ELECTRONIC TEST TUBE ALIENS get rated as the “gadget of the week” by Popular Mechanics. “Electronic Test Tube Aliens ($15) are either the most cynical and ill-conceived toys on the market, or the world’s first truly existential toy.”

I DON’T CARE WHAT IT SAYS, there’s never anything sexy about a memo from a Dean.

HEY, MAYBE IT’LL BE AL GORE versus Fred Thompson in 2008!

Big electric bills aside, I’ve already explained why I like Gore.

PAGING HERNANDO DE SOTO:

Call it an economic and political victory for “New Iraq” — and an indication that we may see more in the future.

This past Monday, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s cabinet finally agreed to a reformed “oil law.” The cabinet will forward the legislative package to the Iraqi parliament for action later this spring.

The “oil reform” program in Iraq is long overdue, but the Iraqi government also deserves kudos for the effort. Democracy is often a slow, muddled and tedious operation (look at the U.S. Congress). . . .

The Iraqi government should consider two other economic reforms.

A logical follow-on is the establishment of an Iraqi “oil trust” program, similar to the one implemented by the state of Alaska where every qualified citizen gets a share of state oil revenues. An oil trust would put several hundred dollars a year into the pockets of every adult Iraqi — that serves as an instant economic “fire-starter.” The oil trust immediately invests everyone in the economic success of Iraq’s new democratic government.

Clarifying and affirming individual property rights is another important reform. Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto’s “Mystery of Capital” (published in 2000) argued that Egypt’s poor have around $240 billion in “dead capital,” most of it tied up in property that they cannot properly mortgage. De Soto said that individual property rights and a legal system that protected contracts would instantly energize Egypt’s sclerotic economy.

In 2004, while serving in Iraq, I read a short, unclassified study that made the same argument for Iraq. The potential economic payoff is huge.

Yes. And then we should start enacting some De Soto-style reforms here . . . .

JENNIFER RUBIN ON THE MAN WHO WOULD BE MITT:

The key to understanding Romney is his resume. He had his great success as a turnaround specialist. As founder and CEO of Bain Capital he identified failing companies, saw potential if their direction could be changed, and revamped them for a new and successful future. . . .

He does get points for candor by admitting he is “unlikely to be the top pick for those voters looking for a ‘war/strong leader.’” That may not go over well with supporters of the President. That is ok. Romney seems indifferent to their concerns and is willing to distinguish his brand from Bush’s with one word, the document says, “intelligence.” Maybe this is his cross over appeal to Democrats who think the President is dim.

Not a very positive assessment, overall. You can hear our podcast interview with Romney here.

STILL MORE on whether carbon offsets work, from The Economist. “If you are salving your conscience by buying carbon offsets, which allows you to cheerfully emit 20 times more than the average person, then even a conservatively estimated rebound effect means that carbon offsets are increasing the amount of emissions.”

WOW, that was fast. A response to InstaPunk’s question on potty-mouth blogging.

HEY, WHY NOT: Stop global warming with alien technology. I mean we’ve got all those crashed alien spaceships that we captured from Saddam — what, you think the war was about oil? — and we might as well put them to good use!

RIDICULE AND ELLIPSIS.

TALKS WITH IRAN: An advance transcript.

JIHAD: The (short) motion picture.

THE WASHINGTON POST EDITORIALIZES:

THE BUSH administration has tolerated Egypt’s brutal crackdown on domestic dissent and the broader reversal of its democratic spring of 2005 in part because President Hosni Mubarak argues that his adversaries are dangerous Islamic extremists. It’s true that the largest opposition movement in Egypt is the Muslim Brotherhood; how dangerous it is can be debated. But what is overlooked is that Mr. Mubarak reserves his most relentless repression not for the Islamists — who hold a fifth of the seats in parliament — but for the secular democrats who fight for free elections, a free press, rights for women and religious tolerance.

The latest case in point is a blogger named Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman, who was sentenced to four years in prison last week on charges of religious incitement, disrupting public order and “insulting the president.” A brave and provocative 22-year-old student, Mr. Soliman first achieved notice with postings that denounced riots in Alexandria directed at Egypt’s Christian Copt minority. He said the brutality he witnessed was the result of extremist Islamic teachings, in part by his own university, Al-Azhar, which he called “the other face of al-Qaeda.” . . .

As a political prisoner, Mr. Soliman will join Ayman Nour, who was sentenced a year ago on fabricated charges after he ran for president against Mr. Mubarak on a liberal democratic platform. As many as 800 members of the Muslim Brotherhood have also been jailed in the past year. This by a government that continues to be one of the largest recipients in the world of U.S. aid, collecting more than $2 billion a year. What do American subsidies support? Not least, the elimination of what would otherwise be the strongest secular democratic movement in the Arab Middle East.

Seems like we’re getting a bad deal. (Via Xeni Jardin, who emails: “I wonder how many Americans realize this guy is going to jail in part because he stood up for Egypt’s *Christian minority* on his blog? When Americans hear about these free speech cases in developing countries, I think many of us assume the issues at hand have nothing to do with our own cultures or faiths.”).

Danny Glover has more.

JAMES LILEKS IS WITHOUT INTERNET AT HOME, and doesn’t entirely mind:

At this moment I’m back at the coffee shop where I filed two pieces yesterday morning, then returned at 7 PM to file another. I’ve caught up on everything I need to read, and have realized that I do not have to check sites nine times every ten minutes. I can catch up Achewood (always brilliant, but I loved this) and the rest of my imaginary friends, and then I can close the machine and do something else. It’s remarkable the things you can get up to, once you leave the house.

I’m enjoying a bit of that, using the “scheduled posting” feature of Movable Type to let me stay away from the computer for longer periods. It is kind of nice. And useful, since I was busy doing stuff like checking in with the Insta-Mother-in-Law at the rehab center.

THOUGHTS ON HYPOCRISY AND POLITICS, from Eric Scheie.

A “SCIENCE FICTION NIGHTMARE?” At least there are no zombies.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE: “The law reviews have made a hash of the manuscript submission process, which once more raises the question of why legal scholarship remains dependent on the whims of twenty-something second and third year law students. Personally, I plan to stick to books and symposia articles until the law reviews get together and coordinate their requirements.”

I’ve been hearing that kind of thing from a lot of people lately. And it may be one of the pressures on faculty scholarship to evolve beyond the traditional law-review forms. (Via Larry Solum).

A BEE EPIDEMIC.

SARAH PULLMAN WRITES on treating Seasonal Affective Disorder.

BRIAN FLEMMING REPORTS ON more YouTube censorship. Flemming comments: “If YouTube turns into a war of various interest groups organizing to red-flag expressions of ideas they don’t like — and YouTube’s policy is to give in to that pressure automatically whenever it gets high enough — then YouTube is going to suck. YouTube really needs to fix their complaint system.”

That sounds right to me.

A TIMELY WARNING:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke renewed a warning to the U.S. Congress on Wednesday that failure to take action soon to prepare for the retirement of aging Baby Boomers could lead to serious economic harm.

Bernanke did not address the outlook for U.S. interest-rate policy or Tuesday’s collapse in global stock markets in his prepared testimony to the House of Representatives’ Budget Committee, which were nearly identical to remarks he delivered to a Senate panel last month.

“A vicious cycle may develop in which large (budget) deficits lead to rapid growth in debt and interest payments, which in turn adds to subsequent deficits,” Bernanke said.

Bernanke told Congress that over time, the United States needed to move toward fiscal policies that were sustainable and that would promote more saving to support the Social Security retirement program without imposing undue costs on taxpayers.

However, he offered no specific policy.

Perhaps we should work on a longevity dividend.

A NOT-SO-MAGNIFICENT obsession.

GLOBAL WARMING SOLVED: By IowaHawk.

PROPOSING AN EXPERIMENT, at InstaPunk. “I propose an exercise to be perfomed by those who have the software and expertise to carry it out. The exercise is this: Search six months’ worth of content, posts and comments, of the 20 most popular blogs on the right and the left. The search criteria are George Carlin’s infamous ‘7 Dirty Words.'”

MORE ON CARBON OFFSETS, from Tyler Cowen.

SOME THOUGHTS ON WHO BUSH WOULD NOMINATE if he got another Supreme Court pick.