Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
If libertarian or libertarian-leaning candidates for public office feel the need to talk about race, Radley Balko could point them to all sorts of areas in which public policy has a disparate impact on ethnic minorities and people with low incomes, and all sorts of injustices visited upon ethnic minorities on a daily basis.  [...]

By Thoreau
Right now, a key challenge in wastewater treatment is converting ammonia and other nitrogen compounds into harmless nitrogen gas.  The process used for this consumes a lot of energy.  However, scientists now believe that there is a more efficient way of doing this, one that will actually generate enough methane gas to produce more [...]

Bill Kristol is right, really. Rand Paul is Ron Paul without the fun parts. I will say that on his NPR interview this evening, he very nearly managed to not answer the “Would you have opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964?” without calling attention to the fact that he was avoiding answering the question. [...]

By Thoreau
A building that was damaged near Ground Zero is going to have a mosque in it.  This has some NY Post columnist angry. I have my own suggestion:
Instead of putting a mosque near Ground Zero, put it right smack at Ground Zero.  As to the Imam for that mosque, is there a Muslim equivalent [...]

By Thoreau
Saudi woman beats up a “virtue cop” who stopped her to check on whether she was married to the man she was walking with. The cop is in the hospital.
As a regular reader of Radley Balko, I assume that the Saudi police will respond by sending a SWAT team to the wrong address.

By Thoreau
Once upon a time I remember Tom Campbell saying vaguely sane things about drug policy.  That’s more than you can get from most politicians in either party, especially those who aren’t on the fringes with Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich.  So I was all set to vote in the GOP primary in a few [...]

By Thoreau
Radley Balko has some interesting contrasts between no-knock raids in drug busts in the US and house raids in Afghanistan.
Now, I’m not quite willing to believe that the person writing to him is giving a complete portrayal of everything being done in Afghanistan.  However, I can believe that he is giving an accurate portrayal [...]

1. Steve Hynd on the fraud that is “COIN.”
2. CAP on costs of the Iraq War. I’ll add two things: CAP is not bad on showing the disproportionate costs paid by Iraqis. e.g.
One could imagine another such graph – for instance an “Internally Displaced Persons” one showing a bar of height 2.6 million on the [...]

By Thoreau
Less than a week after an election that yielded no clear winner, they have resolved the matter.  I actually like the result, first and foremost because Labour lost.  Say what you will about the Conservatives, but I believe that 13 years is long enough for any party to hold power.  The Conservatives may or [...]

By Thoreau
The Editors point out that the would-be Times Square Bomber was unable to get gasoline to burn, so instead of chasing after the people who “trained” him we should probably encourage them to provide more such “training”.  In fact, we could nominate more people to join their team.  I nominate Dr. Evil for the [...]