Don Boudreaux spanks the Wall Street Journal.

While pandering to economic ignorance often wins votes, it’s distressing to see such pandering – even for a good cause – in your pages.  Trade’s benefits are measured in imports; the more the better.  Exports are the costs of getting these benefits.  In a truly ideal world – one quite the opposite of the ostensible ideal of Messrs. Baucus and Kerry – we’d continually receive cargo ship after cargo ship of automobiles, MP3 players, foodstuffs, and countless other valuable imports in exchange for our export of a single toothpick.  Alas, it’s unfortunate that foreigners in fact are so prehensile that they demand lots more than one toothpick in exchange for the stuff they ship to us.

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The traditional, thin plastic bag, though increasingly demonized and taxed, has better environmental performance and is likely to be considerably safer for human health than alternatives.

Two recent studies might end the great grocery bag debate. The debates over which type of grocery bag is best break down into two issues: which are better for the environment, and which are better for your health.

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When I studied economics in college, I learned that mercantilism supplanted feudalism to become the predominant economic doctrine through the late Middle Ages. Mercantilism, “economic nationalism for the purpose of building a wealthy and powerful state,” is based on this logic: “The richer the nation, the stronger the nation; the stronger the nation, the better for every member of that kingdom.” It wasn’t until the 17th century that mercantilism was seriously challenged, and Adam Smith finally drove a stake through its heart when he published The Wealth of Nations 235 years ago. Perhaps most economists hold this clean view of history, but it seems that the rest of the world never got the memo. Unfortunately, the archaic and counterproductive ideas of mercantilism are alive and kicking in 21st-century America.

No bad idea ever truly dies.

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I especially like the preening inherent in the term ‘creative class’. Given its proper name, ‘bullshit class’, it would sound less admirable.

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James Madison once described the judiciary as “an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislative or executive.” Had he lived to see the Supreme Court’s sweeping definition of congressional power under the Commerce Clause, he might have revised that statement.

Does just sitting and doing nothing constitute ‘commerce’? Some think so.

Under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, Congress possesses the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with Indian tribes.” In the 1942 case Wickard v. Filburn, the Court held that the Commerce Clause allowed Congress to forbid farmer Roscoe Filburn from growing twice the amount of wheat permitted by the Agricultural Adjustment Act and then consuming that extra wheat on his own farm. In 2005, the Court reinforced this decision, holding in Gonzales v. Raich that medical marijuana cultivated and consumed entirely within the state of California still counted as commerce “among the several States” and was thus open to the depredations of the Controlled Substances Act. As Justice Clarence Thomas observed in his Raich dissent, “If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything—and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.”

Welcome to the Obamanation.

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Climate like a slice of heaven, a central valley with the most fertile and productive terroire on earth, and California seems grimly determined to piss it all away.

If that doesn’t convince you of man’s fallen nature, I don’t know what will.

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United Nations staff were hunted down in a hidden bunker and slaughtered by a Muslim mob that stormed their compound last Friday, it emerged over the weekend.

Gee, things don’t appear to have changed much in the past 150 years.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

More or less.

see at the start of this story
basically what Grendel is doing
is every night
when Hrothgar settles down to have himself a sweet party
in his meadhall
Grendel comes charging out of the swamp
humps the door down
and proceeds to play cockhockey with the internal organs
of all the people who are trying to get their booze on
he does this FOR TWELVE YEARS
there are several shocking things about this
one is that these are twelve years of solid murder we are talking about
but more importantly
where do they keep getting dudes
to come to these parties
after say
the first SIX YEARS of unstoppable death
you would think word would get around
like hey
party at Hrothgar’s crib tonight
are you coming
nah man I hear THERE IS A MONSTER THERE WHO MURDERS EVERYONE
but perhaps most bizarre
is the fact that Hrothgar CONTINUES to party throughout these 12 years
this is clearly a man who is committed to partying

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Well, those draconian anti-gun laws in Britain certainly seem to have worked, haven’t they?

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Contrary to the popular mythology about children rebelling against their parents, most left-wing activists had left-wing activists in the previous generation. The term ‘Red Diaper Baby’ exists for a reason.

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A suicide bombing inside a Sufi shrine in central Pakistan’s Punjab province on Sunday killed at least 25 people and wounded dozens of others, a senior government official told CNN.

Dera Ghazi Khan is no stranger to violent bombings. Dozens were killed in a December 2009 bombing that ripped through a market near the home of a provincial official.

Another blast earlier that year struck a crowd of Shia Muslims as they took part in a procession toward a mosque, killing scores of people.

When there are no Jews or Americans handy, Muslims will cheerfully blow each other up.

Reporter Mollie at Get Religion doesn’t understand the media coverage of the Koran-burning kerfuffle.

Murdering people who have nothing to do with the Koran burning is another animal from rape entirely, but it is still surprising to me to see how the media suggests that the pastor who oversaw the Koran burning — Terry Jones — is responsible for murders he didn’t commit.

Welcome to the Crustian world, Mollie. I hope you enjoy the realization that ‘journalists’ and Muslims share a common outlook: Anything bad that happens is never a Muslim’s fault.

Frankly, I’m finding it incredibly entertaining that our entire Middle East policy could unravel through the efforts of one publicity hound in Florida. Who says the individual can’t make a difference these days?

Charlie Stross, Hugo Award-winning writer, tries his hand at forecasting the future, with fascinating results.

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Most archeologists agree that the use of fire is tied to colonization outside Africa, especially in Europe where temperatures fall below freezing, wrote Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University in the Netherlands and Paola Villa of the University of Colorado.

Yet, while there is evidence of early humans living in Europe as much as a million years ago, the researchers found no clear traces of regular use of fire before about 400,000 years ago.

After that, Neanderthals and modern humans living in Europe regularly used fire for warmth, cooking and light, they found.

Their results raise the question of how early humans survived cold climates without fire. The researchers suggest a highly active lifestyle and a high-protein diet may have helped them adapt to the cold, adding that the consumption of raw meat and seafood by hunter-gatherers is well documented.

Hey, if it were easy, anybody could do it.

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Whenever we have an election, pundits and politicians wax eloquent about the supposed need to increase voter turnout. Much less attention is paid to the question of whether the people going to the polls actually understand the issues they’re voting on.

I have always found puzzling the whole ‘get out the vote’ concept. Surely, if people were interested in the outcome of an election, they’d vote? And if they’re not interested in the outcome of the election, why badger them into it? The problem that needs to be addressed is not the number of people voting, but the number of people sufficiently interested in voting to actually do it.

It does not surprise me that the ‘get out the vote’ crowd consists of people whose lives are consumed by politics and political issues. Most people have higher priorities: family, job, recreation, sports.

I have no objection to people who are consumed by politics, just as I have no objection to people who paint up their faces for football games (although I think a good case could be made that people who paint their faces for football games have a more positive impact on our civilization).

But such people are ‘activists’, and the distinguishing characteristic of ‘activists’ is that they are utterly convinced that what they find important is what everybody ought to find important; and (tellingly) therefore there is something wrong with those who don’t. It is but a short step from thinking ‘there’s something wrong with these people who don’t consider important the things I consider important’ to ‘these people ought not to be allowed to participate because they’ll get it wrong’.

Lynn Viehl, famous writer (read her books), learns why Tim avoids Facebook.

The second — the absolute split second — I created a Facebook account I got slammed. Two people instantly wanted to be my Friends (they must hook up something that reads the e-mail address you use to create the account that other people are watching for; both people send me endless amounts of SPAM on my regular e-mail.) Facebook demanded all kinds of personal information from me, too: what school had I gone to, who were my friends, who did I want to invite to be my friends, yada yada yada.

I skipped all that and went to make my profile private. No such luck. I could, however, put up a picture of myself. Tell everyone all about me on my permanently public profile. Stuff started popping up on the sidebar for me to buy, join, check out, etc. And the questions, God. Have you done this? Why not? You’d better do this. And this. My security was too low, fix that.

In two minutes so much crap was thrown at me I almost gave up. But I really wanted to enter the contest, so I skipped as much as I could, put phony info in the stuff I couldn’t, and finally verified it all. At last. I could go to the contest page and get this over with one and for all.

Here’s the real irony: on the contest page? The link to enter the contest didn’t work. So I joined Facebook and went through all that nonsense for nothing.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Anyway. I took great pleasure in going to the account settings page so I could delete the stupid account. Only I discovered that I couldn’t delete it; I was only given the option of “deactivating” the account. And before I could do that, I had to tell them why I was deactivating it. I had to explain myself by checking off one of their reason boxes (none of which said “You’re pushy, intrusive dumbasses and I don’t want you anywhere near me or my e-mail”.)

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, listens to Calypso Louis Farrakhan.

I also have a soft spot for black church oratory. I don’t have a religious bone in my body, but taken simply as an art form, this stuff can be quite striking. Al Sharpton, for example, who is an ignorant buffoon in all matters that actually engage my powers of reasoning, is a terrific preacher, with cadences and rhythms really quite musical. I could listen to him for … well, not hours, but quite a lot of minutes.

The really striking thing about the address was the almost total absence of anything Islamic in it. Most of the themes and references were in fact Christian.

Some part of the antisemitism shtick is Holocaust envy — resentment that any other people should claim to have endured suffering comparable to the black man’s. In Ireland the whinier section of the republican movement is scoffed at as “the MOPE faction,” where MOPE stands for “Most Oppressed People Ever.” Nobody in the Rosemont stadium — certainly not Farrakhan — nursed any doubt that black Americans are MOPE.

NOI is in fact just Christianity with a thin coat of Islamic paint.

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An obvious sign of the End Times.

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The slaughter of at least seven United Nations workers amid a murderous rampage by an Afghan mob enraged at the burning of a Koran in Florida could not have come at a worse time for the United States and Nato.

Yeah — they might be forced to wake up and face reality.

(Knew I couldn’t write that with a straight face….)

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I grew up in a farm state, South Dakota, and still recall a joke that was then popular. It grew out of the fact that the number of farmers in the U.S. was constantly declining, while at the same time the Department of Agriculture was steadily growing. So here is the joke: A guy at the Department of Agriculture is going past a cubicle and he sees one of his colleagues sitting at his desk, crying. He wonders what is wrong and stops to ask his colleague what has happened. The guy looks up and, through his tears, says: “My farmer died.”

I’m sure that happens in the State Department, too: ‘My country died.’

Let’s try this one: if the cowboy gets bigger than the horse, both the horse and the cowboy are in trouble.

We’ve been in trouble for a loooooong time….

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A terminal cancer patient tackled a would-be bank robber and held the suspect on the ground until police arrived because she “had nothing to lose,” the Orlando Sentinel reported Friday.

Helen Dunsford,66, leaped into action when a woman tried to rob an Oakland Park, Fla., Bank of America branch, tackling the suspect and pinning her to the ground until authorities arrived on the scene.

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The Staten Island terror charged with viciously bashing a young female middle-school classmate while demanding to know “Are you a Muslim?” is himself the son of a Muslim woman, his dad revealed today.

“How could a Muslim have another hate crime against a Muslim?” asked Frank Davies, 32, about his son Osman Daramay.

Makes sense. Few people hate Muslims like other Muslims, judging by the way suicide bombers operate.

Osman, who has a history of disciplinary problems at the school, yesterday allegedly began assaulting the Muslim girl just outside the school building with a 13-year-old female accomplice, and tried to rip off the victim’s hijab headdress covering her hair while yelling, “Are you a Muslim?” authorities
said.

Sound like a typical New York City kid to me.

A dog with a prosthetic foot.

Disgusting.

Or at least of the 20th century. Barry is on course to set the bar for the 21st.

He’d better hurry if he wants to be photographed with Lenin’s corpse before they move it out of Red Square, which I’m sure is on his agenda.

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One is kind of pink and the rest are various shades of brown.

“8 ct. Crayola Washable Multicultural Broad Line Markers is an assortment of ethnic-sensitive color palette. The broad line markers have a unique conical tip that is good for coloring and detailing. Great colors for school projects.”

I am not making this up.

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In an effort to get closer to the local population, American female soldiers stationed in Afghanistan are being encouraged to wear a Muslim headscarf when interacting with civilians. But some question whether the practice constitutes cultural sensitivity or a form of appeasement that is degrading to U.S. soldiers.

Major Kyndra Rotunda, executive director of the Military Law and Policy Institute and AMVETS Legal Clinic, told The Daily Caller that while the women are not being ordered to wear the head scarf, encouragement is tantamount to a demand.

“They say they are encouraging women to wear the headscarf when they are out and about and on patrol. But the problem is — and I think anyone who has been in the military understands that being encouraged to do something is about the same thing as being ordered — it really puts them in an uncomfortable position when their commander says, ‘We really want you to do this, technically you don’t have to, but we really want you to do this,’” she said.

I wonder whether they’re encouraged to walk behind their male colleagues and only speak when spoken to, as well?

What a victory for feminism.

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The problem, of course, is not ‘the drug companies’, but rather the FDA; the drug companies are merely letting the government do the heavy lifting for them.

Since Slate is a Voice of the Crust, however, it can’t pin the blame on Big Government where it belongs — no, it has to be the fault of Evil Corporate Greed.

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The producer of the syndicated children’s TV series “Zodiac Island” claims that an entire season of the show has been wiped out thanks to a fired employee at its data-hosting company who hacked into networked computers and destroyed its work.

If you don’t back it up, you won’t get it back.

Our entire government.

Oh, wait, you mean that’s for real? Bummer….