CARBON SEQUESTRATION with Calera cement.

PROF. KENNETH ANDERSON on the U.N. and international gun control efforts.

REPORTS THAT MALIKI ENDORSED THE OBAMA TROOP-WITHDRAWAL TIMELINE turn out to be in error, which should come as no great surprise to those who have been paying attention.

UPDATE: Does this mean that Maliki wants us to stay? Not necessarily. This StrategyPage item that I linked the other day explains. Too much U.S. presence might interfere with corruption! “As long as the American troops are in the country, auditors have armed protection and can be very effective at revealing the thefts and getting the thieves punished. This makes thieving government officials very uncomfortable. Corruption in general remains a major problem (as it is in all Middle Eastern countries). While many Iraqis would like to see clean government, they are usually not the ones who get elected (elections involve a lot of bribery and trading of favors.)”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch emails:

“While many Iraqis would like to see clean government, they are usually not the ones who get elected.” Just like it is here!

My own sense is that politicians are the same everywhere. To the extent their behavior differs, it’s because of social and political constraints on what they can get away with.

TECHCRUNCH: Tesla Motors Unveils Jaw-Dropping Menlo Park Showroom. “It’s hard to put into words how ridiculously sexy the Tesla Roadster is in person, so we’ve grabbed a lot of pictures. Suffice to say, as soon as you walk in the store, you’re going to want one. Unfortunately, actually buying a Tesla Roadster is an involved and lengthy process.”

FOLLOWUPS: Regarding yesterday’s post on the Universal Package Opener, reader Jamie (“No relation to Megan”) McCardle writes:

My mother-in-law got me this for Christmas last year – EASILY my best Christmas gift of the year! It comes out once a week at least, and I wish I had one at work too. Nothing gets through those accursed plastic bubble packs better or with less pain. I use it even when the package says it’s “easy-open” and has directions for alternative opening methods. Hey… maybe I should actually order another!

I don’t think that two would double your pleasure — but I guess you could open packages in stereo? Meanwhile, in response to the post on gas prices and online shopping, reader Dale Britton emails:

Your site got me turned on to Amazon Prime a couple of years ago, and I’ve never looked back. I’m at the point now where I don’t buy things online that aren’t from Amazon – or don’t have free shipping for other reasons – because I figure if Amazon can do it for me, so can everyone else. And they will. Matter of time.

Hell, I very rarely buy in a brick & mortar store any more. When you figure taxes (7.75% in San Diego), gas ($4.50/gallon in San Diego), the intrinsically limited selection you can have in a physical store, the lack of knowledgeable salespeople, and the inability to instantly compare prices, it’s a no-brainer.

Plus the “experience” of actually shopping just blows these days. Case in point – just got back from a quick trip to Barnes and Noble with my friend. Loud kids, inadequate selection of what I was looking for, and obnoxious music blaring in the entry area of the store. After my friend mentioned how annoying their “thank you for shoppping” music was, I told her this is why people prefer online shopping, and why B&N is going in the tank.

P.S. Only reason I went? The item I ordered from Amazon is back ordered due to supplier issues, so I thought I’d see if B&N had it in stock. They didn’t.

Online shopping can save you a lot of trouble. On the other hand, I do like visiting real stores from time to time. I wish my local grocery stores would let me shop for groceries online and then get home delivery, though. You can buy nonperishables via Amazon, and sometimes I do, but you can’t really cut out your grocery store visits.

UPDATE: Reader Russ Emerson emails:

I’ve been doing my grocery shopping online for a couple of years, via Lowe’s Foods (http://www.lowesfoodstogo.com) – it’s a terrific convenience, particularly as I’ve become disabled and have tremendous difficulty strolling the aisles of the grocery store.

You can shop the website and choose next-day delivery (not cheap – $20, I think) or you can order for same-day pickup, with a three hour lead time, for a fee of about $5. If, like me, one has a hard time doing the shopping due to physical or time constraints, the service is well worth the expense. They even bring the goods out to your car for you.

I don’t know of other chains offering the same service, but I can’t see how they can avoid doing so in the future, if they want to remain competitive.

I agree. Meanwhile, I note that Sam’s Club offers “Click ‘n’ Pull for groceries, where you order online, they pull it, and you drive up. I’ve never used that, though.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader shares her experience with “click ‘n’ pull:”

Sam’s is not fun with four kids in tow. So Click-n-Pull, in theory, is a good idea. In reality, you still have to enter the store, whip out your card to prove you’re a member, and then maneuver said cart to the tobacco area, where you stand in line to pay for the items you shopped for online the day before. If any of those items are refrigerated, they have to be delivered separately, and thus you are dependent on whether or not the refrigeration/freezer department is fully staffed on the day you pick up your order and can respond to the intercom call put out by the tobacco cashier.

All that is after you stand in line behind every convenience store operator in a three state area as they buy cigs, candy bars, and Powerade by the case to stock their shelves. As you might guess, it’s not the time saver it could be if Sam’s would figure out a way to load orders of, say, ten items or less into the car at curbside and let me pay online when I place my order.

In theory, Sam’s could be a weekly shopping destination for me if Click-n-Pull revamped and made itself convenient. As it stands now, it’s a once a month hassle that I endure for cheap cheese and diapers.

I’m going to look into Amazon, though, for the diapers. Thanks for the tip!

Sounds like it’s not ready for primetime yet.

MICKEY KAUS ON CHUCK HAGEL: “What is it about Hagel that has the power to fog not just his own mind but the minds of others? Does he tell great dirty stories? Is he so gloomy that his friends worry that dissing him will send him over the edge?”

LET’S HOPE: As the price of oil drops dramatically, some analysts wonder if the bubble is bursting. But it’s a bit early to get too excited.

RON BAILEY ON DEATH FROM OUTER SPACE. Asteroid impacts, gamma-ray bursts, and crashing comets.

HEH.

THE WIKI-HACKER strikes again.

MORE ON THE ORION NUCLEAR SPACECRAFT, from Rand Simberg.

EYES OFF THE PRIZE:

Looking back at my family’s expenses over the past few years, I see big increases in our health care costs and in how much we pay for food. The rise in what we spend on gas is not nearly as extreme as our increases in categories like electricity and telephone. So why does the amount we spend on gasoline feel so enormous? I think it is because of the way we buy gas.

For the several minutes that I stand at the pump, all I do is stare at the growing total on the meter — there is nothing else to do. And I have time to remember how much it cost a year ago, two years ago and even six years ago.

Yet I have no such memory about the prices of items in any other category. I have no idea how much milk was six years ago, how much bread was three years ago or how much yogurt was a week ago. But I suspect that if I stood next to the yogurt case in the supermarket for five minutes every week with nothing to do but stare at the price, I would also know how much it has gone up — and I might become outraged when yogurt passed the $2 mark.

If only people were this aware of taxes. . . .

A BASIC RULE OF POLITICS has always been that you tax other people’s constituents to provide goodies for your people. So Barack Obama deserves credit for breaking from this with a tax plan that will hit well-off blue-staters — his core constituency — the hardest:

New York tax filers reporting more than $375,000 a year in earned income may end up paying nearly 60% of their wages in taxes to the government under a Barack Obama presidency, economists who have analyzed his plan said. The Democratic presidential candidate is proposing not only raising the federal income tax, but also adding a Social Security tax for those Americans earning more than $250,000 a year. For New Yorkers, that could mean that if the current Social Security rate is applied, the marginal tax rate, or rate on every extra dollar earned, could rise to 58%.

Well, good for him. More on Obama’s tax plans and blue-staters at TaxProf.

JOEL STEIN ON HOW TO MAKE FUN OF OBAMA: He’s “manorexic?” “No one loses weight on the campaign trail, when you’re grabbing fast food and eating whatever is offered out of politeness, but this guy is always turning down doughnuts.”

Plus this:

“We are the people we’ve been waiting for”? Actually, I’m pretty sure we’re the people who put all our money in Yahoo and then bought a house to flip and now are hocking everything we have. We’re the people China has been waiting for.

Read the whole thing.

SOMETHING CALIFORNIA PROBABLY COULDN’T DO: Texas Approves a $4.93 Billion Wind-Power Project.

ADVICE TO MCCAIN, from Michael Barone.

THE STRANGELOVE SOLUTION to preventing human extinction.

WALL STREET JOURNAL: How a Young Lawyer Saved The Second Amendment.

THE ONION: ‘Time’ Publishes Definitive Obama Puff Piece: “Hailed by media critics as the fluffiest, most toothless, and softest-hitting coverage of the presidential candidate to date, a story in this week’s Time magazine is being called the definitive Barack Obama puff piece. ‘No news publication has dared to barely scratch the surface like this before,’ columnist and campaign reporter Michael King wrote in The Washington Post Tuesday. ‘This profile sets a benchmark for mindless filler by which all other features about Sen. Obama will now be judged. Just impressive puff-journalism all around.'” (Via Protein Wisdom).

THE MUSIC INDUSTRY PICKED ON THE WRONG MOM: They made her take down a 30-second YouTube video of her kid dancing to a Prince song. She fought it and won. Now she’s out for blood:

Now Lenz is out to teach the music industry a lesson.

What Lenz and her attorneys at the Electronic Frontier Foundation want are for media companies to stop sending take-down notices in a “willy nilly” fashion and to make sure that they have a legitimate claim of copyright violation before acting. They failed do this with Lenz’s video, according to Corynne McSherry, an EFF attorney.

“This video is so clearly noninfringing,” McSherry said. “What we’ve seen is that Universal Music had the view that they could take down Prince content as a matter of principle. But what they were obligated to do was form a good-faith belief that the video was infringing…They may not have formed a good-faith belief at all.”

I’ve noted the vulnerability of these takedown procedures in the past. Glad to see that someone is going after them. Read this, too.

INDYMAC: Not such a “wonderful life.”

BETTER THAN CANOEING AND MAKING LANYARDS: Culinary Summer Camp.

FROM JIM LINDGREN: Thoughts on Barack Obama’s proposed “Civilian National Security Force.”

WITH RON BAILEY COVERING THE CATASTROPHES CONFERENCE AT OXFORD, here’s a blast from the past on that topic. Plus, some related thoughts here.