• Capitol Hill Workshop, June 10-12, 2009
• How to Research and Compile Legislative Histories, June 26, 2009 – with WiFi Classroom
• The great carbon credit con: Why are we paying the Third World to poison its environment? – “In the fields around this giant chemicals factory in Gujarat, the barren soil smells of paint stripper and the water from the well makes you gag. So why has it been given tens of millions of pounds of taxpayer-funded UN ‘green reward points’, which are traded hungrily on the financial markets at huge profit?”
• The National Security Risks of Gov 2.0 and the Social Web – “How do you mitigate the risks while enjoying the benefits of Gov 2.0 and the social web? You do it by thinking like your opponent; or like the Trickster. Read your post twice before you hit send; once as you and once as your adversary who is looking to exploit you. If you work for the DOD or a government contractor, start by re-reading your employer’s OPSEC guidelines and edit your profile and your posts accordingly. If your office hasn’t created any OPSEC guidelines for social media yet, please let me know. My company GreyLogic is creating training for precisely that purpose. In the meantime, here are five things that you can do right now to reduce your risk profile:”
• Jim the Realtor: Check out this Backyard!
• Metro Dig at Tysons Stirs Underground Intrigue: High Anxiety Over Top-Security Cable
• Patron Saint of Turpentine
• Hot or Not? Consumer Reports
• The Economy is in Good Hands – “It’s funny, but just the other day I was telling my wife that I hope the automobile industry’s future [and, more broadly, the economy’s] is in the hands of early 30-something political operatives working on law degrees from Yale who have no formal background in business, economics, engineering, or marketing.”
• Tax What You Love – “Governor, why don’t you tax golf carts?”
• The Last Empire: China’s Pollution Problem Goes Global: Can the world survive China’s headlong rush to emulate the American way of life? – “China has become not just the world’s manufacturer but also its despoiler, on a scale as monumental as its economic expansion. Chinese ecosystems were already dreadfully compromised before the Communist Party took power in 1949, but Mao managed to accelerate their destruction. With one stroke he launched the “backyard furnace” campaign, in which some 90 million peasants became grassroots steel smelters; to fuel the furnaces, villagers cut down a 10th of China’s trees in a few months. The steel ultimately proved unusable. With another stroke, Mao perpetrated the “Kill the Four Pests” campaign, inducing the mass slaughter of millions of sparrows and a subsequent explosion in the locust population. The destruction of forests led to erosion and the spread of deserts, and the locust resurgence prompted a collapse of the nation’s grain crop. The result was history’s greatest famine, in which 30 to 50 million Chinese died. Yet the Mao era’s ecological devastation pales next to that of China’s current industrialization.”
• Former Chinese Central Bank Advisor Questions Geithner’s Math, Calls Federal Reserve Assets “Rubbish” – “Referring to the Federal Reserve ‘as the world’s biggest junk investor,’ and to Chairman Ben S. Bernanke as ‘helicopter Ben,’ Yu said the Fed has dropped ‘tons of money from the sky since the subprime crisis.’”
• GM’s Nationalization and China’s Capitalists
• What plagiarism looks like
• Google throws down the gauntlet, announces plans to sell e-Books (NYT)
• Selective Outrage – “This has all the proper elements: Violence against women with a religious nexus. I wonder what the difference could be?”
• Vanishing Muslims and the Shift to Africa
• The Death of George Tiller – “For an extended critique of the idea that moral blame for Tiller’s death extends beyond the person who pulled the trigger, see Brendan O’Neill’s excellent column from yesterday, a powerful assault on the notion that “public debate should be watered down to the level of polite tea-party disagreements, lest any borderline cranks be agitated or inflamed by it.””
• When You Can Hold Every Song Ever Recorded In Your Pocket… Does $1/Song Still Make Sense?
• Booksfree Is Like Netflix for Audiobooks
• Why aren’t more theatrical plays on DVD?
• Jazz Me Blues
• Tips On Running Your Food Business
• Jet Cyclist Hits 73 MPH and Lives to Tell the Tale
• Signos Portable Ultrasound Billed As World’s Smallest
• Making your own charcoal
• How to make charcoal at home, by Dan Gill
• Barbecue 101: A guide to Wicked Good Barbecue. Part II: The Fuel