FOOD SAFETY MEASURE WOULD GIVE SMALL FARMERS INDIGESTION. “The ‘Food Safety Modernization Act’ would not appreciably improve the safety of the food supply in the U.S., but it would create an army of regulators with TSA-like authority over agriculture.”
Archive for 2010
November 26, 2010
DON’T GET COCKY: Byron York: Obama’s Poll Numbers Point To His Defeat in 2012.
HAPPY BLACK FRIDAY! Lots of deals at Amazon. When you buy through Amazon links on this site (or the search box in the right sidebar) you put a little money in my family’s pocket at no cost to you. So if you do, thanks!
TELEGRAPH: EU rescue costs start to threaten Germany itself. “Germany cannot keep paying for bail-outs without going bankrupt itself.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: More from Arnold Kling. “The question is whether the Eurocrats can beat back the speculators. I find the whole situation much too complex. I can only come up with a list of things that I wish I knew.”
WAR AND POSTURING: The Latest News From The Korea Conflict.
ANOTHER LOVELY THANKSGIVING HERE. I cooked two legs of lamb and a 20-pound turkey for my family, Helen’s family, and a few other folks who were at loose ends. Hope yours was good, too!
IRRADIATING FOOD VS. IRRADIATING PEOPLE: “If we’re overcautious to the point of irrationality about radiation, why then are we at all willing to let the government irradiate our bodies? . . . Is it that we are not only irrational, but we are also irrational in our choice of what to be irrational about? I don’t think so. Food radiation was something that businesses were permitted to do, but they stopped because we avoided buying the product. The government isn’t asking us whether we want our bodies irradiated if we want to travel by plane. It’s not like going to the grocery store and picking one package of hamburger instead of another. We still get our hamburger. We don’t have a choice of flying with radiation or without radiation. The only choice the government gives us is not to fly or to accept a groping.”
THANK YOU SIR, MAY I HAVE ANOTHER: 11 Statistics That Reveal Just How Far The U.S. Economy Has Fallen Over The Past Four Years. Here’s one: “At Thanksgiving back in 2006, 26 million Americans were on food stamps. Today, there are over 42 million Americans on food stamps and that number is climbing rapidly. . . . In 2006, the U.S. national debt was getting close to 9 trillion dollars. Today, the U.S. national debt is well past 13 trillion dollars and is rapidly closing in on 14 trillion dollars.” Follow the link for more, if it’s not too depressing. Hope and change!
CLAIRE BERLINSKI: Why I’m Like GM: Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Debt. “With my mom paying my rent, I’ve been able to charge less for what I write and stay in the black. Voilà, I’m selling a cheaper product (for now) than Reuters and AP. That will teach them where to stuff their ‘good investment decisions’ and their ‘economies of scale.’ I fired the guy who does my odd jobs—it was painful, but it had to be done. So, congratulations to me! I’m making it in this tough business climate, with a little help from Mom. America’s back! And if I’m broke again in a year, I’ll hit her up again. (Don’t forget, Mom, that you really have no choice: no matter what you do, I’m still going to be a huge financial drag on you. If I fail, I’ll end up coming home with all my cats. You don’t want me sleeping on your couch, do you? And you sure don’t want to see what my cats would do to that couch. Antique, I believe it is?) . . . By the way, I’m also considering stiffing my creditors. The GM example proves that it will result in an immediate improvement of my balance sheet. GM’s production numbers have been increasing, and mine have, too: it’s a lot easier to write when you’ve got peace of mind. Whether anyone will buy the stuff I’m writing, God knows, but my word count is definitely up, and that, apparently, is the number that matters.”
November 25, 2010
JOHN STOSSEL: A LOST THANKSGIVING LESSON.
Plus, a reader emails: “Give thanks. By the next Thanksgiving we’ll all realize how lucky we were today.”
THANKSGIVING DINNER the healthy Obama way.
A THANKSGIVING MESSAGE to all 57 states.
BLACK FRIDAY DEALS in Toys And Games.
THE LONG-AWAITED NEXUS of Lawrence v. Texas and District of Columbia v. Heller.
PENELOPE TRUNK: Sex and Asperger’s.
ONE-DAY-ONLY SALE: Sony Blu-Ray 5.1 Home Theater System.
SCIENCE: Upper-Class People Have Trouble Recognizing Others’ Emotions. This explains a lot in today’s politics . . . .
ANN ALTHOUSE: Taking Mark Ames seriously:
Ames has a great insight into “why so many Gen-X/Yers turned against Obama”: “he made them look stupid.” They took Obama seriously. They believed. And that set them up to look…. lame!
If you don’t try, you can’t look stupid.
GUN OWNERS HAVE COME A LONG WAY BABY. “Didja catch that? The paper didn’t portray the Franklin family’s gun as something weird or scary or foreign. They called it a ‘household .357 revolver.’”
CHAMPION FLIERS: Peerless Pterosaur Could Fly Long-Distance For Days. “The natural world’s long-distance flight champions are seagoing birds that fly up to 6,000 miles nonstop. But now, two scientists are proposing to give the honor to the pterosaur, a massive creature from the distant past. . . . Habib teamed up with Mark Witton, a British paleontologist, to plug in factors like wingspan, weight and aerodynamics into a computer model. The results, which they presented at a conference last month, were staggering: They revealed an animal that could fly up to 80 miles an hour for 7 to 10 days at altitudes of 15,000 feet. The maximum range, Habib says, was probably between 8,000 and 12,000 miles.”