• Airborne bears to catch bin Laden, and other letters to the Pentagon. Letter #1: “Bears have scent detection that is far superior to bloodhounds! Trained bears with GPS and day/night cameras around their necks might be able to hunt down the scent of UBL [Usama Bin Laden], even in and through any caves and tunnels!!! Overnight, Parachute some bears into areas UBL might be. Attempt to train bears to take off parachutes after landing, or use parachutes that self-destruct after landing.” Letter #2: “So do you have any top scret information you would to like to tell me? i am doing a project for my senior economics class, and was just wondering…email me back.”
  • Economists: Graham-Kerry’s Sector-Specific Approach to Carbon Limits is Less Efficient. Yup. But this is scary: “The more I work on this,” Borenstein says, “the more I think the only way we’re going to make progress on this is with breakthrough technologies, because the public as a whole is really unwilling to accept the idea of much higher energy prices.”
  • Cars, bombs and climate change, by Bjørn Lomborg. “a sea-level rise of five meters… would affect about 400 million people, force the relocation of 15 million, and imply costly protection of the rest. But it would certainly not mean the end of the world. Estimates show that the cost in terms of adaptation would be less than 1% of global GDP.”
  • Bogus TV report of Russian invasion panics Georgia
  • Peter Graves, ‘Mission: Impossible’ Star, Dies at 83
  • Economy is funny business to them. An article about my upcoming show in Nashville.
  • Paying non-resident taxes in MO. Sigh. Also look up non-resident taxes for city of St Louis…
  • The Lithium Chase. A good article about the invisible hand.
  • Larry White on Hayek and Money
  • Adjusting to Reality. Why add a cost-of-living adjustment to Social Security if there’s no inflation?
  • A Hard Act to Follow? Here Goes. From March 1995, about Mankiw and others chasing Samuelson’s book success.
  • Occasionalism is a philosophical theory about causation which says that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Instead, all events are taken to be caused directly by God himself. (I read about this in a book about Descartes; it’s one way to solve the mind/body problem!)
  • Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets. Props to the Seattle-based Discovery Institute.
  • The Wal-Mart Hippies. David Brooks compares the Tea Partiers to the hippies: “Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures. “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains,” is how Rousseau put it.”