Pig flu hysteria
May 2, 2009 at 00:25 (News, Politics)
Tags: Joe Biden, Swine Flu, Vice President
The US Vice President buys into it:
The day after President Barack Obama urged the flu-worried masses to stay calm, Vice President Joe Biden went off the rails, saying he has urged family members to avoid airplanes and subways.
Biden, whose high-profile misstatements littered the campaign trail last year, told NBC’s “Today” show Thursday that he’d tell family members to avoid traveling in “confined spaces.”
“It’s not just going to Mexico. If you’re any place in a confined aircraft and one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft,” he told Matt Lauer. “That’s me. I would not be, at this point, if they had another way of transportation, suggesting they ride the subway.”
Biden’s statement sent federal officials into damage-control mode. Biden’s staff, along with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs, said he meant only people who are sick should avoid traveling on planes and trains.
I love how Napolitano and Biden’s staff defend him by claiming he really only meant sick people (or was it travel to Mexico?) when that clearly wasn’t what he was saying. I guess you can’t admit your boss is a dope.
Links
April 26, 2009 at 11:09 (Entertainment, Humour, News, Politics)
Tags: Auto-Tune, Birmingham, Clowns, Drug War, Interior Design, LEAP, Licensing, News, Punctuation, Texas, War
Auto-Tune makes the news better in every way.
L.E.A.P.’s loan ranger rides into Washington.
First they came for the punctuation…
Free speech win for Texas interior designers. Reason.tv recently assessed the dangers of unlicensed interior designers and noted that US states with strict regulation and licensing laws had more complaints about interior design companies than less regulated states.
The dream gig for every sad clown?
Cowen critiques ‘The End of Poverty?’
April 23, 2009 at 08:31 (Economics, Entertainment, Politics)
Tags: Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, Free Trade, Naomi Klein, Philippe Diaz, Poverty, Prosperity, The End of Poverty?, Trade, Tyler Cowen, Wealth
Tyler Cowen is uncharacteristically emphatic in his recent article in the The American Interest, decimating the premise of Philippe Diaz’s new documentary film The End of Poverty?. Excerpt:
I can only report that The End of Poverty, narrated throughout by Martin Sheen, puts Ayn Rand back on the map as an accurate and indeed insightful cultural commentator. If you were to take the most overdone and most caricatured cocktail-party scenes from Atlas Shrugged, if you were to put the content of Rand’s “whiners” on the screen, mixed in with at least halfway competent production values, you would get something resembling The End of Poverty. If you ever thought that Rand’s nemeses were pure caricature, this film will show you that they are not (if the stalking presence of Naomi Klein has not already done so). If you are looking to benchmark this judgment, consider this: I would not say anything similar even about the movies of Michael Moore.
In this movie, the causes of poverty are oppression and oppression alone. There is no recognition that poverty is the natural or default state of mankind and that a special set of conditions must come together for wealth to be produced. There is no discussion of what this formula for wealth might be. There is no recognition that the wealth of the West lies upon any foundations other than those of theft, exploitation and the oppression of literal or virtual colonies.
Red Light Cameras
April 22, 2009 at 08:32 (News, Politics)
Tags: Montana, Politics, Road Safety, Traffic
The presence of red light cameras has been shown to significantly increase the number of collisions and fatalities without reducing the rate at which people run red lights.
Reducing the length of the yellow signal by one second also causes between 125 and 225% more accidents.
So why are cities like Billings, Montana ignoring the evidence and doing the exact opposite of what would improve road safety?
Sixth Sense
March 13, 2009 at 17:54 (Technology)
Tags: Gadgets, Pattie Maes, Pranav Mistry, Sixth Sense, Technology, TED, Transhumanism
Do they give Nobel Prizes in Awesome?
HT: Alex Tabarrok
Shrugging off the recession
February 28, 2009 at 05:58 (Books, Economics, Politics)
Tags: Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, Books
The government stimulus may actually boost consumption… of Atlas Shrugged novels:
Sales of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” have almost tripled over the first seven weeks of this year compared with sales for the same period in 2008. This continues a strong trend after bookstore sales reached an all-time annual high in 2008 of about 200,000 copies sold.
A good sign considering there’s never been a more relevant time to read Ayn Rand’s magnum opus.
Illinois Senate declares Pluto a planet again
February 28, 2009 at 05:30 (Humour, News, Politics, Science)
Tags: Astoronomy, Illinois, Planet, Pluto, Politics, Science
Determined not to let those arrogant astronomers decide what is and isn’t a planet, Illinois politicians passed a senate resolution returning Pluto to it’s former glory:
WHEREAS, Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of the planet Pluto, was born on a farm near the Illinois community of Streator; and
WHEREAS, Dr. Tombaugh served as a researcher at the prestigious Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona; and
WHEREAS, Dr. Tombaugh first detected the presence of Pluto in 1930; and
WHEREAS, Dr. Tombaugh is so far the only Illinoisan and only American to ever discover a planet; and
WHEREAS, For more than 75 years, Pluto was considered the ninth planet of the Solar System; and
WHEREAS, A spacecraft called New Horizons was launched in January 2006 to explore Pluto in the year 2015; and
WHEREAS, Pluto has three moons: Charon, Nix and Hydra; and
WHEREAS, Pluto’s average orbit is more than three billion miles from the sun; and
WHEREAS, Pluto was unfairly downgraded to a “dwarf” planet in a vote in which only 4 percent of the International Astronomical Union’s 10,000 scientists participated; and
WHEREAS, Many respected astronomers believe Pluto’s full planetary status should be restored; therefore, be it
RESOLVED, BY THE SENATE OF THE NINETY-SIXTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that as Pluto passes overhead through Illinois’ night skies, that it be reestablished with full planetary status, and that March 13, 2009 be declared “Pluto Day” in the State of Illinois in honor of the date its discovery was announced in 1930.
What Phelps should have said
February 3, 2009 at 03:41 (News, Politics)
Tags: Athletes, Drug War, Drugs, Michael Phelps, Olympics, Politics, Prohibition, Sports
Radley Balko drafts a letter for Michael Phelps. Excerpt:
Here’s a crazy thought: If I can smoke a little dope and go on to win 14 Olympic gold medals, maybe pot smokers aren’t doomed to lives of couch surfing and video games, as our moronic government would have us believe. In fact, the list of successful pot smokers includes not just world class athletes like me, Howard, Williams, and others, it includes Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, the last three U.S. presidents, several Supreme Court justices, and luminaries and success stories from all sectors of business and the arts, sciences, and humanities.
So go ahead. Ban me from the next Olympics. Yank my endorsement deals. Stick your collective noses in the air and get all indignant on me. While you’re at it, keep arresting cancer and AIDS patients who dare to smoke the stuff because it deadens their pain, or enables them to eat. Keep sending in goon squads to kick down doors and shoot little old ladies, maim innocent toddlers, handcuff elderly post-polio patients to their beds at gunpoint, and slaughter the family pet…
