Francis Fukuyama doesn’t think much of libertarians.

The hostility of libertarians to big government extended to U.S. involvement in the world. The Cato Institute propounded isolationism in the ’90s, on the ground that global leadership was too expensive. At the time of the Gulf War, Cato produced an analysis that argued it would be cheaper to let Saddam keep Kuwait than to pay for a military intervention to expel him – a fine cost-benefit analysis, if you only abstracted from the problem of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a megalomaniac.

Kuwait had weapons of mass destruction?
( . . more . . )

The Spirit of Kyoto?

I’ve heard it suggested that manmade pollution helped end the Little Ice Age. Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle wrote a novel on a similar premise, Fallen Angels.

French court rules that frozen couple must be buried (BBC).

According to French law, a corpse must be buried, cremated or donated to science.

A naïf like me might suppose that a longterm scientific experiment, even if performed by amateurs, satisfies the spirit of the law . . .

Prosecutor Jean-Frederic Lamouroux argued last week that the couple’s removal from their refrigerated chambers was an “issue of public order and public health.”

. . . and that a freezer is more sanitary than a graveyard, not to mention in the best interest of the health (if any) of two members of the public.

Hooray for Designer Babies!

The ‘bioethicists’ seem to be worried that desirable diversity could be wiped out by fads, which would make sense if a majority of parents for thirty years were to fall for the same fad. Am I missing something?

(Where do ‘bioethicists’ come from, anyway? What are the roots of the discipline? Do bioethicists say anything falsifiable?)