidenced by the Bobbsey Twins, Obama and Hillary, from here on referred to simply as OH for practicality, simplicity and accuracy.

He’s forgetting their older brother, John McCain.

Unity is another popular slogan but, if this pair is any indication, the only thing uniting liberals is their individual selfishness and arrogance undermining their collective interest and agenda. If too many cooks spoil the soup, then this soup has become a diluted, jumbled and highly intoxicating superficial stew.

He’s forgetting their older brother, John McCain, who likes to pee in the soup before serving it, just to show how much of a maverick he is.

Go to church.

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The Nanny State strikes again.

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One of these babies can save your life….

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

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Think we don’t have bozos like this right here in America? Dream on.

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Perhaps I ought to establish a new category called  Cannibalism Watch.

It always astounds the Brahmins of the Democrat Party when the proles start wanting, oh, democracy.

It won’t work, of course — being a Democrat Brahmin is all about a firm grip on the levers of power — but it will be highly amusing to watch.

This is the most entertaining election season I can remember.

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As if you needed one.

Want a gold-standard example of biased pseudo-journalism? Here you go.

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I certainly hope so.