There seems like a big market opportunity here. Put people to work by fishing, and sell the proceeds to China. You could do it canned, frozen and fresh. I know that when I was a kid growing up in Michigan we’d never eat carp, and considered them junk fish, though the blacks would eat them (and dogfish, too — I remember dogfish runs by the dam near our cottage on the Muskegon River, where people would just pull them out with nets and cover the banks with them). Not sure what the difference is between Asian carp and the native variety, or if it’s tastier. But the Asians definitely do know their carp (which is what koi and goldfish are).
Category Archives: Weird
Osama’s Plot To Destroy America
…by making Joe Biden president. No, really.
[Update a while later]
You couldn’t make this up: The non-embarrassment that is Joe Biden.
Extraterrestrial Real Estate
How will Newt’s prospects affect its value?
Adaptation
Some have said that the cost-effective solution to climate change is to adapt (I’m in this camp). But I think this may be going overboard:
Some of the proposed modifications are simple and noninvasive. For instance, many people wish to give up meat for ecological reasons, but lack the willpower to do so on their own. The paper suggests that such individuals could take a pill that would trigger mild nausea upon the ingestion of meat, which would then lead to a lasting aversion to meat-eating. Other techniques are bound to be more controversial. For instance, the paper suggests that parents could make use of genetic engineering or hormone therapy in order to birth smaller, less resource-intensive children.
What could go wrong?
And of course, it’s all about the liberty:
It’s been suggested that, given the seriousness of climate change, we ought to adopt something like China’s one child policy. There was a group of doctors in Britain who recently advocated a two-child maximum. But at the end of the day those are crude prescriptions—what we really care about is some kind of fixed allocation of greenhouse gas emissions per family. If that’s the case, given certain fixed allocations of greenhouse gas emissions, human engineering could give families the choice between two medium sized children, or three small sized children. From our perspective that would be more liberty enhancing than a policy that says “you can only have one or two children.” A family might want a really good basketball player, and so they could use human engineering to have one really large child.
Yes, that’s what we really care about — a fixed allocation of greenhouse emissions per family.
More thoughts from Mark Wilson at Ricochet.
Westboro Baptist Church
…has made Iowahawk gay. I hate when that happens.
Satellite For Sale
I just got an interesting email:
A fully-operational communications satellite is available for purchase for only a short time (days). If you know an organization that might be interested, please have them contact Richard Van Allen of Microcosm at 310-219-2700 ASAP.
The F2 satellite has been in orbit for about 11 years, during which time it used about 6 kg of propellant. It cost in the multi-hundreds of millions of dollars, and the launch cost was $105M in 1994 dollars. All systems on board the spacecraft are functioning normally, and it has both S-Band and C-Band communications capabilities. Also important, there is a current RF license in place to use the frequencies allocated to it. The current owner has decided it does not want to continue paying about $133K/month to keep it functioning and has been intentionally burning propellant over the last several weeks to deplete the remaining propellant. Currently there is about 30 kg remaining, more than enough for the satellite to last for many years. However, by the end of this week, the remaining propellant will have been used up, and the satellite will be dead.
Info on the satellite can be found here.
Sodium Disposal
And now for something completely different. Dealing with tons of the stuff. They’d never be able to do this today.
Our Green Secretary Of State
Dryer Lint
Is this really a sufficiently huge problem as to justify all the spam I get about it? #FirstWorldProblems
Oliver Stone’s Son
…is an idiot:
“The conversion to Islam is not abandoning Christianity or Judaism, which I was born with. It means I have accepted Mohammad and other prophets,” he said in a brief telephone call from the central Iranian city of Isfahan, where he underwent the ceremony.
Sean Stone’s famous father is Jewish, while his mother is Christian.
The 27-year-old filmmaker did not say why he converted.
According to Iran’s Fars news agency, Sean Stone had become a Shiite and had chosen to be known by the Muslim first name Ali.
Like father, like son.
This raises so many questions. What is he “converting” from? You can be Christian, or Jewish, but not both, and it’s not clear that he’s ever been either (his mother wasn’t Jewish, so he isn’t Jewish by birth). Does he really believe that the Mullahs will be just fine with his “not abandoning” those other religions (to the degree that he was ever an adherent to them)? Does he know the penalty for apostasy in his new religion?
What is clear from his brief message is that he is as ignorant of Islam as he is of the other two religions.