bon mot
Selwyn Duke, a suspiciously white male, comments on the diversity police:
It’s a bit like insisting that every can of paint contain equal amounts of every color, so as to ensure that every color has a place in every can. This certainly would increase the constituent elements in every can, but the end result is that you would be left with only one color of paint in the world. Trying to make the constitution of every unit of society uniformly diverse does not yield true diversity, for it serves to make every unit the same.
Other links du jour — the jour in question being February 16-17, up to which I have caught in reading Rational Review News Digest:
Dave Kopel: The Klan’s Favorite Law
Glenn Harlan Reynolds: Real Social Security Reform
Tim Worstall: The Money Is In the Long Tail
Those who are committed to these leftish values of both a statist economy and a redistributive tax system need to make a choice, which of those do you actually want?
guess what
Travis doesn’t like “bioethicists” either.
three extropian items
Mike Linksvayer attended a lecture on “Changes in the Disparities in Chronic Diseases During the Course of the Twentieth Century”.
Perry Metzger shares a report (pdf) on infrastructure in Somalia. (Later: Michael Tennant comments on it at Strike The Root.)
Mike also has a map showing the potential partition of Ukraine. He wraps up:
It’s time to stop thinking of nation states as sacred and inviolable entities that must be held together with violence in opposition to the wishes of inhabitants, [rather than] as service providers that must peacefully change and differentiate to best meet the needs of inhabitants.
. . . .
So long as freedom to live and work in all parts of the formerly unified state is maintained for all citizens of the smaller states, there need be no negatives for individual citizens, apart from a loss of irrational nationalistic feeling for the unified state, which will eventually transfer to the smaller states in those with the need for such feelings. I’d be happy to see the U.S. split into fifty separate countries under such terms.
(afterthought 2009) I would hope that most citizens keep an attachment to the wider region’s culture, rather than to the successor state.
medical marijuana news
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Cannabis study encouraging for MS
The biggest UK study of cannabis-based drugs has shown evidence for a long-term benefit in easing the symptoms of multiple sclerosis.
(cited by Vicki Rosenzweig)
2012: This post keeps getting comments from bots. I’ve deleted them, and closed that door. If you disagree with that decision, there is a way to let me know.
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the weather up here
I am tall enough to wish I were two inches shorter. Do any very bright minds wish they were dimmer?
A few weeks ago I read – I’ve forgotten where – an article reporting with a bit of worry that Americans stopped getting taller about fifty years ago. You might say aha, Eisenhower’s America stops caring, ordinary folks’ health and nutrition suffer, unlike the progressive Dutch who keep on zooming up — but no: the trend has gone flat for rich and poor, hip and square. It’s a puzzler.
But it’s not bad news in itself. I know most of you would rather be taller, for social reasons, but would anyone be better off if everyone were two inches taller? Sooner or later (I suspect sooner) you run into the cube-square law.
May 30: Found it again. (Cited by yet another weird sf fan.)
June 08: Another version of the story, in the New Yorker. (Cited by Angelweave)
2011: after TCS reorganization