The Best Blog Post of the Week in the Whole World Wide Web

Anyone who sees the national government's takeover of Americans' health care as a mostly-positive thing, let alone a wonderful thing, should read this. Key point: We already have one industry controlled almost exclusively by the feddies, and that's the defense industry. And as McArdle writes, the defense industry "... does not have an encouraging record of cost-effective, innovative procurement." Proponents of government-controlled health care need to answer a) why the government's healthcare-procurement agency's weighing of innovation versus deployment versus cost would be any more efficient than the Pentagon's AND b) if not, then whether a Pentagon-like health-care agency is better than what we have today and will have tomorrow in lieu of radical changes. What do I propose in lieu of government medicine? I propose nothing, on the simple grounds that the burden of proof is on those who wish to overhaul 15-20% of our national economy and put it in the hands of an organization that has a decades-long and deserved reputation as one of the least-efficient large organizations in North America.

Do we really want the people who brought us the TSA to control how we take care of ourselves?

Porn Trumps God. Yay!

Stumbled across an old article from anti-libertarian conservative Jonah Goldberg in which he references a work (cannot find a cite) by Reason contributer Virginia Postrel in which Postrel apparently writes that Americans spend eight billion dollars a year on porn compared to three billion on Christian books.

Stuff like this bothers the Goldberg types no end, but it's one of the things that give me hope for America.

Climate Engineering

To the degree that climate change is harmful, this is the kind of thing that will allow us to escape or mitigate the damage, not useless attempts at conservation that are often thinly-disguised attacks on modern consumerist culture.

Freedom and the Future for a Friday

... And you can have it in any color you like, so long as it isn't black.

Actually, it isn't *quite* as bad as it sounds. California's Air Resources Board -- because air must be parceled out according to bureaucratic diktat -- is not outlawing black cars but is rather mandating "solar reflectivity" levels that represent a tough row to hoe for less-reflective black. So, in an attempt to appease CARB, the paint people have been tinkering with the chemistry to find blacks that reflect more light and to date have produced nothing more striking than "mud-puddle brown".

Apocalyptic Doom Rescheduled for Later

The effects of global warming have been postponed. The National Snow and Ice Data Center regretfully informs the public that its prediction of a "quite possible" ice-free North Pole for the 2008 melt season was wrong because of unreliable sensors. The NSIDC apologizes for any inconvenience.