Global Warming: Northwest Passage for Whales and Plankton

This story from MSNBC suggests that the Northwest Passage is now available not only for cargo ships, but for whales and plankton.

School-End Poems

Dirk Beauregarde has school-end poems, including one familiar to me:


No more pencils
No more books
No more teacher's dirty looks

But I don't know the others.

Liberals Destroy Everything

Not only do liberal historians eat vigorously away at the foundations of our American history (see this link for the most recent attack on one of our Founding Fathers), now a liberal blogger is talking of blowing up the moon!  Is there no end to their destructiveness? Have they no shame?

Peter Falk, Government Efficiency Expert, Dies

After a long and brilliant career, the famed government efficiency expert, Peter Falk, has died at age 83.  For further details, see the obits in the Post and Times.

Unmeasured Improvements in Productivity

Charles Kenny talks about the importance of spreading corrective lenses to the third world.  But how about the improvement in life from lasik eye surgery over corrective lenses?  Does that show up in the CPI?

How about the change from chemical to digital photography?  Or I'm reading "The Emperor of All Maladies, A Biography of Cancer", by Siddharta Mukherjee.  Still early, but it's good and I'd recommend it.  He comments on the the amazing jump in the number of effective medicines between 1940 and 1950.  Where does the reduction of pain and the curing of illnesses get counted in measurements of productivity?

2010 Payments in EWG Database

EWG has updated their database with 2010 payments. As they note, they aren't getting the data they used to, because Congress changed a "shall" to "may" and USDA knows enough to follow the wink.  As I think I've said before [in the comments on the post], the $6.7 million estimate of the cost strikes me as bogus.  The only justification I could think of would be if KCMO has redone the file structures on the mainframes to accommodate the changes in the payment limitation provisions in the 2008 Farm Bill (attributing payments to members).  If the mainframe files changed, that would require changing the programs you run against them. 

To my mind, the EWG database should be a USDA database.

It All Depends on Whose Ox Is Gored

Or James Fallows wrote a famous Washington Monthly article many years ago saying the same thing as reported in this Monkey Cage post by John Sides on scholarly research: if you were subject to the draft and going to Vietnam, there was a (slight) tendency to make you more liberal and more anti-war.

Bureaucracy at CitiBank

This Technology Review post blames bureaucracy at CitiBank for permitting a breach of security which exposed customer data.  It's so simple anyone could do it.

Acton Was Right

Lord Acton is famous for having said: "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely."  That's the lesson from prisons, where as Tyler Cowen passes on, most sexual abuse originates with the staff. 

I'd add, when you have young troops in a foreign land with weapons, there's a power imbalance with the local civilians, so abuse should be expected.

Flash: Half of Americans Below Average

This prompted by this post at Roving Bandit.