GOOD IDEA: “The United States will propose biotechnology as a strategy to boost agricultural production at a UN global food crisis summit in Rome next week, the top US farm official said Thursday. . . . With the United States contributing more than one-half of all the world’s food aid, he said, ‘the world’s other developed nations have an obligation to provide food efficiently without obstructing access to it or limiting safe technologies to produce it.'”

And read this report from Ron Bailey on the Copenhagen Consensus conference and free trade. “Anderson looked at a number of econometric modeling scenarios and calculated the cost and benefits that would obtain from full trade liberalization under realistic assumptions derived from the current World Trade Organization’s Doha Development Agenda negotiations. Anderson estimated that liberalization of global merchandise trade would mean an annual increase of $287 billion per year in global GDP, of which $86 billion would go to developing countries. This compares very nicely with the $104 billion in development assistance that the governments of industrialized countries gave to developing countries in 2006.”

MEANWHILE, BACK AT TRINITY UNITED. People in the press have been pretending this story is over. I don’t think it is.

NEW DRUG NEWS: “Appeals courts in New Jersey and Texas on Thursday scrapped verdicts against the drugmaker Merck & Co. Inc. stemming from some of the earliest trials involving its once popular painkiller Vioxx.”

GOOD NEWS: “NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander flexed its robotic arm Thursday in a successful test of the key element in the probe’s mission to investigate the Red Planet’s soil for conditions conducive to life, NASA said.”

TEXAS SUPREME COURT: Polygamist sect’s children must go home.

UPDATE: More here.

THOUGHTS ON FREEMAN DYSON AND GLOBAL WARMING, from Derek Lowe. “I know how he feels: I consider myself an advocate of the environment, but I think the best way to preserve it is to do more genetic engineering rather than less. Better crops will mean that we don’t have to plow up more land to feed everyone, and we won’t have to dump as many insecticides and herbicides on that land we’re using. That means that I also think the best way to preserve unspoiled spaces is to do less organic farming, and not more: organic farming, particularly the hard-core varieties, uses too much land to generate too little food, and it does so mainly to give people in wealthy countries a chance to feel good about themselves.”

SKIPPING science class.

DUDE, WHERE’S MY RECESSION (CONT’D): James Pethokoukis — who actually coined the “Dude, where’s my recession?” line — observes:

What do you call a recession where the economy keeps going up and up, even if a bit sluggishly? Well, my friends, you call that an expansion. And that is what we seem to have right now, despite all the economic doomsaying about a recession or even a Great Depression 2.0. Today, the Commerce Department revised its first-quarter estimate of gross domestic product upward to 0.9 percent from 0.6 percent. That follows 0.6 percent GDP growth in the final quarter of 2007. The revision also makes it more likely that the second quarter will be positive, maybe 1.5 percent, maybe even higher.

Now I went back and checked the numbers for the past 50 years and didn’t find a single case of a recession—as calculated by the National Bureau of Economic Research—that started with or contained two straight quarters of positive GDP growth, much less three quarters.

It may not be the best economy in living memory, but it’s not all that bad, either.

SOME COOL Knoxville photoblogging.

DOES KEITH OLBERMANN HAVE AN Al Franken problem?

STOP HAROLD ICKES: When life imitates Photoshop.

SOLVING THE WORLD’S PROBLEMS: Does fashionable beat rational?

IMAGINING A WORLD WITHOUT THE FDA: I wonder if you can?

THE ULTIMATE Home Office setup?

SO I’M AT THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE DEVELOPMENT CONFERENCE, where I’ll be speaking in about an hour. Looks like a good turnout.

PROGRESS ON CONCEALED CARRY IN NATIONAL PARKS:

The change, promoted by the U.S. Department of the Interior and some U.S. senators, would cause national parks and refuges to adopt the same concealed gun laws as those governing similar public lands in the states where they are located. . . . Park service officials are waiting until the close of the public comment period on June 30 before taking a stance on the proposal. However, they can foresee complications in changing the rules, especially in places like the Parkway or the Smokies that encompass multiple states with differing gun laws. . . .

The proposed change in national park gun regulations is open for public comment until June 30. Comments can be made online at www.regulations.gov — type “guns national parks” in comment search field — or by mail at:

Public Comments Processing, Attn: 1024-AD70
Division of Policy and Directives Management
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
4401 N. Fairfax Drive, Suite 222
Arlington, VA 22203.

I think that this link is also good. (Via Smokies Light).

JEFFREY TRUCKSESS: Not all biofuels are the same. “Corn-based ethanol has been giving biofuels a bad name. The real solution is biodiesel — a green, efficient energy source that won’t starve the planet.”

BARRY GOLDWATER, unfiltered.

IF YOU COULD REJUVENATE THREE PARTS OF YOUR BODY, which parts would you pick?

VIDEOGAME GUNS OF TOMORROW, from Erik Sofge.

BEN BARTON: Judges, Lawyers, and a Predictive Theory of Legal Complexity. Legal complexity benefits lawyers and judges, and shockingly they tend to produce more of it!

DUDE, WHERE’S MY RECESSION? (CONT’D): “The new reading on gross domestic product, released by the Commerce Department on Thursday, was an improvement from the government’s initial growth estimate for the January-to-March quarter as well as the economy’s performance in the final quarter of last year. . . . The first-quarter performance matched analysts’ forecasts and offered a somewhat encouraging sign because it showed the economy was still growing at that time. The figure didn’t meet a definition of recession, which under a rough rule is two straight quarters of shrinking GDP.”

REAL-TIME MONITORING OF EPIDEMIC DISEASE, using nanotechnology.

THEY’RE BLOGGING THE SPELLING BEE, at Throwing Things.

IN THE MAIL: John McWhorter’s All about the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can’t Save Black America. But don’t rule out Detroit techno — give Juan Atkins a shot!