From Hit and Run:

That’s how Duncan Black sees it, anyway. He links to a report by National Public Radio’s ombudsman that found experts from right-leaning think tanks were quoted significantly more frequently than scholars from tanks on the left in 2005: 239 to 141. And as Black notes, those 141 come from Brookings and CSIS, which aren’t terribly far left.

First of all, I’ve got a few questions about this count. Are CSIS and Brookings really the only left-leaning tanks that provide experts for NPR stories? Let’s try Googling NPR for the New America Foundation. Whoop, there’s a bunch of hits. How about the Economic Policy Institute? Oh, gosh, there’s a bunch more. How about the Institute for Policy Studies? Hits galore! And those are just the first three leftish tanks that came to mind; I hear there might be a couple more out there. To say the ombudsman pulled his numbers out of his ass would be an insult to asses everywhere.

Read the whole thing.

Arstechnica explains the history of the PC. It is amazing how far things have come in the last 30 years.

In the Post George Will writes:

For some people, environmentalism is collectivism in drag. Such people use environmental causes and rhetoric not to change the political climate for the purpose of environmental improvement. Rather, for them, changing the society’s politics is the end, and environmental policies are mere means to that end.

The unending argument in political philosophy concerns constantly adjusting society’s balance between freedom and equality. The primary goal of collectivism — of socialism in Europe and contemporary liberalism in America — is to enlarge governmental supervision of individuals’ lives. This is done in the name of equality.

People are to be conscripted into one large cohort, everyone equal (although not equal in status or power to the governing class) in their status as wards of a self-aggrandizing government. Government says the constant enlargement of its supervising power is necessary for the equitable or efficient allocation of scarce resources.

Therefore, one of the collectivists’ tactics is to produce scarcities, particularly of what makes modern society modern — the energy requisite for social dynamism and individual autonomy. Hence collectivists use environmentalism to advance a collectivizing energy policy. Focusing on one energy source at a time, they stress the environmental hazards of finding, developing, transporting, manufacturing or using oil, natural gas, coal or nuclear power.

A quarter of a century of this tactic applied to ANWR is about 24 years too many. If geologists were to decide that there were only three thimbles of oil beneath area 1002, there would still be something to be said for going down to get them, just to prove that this nation cannot be forever paralyzed by people wielding environmentalism as a cover for collectivism.

What time is it in Iraq right now? I have a cousin and a friend who are in Iraq right now. This cool little website, Gchart.com, will not only tell me what time it is in Iraq, but what time it is anywhere in the world.

Phil Taylor writing in SI.com says the NCAA should banish the bowl games. I couldn’t agree more.

here will be 28 bowl games between Dec. 20 and Jan. 4, when USC and Texas play for the national title in the Rose Bowl. The other 27 contests, no matter how highly ranked the participants, are nothing more than glorified exhibition games. No championships are decided, no conferences are won, no great meaning is attached. In many cases, bowl games are anticlimactic letdowns, no matter who wins them. If Auburn beats Wisconsin in something called the Capital One Bowl on Jan. 2, for instance, do you really think the win will mean as much to the Tigers as their victory over arch-rival Alabama last month?

An even better reason to do away with meaningless bowl games arose this week, with a release of a study showing that many of the 56 bowl-bound teams are struggling to meet the NCAA’s new academic standards. According to Richard Lapchick, a University of Central Florida professor who authors an annual report on the academic performance of NCAA athletes, only 33 of the 56 teams had at least 50 percent of their student-athletes on track to graduate.

There are any number of reasons for the shaky academic performance, of course, but making players continue to practice for one more inconsequential game, especially during the early to mid-December finals period, is surely one of those reasons. If the powers that be in college football won’t put together a true playoff system, how about just letting the kids go back to class?

Bowl games defy logic on so many ways. Take the upcoming Sugar Bowl for example. Georgia and West Virginia will have more than a month layoff before they meet on Jan. 2. Instead of two elite teams, we’re just as likely to see two rusty teams play each other to decide, well, nothing really.

From Bloomberg:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad questioned the reality of the Nazi Holocaust, calling it a “myth” fabricated by the West, and told Europe, the U.S. or Canada they should shelter a Jewish state on their soil.

The West has “fabricated a myth under the name ‘Massacre of the Jews,’ and they hold it higher than God himself, religion itself and the prophets themselves,” Iran’s leader told thousands of supporters in the south-eastern Sistan-Baluchestan province, state television showed in a live broadcast.

“If you say and insist it’s true that you killed 6 million Jews in crematoria during World War II, then why should the Palestinians pay for that?” Ahmadinejad asked. “Our proposal is that you give a piece of your land in Europe, the U.S., Canada or Alaska. If you do that, the Iranian people will no longer protest against you.”

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been up nights worrying about Iran protesting the United States, so this is a relief.

Mark Steyn is one of the greatest essayist writing today. Here’s a great article taking the US to task for not taking Iran task.

About.com’s 10 Most Puzzling Ancient Artifacts.

Here’s a post on the best websites of Web 2.0. Some of these websites are great and some don’t live up to the hype. A website that I started using recently is del.icio.us. Five years ago I used Backflip to store my bookmarks on the web. But Backflip went under and while it’s website remained up, it became slower. Del.icio.us is easier to use is more functional.

The guy that wrote this post really likes Netvibes as a start page. I’ve been using Google’s Personalized Start Page for the last couple months and I’m a big fan. A couple days ago I created a Netvibes start page. The first thing I noticed is that it isn

The Washington Post reports on the ridiculous system of tariffs we have in the US:

Some of the stiffest tariffs apply to the types of goods that people of modest means tend to buy, and lower duties are imposed on similar products that are more often purchased by upper-income individuals.

Sweaters offer a vivid example: If they’re acrylic, the tariff is 32 percent. But if they’re wool, the tariff is 17 percent. On cashmere sweaters, the tariff is lower still — 4 percent — and on silk ones, 0.9 percent. (Tariffs are levied on the “ad valorem” value of a product when it enters the United States — the amount the importer pays, excluding insurance and freight. So for an acrylic sweater with an ad valorem value at the border of, say, $10, the 32 percent tariff would be $3.20.)

In the case of low-end sneakers, tariffs range between 48 and 67 percent, but tariffs on higher-end sneakers are only 20 percent, and for leather dress shoes, the tariff is 8.5 percent. Plastic handbags are hit with 16 percent tariffs but reptile-skin ones with only 5.3 percent tariffs. For drinking glasses, the tariff is 28.5 percent if the value at the border is 30 cents or less, but 5 percent if the value is $5 or more.

“Over the past 40 years, we’ve created a very skewed system, where many of the things that poor families buy are very heavily taxed, and things that only rich families buy are not,” said Edward Gresser, a trade expert at the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. “Of the five different kinds of taxes that the federal government imposes, tariffs are the smallest — but they’re by far the most regressive.”