The Washington Times reports:

Nondefense spending has skyrocketed under Republican control of Congress and the White House, and critics say the outlays will hit the stratosphere with the passage this week of a drug entitlement for seniors.
The Congressional Budget Office reported that nondefense spending rose 7 percent in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, nearly double the 4 percent discretionary spending caps that President Bush insisted Congress honor.
Since Mr. Bush took office in 2001, nondefense spending has leapt 13 percent

Anne Applebaum, writing in the Washington Post, tried to figure out for two days what in the in Medicare Bill. She tried to talk to both sides and figure out what was in the bill–they didn’t know.

At issue, I had discovered, were not merely interpretations of the facts but the facts themselves. More distressingly, I also realized by the end of the two days that some of the people making vigorous arguments for and against the bill were not absolutely sure what it contained. Nevertheless, the U.S. House of Representatives duly passed the bill in the wee hours of Saturday morning, and the U.S. Senate followed suit. Now we have a Medicare reform law. And now Congress, along with the rest of us, can start figuring out what it says.
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Nevertheless, the nature of this bill — which will cost at least $400 billion over the next 10 years, which some officials think could cost as much as $2 trillion in the following decade, and which will have profound effects on our nation’s health — does seem to demand something more than a few hours of heavily partisan Senate debate and even less in the House. A month’s worth of public discussion, say, on television, on radio shows, in newspapers, in local legislatures, would have been more like it.
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[O]nly twice, in recent memory, have we come together as a nation and vigorously pushed Congress to act on an issue of mass public concern. The first time, it was to pass a “Do Not Call Me at Home” law. The second time it was to pass a “Do Not Spam Me” law. As a nation, we adamantly reserve the right not to be hassled. As for everything else that Congress does — it seems we are perfectly content not to know about it until the shouting’s all over.

Strong Bad describes the history of Thanksgiving in Strong Badia.

The world is a strange place. First we have Madonna, the woman whose first book, Sex, was a pornographic coffee table book, now has a children’s book Mr. Peabody’s Apples debuting at number 1 on the New York Times’ best seller list.

If that wasn’t weird enough, we find out that Pamela Anderson teaches Sunday School. Anderson says:

“Maybe I’ve surprised people,” she says. “When you are blonde, people have low expectations of you.”

Anderson, currently on TV as the voice of a cartoon-stripper-turned-sleuth in the series “Stripperella,” added: “I’m not killing anyone or breaking any laws with my work. It is entertainment – there’s nothing wrong with it.”

Tony Blankey writes in today’s Washington Times that power in Washington is shifting to the GOP. He writes:

The passage of the Republican Party’s Medicare/prescription drug bill

Tim Cavanaugh writes in Reason that the conservatives and liberals have switched roles:

They continue to look and sound like, respectively, conservatives and liberals; but no voter can escape the conclusion that the evil party and the stupid party have decided to switch roles.

Exhibit A is Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), last seen dragging his superannuated bulk onto the Senate floor to filibuster against a massive expansion of Medicare drug benefits, the sort of bill Kennedy has spent his entire career trying to promote. “I’m going to fight this bill with everything I’ve got,” the crapulous lawmaker vowed. “The more senior citizens learn…the more they oppose it.”

According to the New Scientist, Intel will continue to follow Moore’s Law:

Intel, the world’s biggest maker of computer chips, has achieved an average feature size of just 65 nanometres for its next generation chip. The memory cells produced are half the size of the most advanced manufacturing technology in use today.

If the chip is manufactured by 2005 as planned, it will ensure that the number of transistors engineers can cram into a given area will continue to double every two years.

This trend is known as Moore’s Law, after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, and has held for the last 30 years. But recently experts have suggested that the problems of current leakage and heat build-up, which increase as chips shrink, could finally break Moore’s Law.

Truth be told, Gordon Moore never gave the succinct statement we now think of as Moore’s Law–that the number of transistors per square inch of integrated circuit will double every 18 months. Here’s a good write-up about Moore’s Law.

Here’s what Gordon Moore has to say about Moore’s Law today.

Even though we have a system of check and balances which intentionally slow down the legislative process, legislatures still do some crazy things. For one, they pass Medicare bill to sock it to people who work, and in Kentucky at least, they force people to take a bath at least once a year. It’s a great country.

According to the article Endangered Species Listings May Backfire in the journal Conservation Biology, endangered species listings may backfire. The press release for the article says (the article is not available on-line):

New research confirms fears that Endangered Species Act listings do not necessarily help – and may even harm – rare species on private lands. Since the Preble’s jumping mouse was listed as threatened, the landowners in the study have degraded as much habitat as they have enhanced, and most oppose the biological surveys that are critical for conserving species.

“Private landowners’ responses suggested that the current regulatory approach to rare species conservation is insufficient to protect the Preble’s mouse,” say Amara Brook, Michaela Zint and Raymond De Young of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the December issue of Conservation Biology.

More than 90% of federally listed species live at least partly on nonfederal land and as many as half live entirely on nonfederal land, much of which is private. Anecdotal evidence suggests that listing endangered species may not help protect them on private property because landowners may wreck their habitat to avoid land-use restrictions. This is the first study to see if this is true.
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This work suggests that listing the mouse may have done more to hurt it than to help it. Better approaches could include letting landowners know how conserving the mouse’s habitat can benefit them (for instance, riparian vegetation also benefits landowners by reducing erosion); reimbursing landowners for the cost of fencing to keep cows away from riparian areas; and reducing landowners’ fears of regulation by including them in the conservation decision-making process.

Actually, this is not the first study to see if landowners purposely “wreck” habitat to avoid land-use restrictions. The first study I know of was conducted by Dean Lueck of Montana State University and Jeffrey A. Michael of Towson University. They reached the same conclusions as “Endangered Species Listings May Backfire.” In their paper, Preemptive Habitat Destruction Under the Endangered Species Act, they found that “the ESA, at least for [red-cockaded woodpeckers] in North Carolina, actually reduces the amount of endangered species habitat.”

New Line Cinema has unleashed the hype machine to start promoting the final installment of the Lord of the Rings–The Return of the King. Aragorn graces the cover of this week’s Newsweek. Regardless of hype, it looks like the move is going to be good. Newsweek claims:

“The Return of the King” is the third and final chapter in what