CapitalistImperialistPig

Mickey Kaus asks: "Is the GQ Man a wuss?" Since I don't read Kaus (it's a blood pressure thing), I have no idea what the actual subject matter is, but it sounds to me like the start of an exciting series: "Is the Pope Catholic?... Does a bear sleep in the woods?..."

Jo Rowling is sueing the author of an unauthorized Harry Potter encylopedia. She apparently claims that his book is a threat to her next billion bucks. I'm no lawyer, but it sounds to me like she has no case - the proposed encyclopedia is almost certainly a critical work of the type protected by fair use laws. On the other hand, she, unlike the author, has the money and lawyers to summon up plenty of practitioners of the dark arts to crush him. I suspect she would do more for her future earnings and the artistic integrity of her work if she would do something about the increasingly stinko movie versions of the books - each one seemingly worse than the last. Of course it's pretty clear that she has lost touch with her story - that stupid bit about Dumbledore being gay, for example. How she could confuse a minor homoerotic element of a relationship with sexual orientation is really a mystery to me. Of course, she made the obverse mistake with Ginny. Pretty much everybody ...

As we progress through our eighth year of George W Bush, I note that the stock market indices, in dollars, are now just about where they were when Bush took office. Meanwhile, the dollar has lost about 1/3 of its value against the Euro, 2/3 of its value against the oil barrel, and the country has been saddled with a mountain of new debt. By almost any measure, Americans are far poorer today than when Bush became president. Nonetheless, John McCain and virtually all other Republicans remained committed to the same disastrous policies. There is one group that has benefitted from the Bush policies - the very rich. Some hangers on, like Cheney, have also done very well. If the American people fall for this stupidity again, they are probably beyond hope.

We have a tendency to want to keep our options open. This is a very good principle for defense, escape and evasion, but it can also inhibit accomplishment. If we think too much about the road not taken, we are going to spend all our time at that fork in the road. John Tierney, writing in The New York Times talks about a study and a famous example: The next time you’re juggling options — which friend to see, which house to buy, which career to pursue — try asking yourself this question: What would Xiang Yu do? Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking pots and burned their ships. He explained this was to focus them on moving forward — a motivational speech that was not appreciated by many of the soldiers watching their retreat option go up in flames. But General Xiang Yu would be vindicated, both on the battlefield and in the ...

OK, Craig Venter is the wizard who won the contest to sequence a human genome (his own), but I have got to call bullshit on this story: A scientist who mapped his genome and the genetic diversity of the oceans said Thursday he is creating a life form that feeds on climate-ruining carbon dioxide to produce fuel. Geneticist Craig Venter disclosed his potentially world-changing "fourth-generation fuel" project at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, California. "We have modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry and becoming a major source of energy," Venter told an audience that included global warming fighter Al Gore and Google co-founder Larry Page. "We think we will have fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months, with CO2 as the fuel stock." You can't use CO2 as fuel - fuel has to supply free energy, and CO2 can't do that. We already have organisms that convert CO2 to fuel - we call them plants...

William Buckley was handsome, accomplished, and urbane, not to mention wealthy and patrician. His vocabulary was seemingly beyond pretention and affectation. As author, editor, and television host he was a major voice for American conservatism in the second half of the twentieth century. His causes were mostly unholy, including racism, Franco's fascism, and MaCarthyism. American conservatism has usually been a mix of aristocrats bent on conserving their wealth and power and yahoos bent on conserving ignorance, superstition and their own prejudices. Buckley put a sophisticated and amiable sounding face on these, thus doing a lot to make conservatism appear respectable. His work lives on in the National Review, but the urbanity has largely given way to the fulminations of mouth-breathing yahoos. Brad DeLong has his own funeral orations .

The management reserves the right to summarily delete personal insults. This should be a seminar, not a food fight, as Brad DeLong puts it.