Month: October 2009

Musings On Iraq checks in on the country's chief resource:

Things are far from settled…with Iraq’s oil. The Oil Minister remains under attack from parliament, members of his own ministry, and the Kurds. Oil exports continue to fluctuate up and down. There are major problems with the Ministry’s accounting and metering systems, as well as corruption. Iraq has also failed to pass a new petroleum law. Because there is so much excess crude and other reserves right now, companies may not be as eager to invest in Iraq as before. All of these factors mean that new oil deals are more important to Iraq than to the oil conglomerates, so the Oil Ministry has to carefully construct its policy to appease both a strong nationalist trend in Iraq that is weary of foreign exploitation, and appeals to those same companies. This is something that the Ministry has been largely incapable of performing so far.

Another redoubt of gay culture surrenders to the straights. Dan:

I'm often asked—confronted—about gay pride parades when I speak at colleges and universities. Usually it's a conservative student, typically someone who isn't happy about my being invited to campus in the first place. We gay people like to pretend that we're all about love and marriage, the conservative student will insist, but look at your pride parades! Look at those guys in assless chaps and all those bare-chested lesbians dancing! Just look! The exchange almost always ends with this:

Conservative student: "Straight people don't flaunt our sexuality like that. We don't have straight 'pride' parades."

Me: "You should."

And it seems clearer with every passing Halloween that straight people do.

(Hat tip: Videogum)

This interactive chart on the scale of cells and atoms is making the rounds.

(Hat tip: Flowing data)

Tyler Cowen makes a list.

Dreher's argument against the death penalty:

If Willingham really did kill his three daughters, he deserved his 2004 date with death at Huntsville. Anyone who takes the life of another in cold blood should pay for it with his own. But being found guilty by a jury is not the same as actually being guilty of the crime – which is why I reluctantly oppose the death penalty. This is no longer the Wild West. If we are going to send a man to his death, an irrevocable punishment, the margin of error must be vanishingly small.

It’s unlikely we will ever devise a capital punishment system guaranteed to smite only the truly guilty. DNA evidence greatly enhances the possibility of accuracy, but those results are only as reliable as crime lab technicians. Remember Joyce Gilchrist, the incompetent Oklahoma City forensic scientist whose work helped send 11 convicts to their deaths – and who has seen numerous inmates, some on death row, exonerated since authorities learned what a disaster she was?

Granted, Gilchrist’s expert testimony concerned less sophisticated kinds of lab analysis, which was refuted later by DNA testing. The point is that perfection is an impossible standard for anything involving human beings. We can live with something less than perfection when it doesn’t involve ending someone’s life. But how can the state’s executing a thousand killers compensate for the moral horror of putting to death a single innocent person?

(Hat tip: Ordinary Gentlemen)

… and what happened. We all know by now that the White House guessed wrong about the recovery and the stimulus last January. But Daniel Indiviglio presents a useful graph of unemployment predictions and outcomes (in red).

You don't want the video, do you? No – anything but the video: