Unqualified Offerings

Good thing our rules only count for us!

Megan McArdle makes short work of a bizarre defense of the essential nobility of firebombing by one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers. Maybe the strangest feature of the argument is that Sullivan’s reader is apparently a Quaker. (He went to a Quaker High School and attended Meeting. It’s possible that the high school requires Meeting attendance [...]

At my home away from home, I bitch about Bill Press, anti-anti-ethanolist radio host.
Meanwhile, The Editors makes the point that some better version of biofuels production technology may work great some day, but that doesn’t change the fact that the existing corn-ethanol fixation has awful effects on food production all out of proportion to its [...]

Best you can say about the FLDS raid and its aftermath is that nobody got burned to death this time. Jesse Walker has info and links.
Via Possible Mona!

Tony Karon’s post about Uri Avnery’s review of the revisionist work of Israeli historian Shlomo Sand is interesting, but it raises a pretty big question the post itself doesn’t trouble to address: If there was a proselytizing period in Jewish history that was spectacularly successful – large numbers of conversions among the upper classes of [...]

By Thoreau
Here’s an interesting tidbit from the debates over ratification of the Constitution:
Mr. George Mason replied that the worthy gentleman was mistaken in his assertion that the bill of rights did not prohibit torture; for that one clause expressly provided that no man can give evidence against himself; and that the worthy gentleman must know [...]

By Thoreau
In the past 24 hours I’ve read two interesting pieces on evolution and developmental biology:
1)  In the latest Scientific American, there’s a nice article explaining the role of regulatory DNA sequences in shaping anatomy.  An amazing number of genes are quite similar throughout the vertebrate family tree, yet vertebrates come in all shapes and [...]

By Thoreau
Over at Megan’s blog there’s a discussion of academics and job satisfaction.  While some are theorizing on why we allegedly hate our jobs, I have to say that I love my job.  In response to some speculation on tenure and what people do afterward, I posted my plans for life after tenure.  I’m reposting [...]