The OECD has apparently discovered that biofuels are garbage, something the Libertarians (and the free market) have been saying for years.

A fascinating profile of the new mayor of DC. The DC schools get $20,000 per student per year, which is 2-4 times what private schools charge. Yet:

In June, he seized control of the schools from the Board of Education and hired a new chancellor. With $1 million in donated goods and services from local contractors, he initiated an uncommon “buff and scrub” blitz, fixing buildings and clearing a decades-old backlog of code violations at 54 of 141 schools. Last week, for the first time in years, all schools opened on time and more than 90 percent had all the books they ordered.

Invited by school officials to see how the system works for processing book orders, Mr. Fenty found a cavernous storeroom with shrink-wrapped books stacked to the ceiling and supplies that had been gathering dust for years as orders were lost. One auditorium had been neglected so long that volunteers renovating it discovered that students had been pledging allegiance to a tattered American flag with just 49 stars, dating to 1959.

He sounds like a good man. Time will tell. Let’s hope he’s smart enough to give school choice a try.

From the “why do these people get grants when I can’t?” file we get this:

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

Boy, those liberals sure have superior brains! Until you read about how the study was done.

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from “very liberal” to “very conservative.” They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

Are you kidding me? We’re supposed to extrapolate from this to how people think about complex issues like taxes and welfare? Politics are not generally decided in a split second. (And to be fair, the authors caution against an overly, um, liberal interpretation of their results).

I can think of an alternative explanation. Liberals have such tiny brains that they didn’t get terminally bored with the experiment.

In seriousness, this brain flexibility could explain a lot of the “nuanced” views of liberals. Wealth is bad unless it’s mine; sexual harassment is evil unless it’s a Democrat; unilateral war is bad unless it’s Clinton. Do we finally have proof that ther liberal mind can hold completely opposite views at the same time? And I wonder what would happen if you plugged Mitt Romney into one of those things? it would probably explode.

You know what the biggest problem is with getting the public to accept global warming? It’s environmentalists being so incredibly stupid.

Under the proposals, a cap could be set on the energy use of each electrical appliance, and those exceeding limits could be banned from sale in the UK.

How do you measure energy use? It’s been amply demonstrated that environmentalists have no clue when it comes to measuring carbon footprint. Is making people go with TVs that use less energy going to end up using more energy for production and transportation? Is it going to cause more pollution? You know what’s really good at figuring out that complex math? The free market.

And there could be a ban on electrical goods with stand-by lights which can stay on indefinitely. Some 2 per cent of Britain’s total electricity use is currently taken up by appliances left on stand-by rather than being switched off.

Talk about your law of unintended consequences. Most of these are almost certaintly computers. All three of mine run on standby. You know what’s going to happen if you ban standby mode?

People will just leave their computers on all the time. And it will burn up far more energy, do more damage to the machines (requiring more resource us to fix/replace them) and set the environment backward.

Jesus Christ, enviros. Do you guys ever think?

Have a swiss army knife? Become a convicted felon. Note to our public schools: ruining the lives of students is probably not the way to clean up the place.

Bainbridge on John Edwards’ hypocrisy, doing that oh-so-liberal thing of telling us all to conserve while he drive SUVs to his energy-gobbling and hideously ugly mansion.

I don’t expect more from Edwards. He’s an intellectual flyweight. But, jeez, do you think the people crowing about Senator Craig’s hypocritical bathroom adventures could spare a moment for Edwards?