Of Kevin’s Friday cat blogging. Which is too bad. Jasmine and Inkblot have become fixtures. Maybe Kevin’s readers will overwhelm him and he will find a way to continue.
Commenter Jeff Boatright nails today’s pictures:
The cat on the left is avoiding reading the latest economic reports.
The cat on the right foolishly read them…
I suspect we will see more of these felines in the future.
Micah, at Catallarchy, has figured out how the US can avoid bankruptcy.
Ok, I almost titled this: Today’s Chuckle but the problem is real and the solution speaks volumes about why we have the problem in the first place.
RFIDs well probably be a positive thing for retail inventory management:
(London, UK – 18 February 2004) Exel, the global leader in supply chain management, has announced that it will embark on a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) project with House of Fraser, Britain’s leading department store group. The trial will represent one of the most advanced and ambitious projects in the industry as it will test the application of RFID across international supply chains.
The project will encompass individual products from House of Fraser’s own brand manufacturers in China. RFID tags will be attached directly to garments providing the scope to track shipment movements at item level. The tags enable automatic, real-time product visibility at any point in the supply chain.
This type of application is well underway in the US as well. In particular Wal-Mart has an agressive program.
Once these things proliferate everyone and their cousin will have RFID readers, for example: 1) your friendly border guard will quickly know that you are lying about the price of that nice coat from Canada; 2) on the positive (?) side the traffic cop could quickly know if there are stolen goods in the car she just stopped; 3) your neighbor will know that you bought that sweater at the dollar store not Nordstroms. We will all probably need to buy RFID zappers to kill the damn things once we take something out of the store.
Oh, and remember to pay cash so that your purchases can’t be tied back to your credit card. There is no point in feeding federal, state, local or business databases and giving the banks an automatic skim on everything that you buy.
Via White Rose.
For the FDA it appears that ‘B’ stands for babies. Why else would the FDA ignore the 23-4 vote of its scientific advisory panel and continue to withhold the morning after drug ‘Plan B’ from the over the counter retail market?
Well, perhaps babies and, as Mark Kleiman suggests, politics:
I’m prepared to bet that the FDA will eventually do the right thing. But how many unwanted pregnancies, leading to how many abortions, will result from this obviously political decision?
Yep, politics, and one more example of why such decisions should not be in the hands of political hacks.
Mark also says:
Once again, we can expect a deafening silence from the libertarians, whose sincerity about personal liberty I keep doing my level best not to doubt.
I don’t know if there will be a deafening silence or not. However, I suspect that most real libertarians not only would object to this decision but also argue that the FDA should not have any say in the matter at all, that it should not even exist as a government function.
I haven’t often read Andrew Sullivan but his analysis of bush’s MTP appearance seems pretty accurate to me:
We have a few options here: The president doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or he’s lying, or he trusts people telling him lies. But it is undeniable that this president is not on top of the most damaging part of his legacy–the catastrophe he is inflicting on our future fiscal health.
And in closing:
I cannot help liking the president as a person. I still believe he did a great and important thing in liberating Iraq (although we have much, much more to do). But, if this is the level of coherence, grasp of reality, and honesty that is really at work in his understanding of domestic fiscal policy, then we are in even worse trouble than we thought. We have a captain on the fiscal Titanic who thinks he’s in the Caribbean.
Via Atrios where some of you may be entertained by the comment thread.