Iain Murray notes that, now that the Democrats control Congress, global warming isn’t as urgent an issue as the hysteria mongers have have been telling us it is.

Some climatologists are getting concerned that their scientific results have been hijacked by global warming evangelicals with an anti-growth agenda. It’s about time.

Better fire up your SUVs. We have to fight off the new global cooling trend.

This could be huge. I’d like to see it replicated as soon as possible. Some researchers may have come up with a cure for diabetes. And it’s an unconventional one, out of left field:

Dr. Dosch had concluded in a 1999 paper that there were surprising similarities between diabetes and multiple sclerosis, a central nervous system disease. His interest was also piqued by the presence around the insulin-producing islets of an “enormous” number of nerves, pain neurons primarily used to signal the brain that tissue has been damaged.

Suspecting a link between the nerves and diabetes, he and Dr. Salter used an old experimental trick — injecting capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot chili peppers, to kill the pancreatic sensory nerves in mice that had an equivalent of Type 1 diabetes.

“Then we had the biggest shock of our lives,” Dr. Dosch said. Almost immediately, the islets began producing insulin normally “It was a shock ? really out of left field, because nothing in the literature was saying anything about this.”

The only problem I see is that this is worse than stem cells from a human sacrifice standpoint. How many people will a small band like the Hot Chili Peppers be able to cure? Just how much capsaicin can they produce, and how fast?

From Lileks:

The idea of people sitting at home in sweatpants watching a big TV while shoveling in the Haagen-Daz mortifies the social engineers; they can practically feel the planet wobble on its axis from the cumulative weight of so much freedom and prosperity.

The preferred model for a nice, controlled population is a dense city where your small apartment has a tiny fridge st0cked with bean curd molded into pleasant, food-like shapes. Trains take you to your job, which is either building trains, fixing trains, designing public service posters for trains, cleaning trains or writing software to operate trains. Once a week you’ll pull on your best taupe-hued hemp jumpsuit and take the train to the biweekly Culture Expo to hear something held up to enlightened ridicule (anything’s game, except Islam and Global Warming).

It may sound like hell itself, but at least it’s sustainable.

Makes me want to get in the SUV and head to McDonald’s. And I don’t even like McDonald’s.

To how many other people has Verizon been quoting their rates as 0.002 cents, when they meant $0.002? And of course, the stupefyingly defiant ignorance of basic mathematics is indeed frightening.

Via emailer Erik Max Francis, who notes:

Here’s the full customer service call recording on YouTube (which is long enough to get tedious but here it is for reference):

But here’s a YTMND entry that chops it up and only gets the juiciest bits (and despite most YTMNDs, isn’t obnoxiously flashy and annoying):

What’s interesting to me as a crank-watcher is how many people in the comments in the various blogs and places it comes up (like dogg.com and rec.gambling.poker) are actually siding with Verizon …

A long but interesting disquisition, by Christopher Hitchens.

He makes an interesting point that I’d never thought about before–that the male equivalent of childbirth for women is war.

A long but interesting disquisition, by Christopher Hitchens.

He makes an interesting point that I’d never thought about before–that the male equivalent of childbirth for women is war.

A long but interesting disquisition, by Christopher Hitchens.

He makes an interesting point that I’d never thought about before–that the male equivalent of childbirth for women is war.

Alec Rawls writes about the anti-Norman Borlaugs, Paul Ehrlich and Al Gore.