Ian Murray turns over the rock.

The UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has issued its report  into the so-called Climategate scandal.  As might be expected, it’s pretty much a whitewash, except as detailed below.

Read it.

Read it.

Whatever the new problem, environmentalists always end up back at the same old ‘solutions.’ No matter how many times green gloom is discredited, lapsing into the old eco-fundamentalism is just too irresistible.

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But it’s off-Broadway, so nobody cares.

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Texas has strict rules on home-equity lending, relative to other states, and this has helped to prevent ratios of loan size  to home value from rising as high as they have elsewhere. This is certainly worth thinking about in considering potential changes in the regulatory environment. A word of caution, however—it’s very easy to underplay the importance of both the relative strength of the Texas economy and the advantage of not having a significant housing bubble.

A lot of it’s just being a red state.

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If you think about it for a moment, you’ll figure out the source of this seeming paradox (although this simple insight did not occur to anyone before Feld published his paper in 1991).  You are more likely to be friends with someone who has more friends than with someone who has fewer friends. There are 12 people who have a friend who has 12 friends, but there is only one person who has a friend who has only one friend.  And, of course, there is no one who has a friend who doesn’t have any friend.  Yet there is actually only one person who has 12 friends.  So “12” gets counted only once when you compute the average number of friends that people have, but it gets counted 12 times when you compute the average number of friends that their friends have.  Hence the seeming paradox that your friends have more friends than you do.

Happy to be here, dragging down the average for everybody.

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I’m looking forward to one that can iron shirts.

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As steadily as ivy creeps up the walls of its well-groomed campuses, the education industrial complex has cultivated the image of college as a sure-fire path to a life of social and economic privilege.

Joel Kellum says he’s living proof that the claim is a lie.

The Other McCain overturns a rock.

Drew M. at Ace of Spades says John Cornyn is “starting to go wobbly,” which involves the wholly unwarranted assumption that Cornyn was ever steady to begin with.

Over and over, we have seen recently that Republican “leadership” in Washington is a joke, their cowardice exceeded only by their incompetence.

Preach it, brother.

Disgusting.

Another of the reasons I never practiced law.

Heh.

Getting your comeuppance in internet time. This is a great time to be alive.

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One of the reasons to have hearings on legislation is that so people who comb through it can point out hidden traps, ambiguous language, unintended consequences, etc. But large parts of the Senate bill on health care that went into law were written behind closed doors. And it shows.

Quelle surprise.

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Most people want cheap. Some people can only afford cheap. Walmart helps people maximize the return from their financial resources and all it gets is crap from the Crust.

Read it.

Just sayin’.