Non

This entry was posted in Government on by

Eugene Volokh does not appear to think highly of the French non vote on the proposed EU constitution:

As best I can tell from what I’ve read recently, the substantive arguments for the French “no” vote weren’t very sound, either; and peevishness at the political classes’ seeming arrogance doesn’t strike me as a great reason to vote no.

He does not go into detail on what those substantive arguments were but there is one argument that I find quite compelling: the document is 485 pages long. Only a lawyer or a judge could love a constitution of that size.
Consider the brevity of the US Constitution and the huge bureaucratic and legal bloat that has occurred in a modest 200 years. Heck, with 485 pages to start with the EU will need bariatric surgery before it even leaves the starting gate.
Related notes:
Lynn Kiesling “…concluded that it was a curate’s egg.”
Steeph has probably already voted no today in the Netherlands. He has studied it much more thoroughly than the average voter!

Harmful Books

This entry was posted in Culture Economics Politics on by

For your edification Human Events has compiled a list of harmful books:

HUMAN EVENTS asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help us compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

They don’t really define harmful or to whom these books will be harmful but each listing does come with a brief rationale. Your mileage may vary….
And, as Radley Balko notes they don’t want to burn them they want you to buy them via their Amazon account link!
Update (6/1): Tom Traina has a suggestion for an addition to this list.

About Those Sugars You Are Eating

This entry was posted in Biology Health Care Longevity on by

Don’t:

I take a couple of nuts as Kenyon instantly shifts the topic — she does that often — and explains to me that she has totally changed her diet, eliminating most sugars, including those found in processed flour. Hence the peanuts. An experiment with her tiny worms is responsible, she says; that experiment proved that sugar switches on a genetic sequence that increases the amount of insulin produced by an organism, which in turn causes the body to demand more sugar. This not only adds flab to the waistline, if worms had a waistline, but also increases damage to cells in the body, speeding up the slow degradation of cells that contributes to aging.

Via Steeph.

Hosting Problems

This entry was posted in Modulator on by

I apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced accessing Modulator on Monday 5/30. The server Modulator is hosted on begain failing at about 21:40 GMT and service was not restored until sometime around 07:00 GMT on 5/31.
Puzzling to me is that Sitemeter shows a fair amount of activity during the problem period. Heck, I couldn’t get in how could all those folks….?