THE ATF’S MEXICAN GUNRUNNING SCANDAL: Another agent speaks out.
Archive for 2011
March 23, 2011
HIGHER EDUCATION UPDATE: When Students Feel Cheated.
NEW AND NOTABLE book trailers.
LOL: $115,000 / YEAR to run a federal agency’s Facebook page.
REVIEWING THE IPAD2. I’ve had mine for a few days now, and I’m pleased with it — it’s really good for viewing video, and folks who’ve seen the PJTV videos on it, in particular, have been blown away; also, the Wall Street Journal seems to translate to iPad especially well — but I agree that if you’ve got a first-gen iPad there’s no real reason to upgrade. In fact, I’d say that if you don’t think you’ll use the camera much, you’re probably still better off buying a discounted first-gen iPad now if you don’t already have one. You’ll save some money, avoid a wait, and not really miss all that much. Two caveats: (1) Now you’ve got the option of getting Verizon 3G instead of being stuck with AT&T — if you get a 3G model; and (2) The camera will support cool augmented reality apps, but by the time there are a lot of those out there we’ll probably be on to iPad3.
THE ORIGINS OF The Crimson Bolt.
MARKDOWNS ON Shun kitchen knives.
THE PRICE TAG ON Claire McCaskill’s private-airplane tax scandal gets bigger.
MICKEY KAUS: Libyan War = World Government? Not that there’s anything wrong with it. “It’s one thing for a supra-national authority–the U.N.–to authorize a war against someone who has committed cross-border aggression, or who has repeatedly violated earlier U.N. resolutions left over from a previous war. That was the case with Saddam in 2002–in theory. It’s another to let the U.N. authorize a war on what Obama calls ‘humanitarian grounds’–whether it’s to stop actual killings or some less severe variety of ‘human rights violation.’ These are concepts that are easily watered down to justify intervention.”
THEY KEEP USING THAT WORD: U.S. New-Home Sales Unexpectedly Fall to Lowest on Record. And yeah, this is the snark that just never dies.
SENDING robot helicopters to Japan.
WHAT COASTAL CITIES CAN LEARN from Japan’s experience.
SPENDING UPDATE: Obama’s Funny Numbers. “Last Friday, the Congressional Budget Office put out a report that showed just how badly the administration underestimated the deficit and the cost of ObamaCare. . . . The CBO report comes at a particularly inopportune time for the White House. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle accuse the president of failing to lead. And indeed with Obama gallivanting around South America, not leading on Libya and not leading on our fiscal problems, it’s hard to see anything at work other than an ill-conceived plan to get re-elected by doing nothing.”
THE JOYS OF homemade chicken soup.
DEBUNKING the romanticism of the locavores.
SCIENCE: Long-Neglected Experiment Gives New Clues to Origin of Life. “A classic experiment that has sat on the shelf for more than a half-century is yielding new clues about how life may have arisen on Earth, according to a team of scientists that has gone back and analyzed the data with modern techniques.”
JOURNALISM IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Reporter Becomes Pimp After Having Pay Cut. Well, some would call that a promotion.
I HAVE A REVIEW of Michio Kaku’s Physics Of The Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 in today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s the link. It should work for non-subscribers, too. (Bumped).
AUSTIN BAY: Regime Change: Libya. “Candidate Obama may have pursued smart politics (for the tactical purpose of gaining power) by mainstreaming ‘Bush lied, people died’ and other inflammatory nonsense. The intent was to impugn the motives of those of us who saw the GWOT enterprise as the best choice among many terrible choices. Libya, however, reveals Candidate Obama’s foreign policy prescriptions, billed as smart diplomacy by liberal media operatives, as more balderdash for the dustbin of history. It also calls into question just how smart the politics of 2005 to 2009 will ultimately prove to be for Obama and the Democratic Party.”
IN FLORIDA, faculty unions go into overdrive. What’s got them upset: a bill that “would bar any public union from automatically deducting dues from members’ paychecks.” That really seems to be the sticking point, doesn’t it?
A UNIQUE FORM OF “TERRORISM:” “What we do suggest is that the contrast between the Fed and von NotHaus is an example of how the scandal is not in what’s illegal but in what’s legal. When Mr. Goldstein interviewed Mr. von NotHaus in 2007, he had recently been selling a one-ounce silver coin for $20, which at the time was, Mr. Goldstein noted, several dollars above the spot price of silver. It was also at the start of a rapid collapse in the value of Federal Reserve Notes, which has plunged to the point where today a dollar is worth less than a 30th of an ounce of silver. So who is the injured party — the individual who acquired a one-ounce Liberty silver coin for $20 or the individual who kept his wad of twenty one-dollar Federal Reserve Notes?”
ILYA SOMIN IS NOT ENTIRELY PERSUADED by Jack Goldsmith’s defense of the Libyan War’s constitutionality.
PREDICTABLE AS CLOCKWORK. And as interesting.
Related thoughts here.