The National Air and Space Administration‘s announcement that it will hold a news conference tomorrow to speak on a discovery of “astrobiological significance” has got the blogs and news media a buzz. Theories on what NASA is about to reveal vary wildly, from speculation that the Space Agency will annouce that signs of life have been discovered on one of Saturn’s moons, to talk of newly discovered exotic life forms here on Earth that portend possible future discoveries beyond our planet. Having perused the vast literature and spoken with mulitple experts in government, academia and industry we here at Stinque have weighed the evidence, eliminated the impossible, pushed the improbable off to one side and come up with a list of what we believe are 10 plausible discoveries that NASA might reveal at tomorrow’s press conference. And here they are, in no particular order: Read more »

The rhetoric from the right, which is all to often echoed by the maintream media, is that the Obama administration has moved policy so far to the left that it produced a backlash from a traditionally right-of-center populace. The latest object of right-wing scorn is the Federal Reserve’s program of Quantitative Easing, meant to fight the growing specter of deflation while hopefully promoting employment. This policy has been roundly criticized by right-wing luminaries as varied as Ron Paul, William Kristol and Sarah Palin. So how far to the left is this policy? It is so leftist that in 2000 the policy was promoted, in an almost identical economic circumstances, as a way of helping Japan out of its economic malaise by no less prominent and raging a leftist than Milton Friedman: Read more »

So this is how haggling is supposed to work: you’ve got a sheep herder named Akhbar, wants to sell one of his sheep. You’ve got a farmer named Muhamed who wants to buy a sheep. Akhbar knows that the going rate for sheep is 35 Kubokis, and he doesn’t want to sell his for any less. So he starts the haggling process by offering Muhamed a great deal on a fine, strong, young buck at 60 Kubokis. Muhamed also knows the going rate for sheep is 35 Kubokis and he refuses to pay a dime more, so he answers that the scrawny, sickly, old specimen before him isn’t worth more than 20 Kubokis. Read more »

To your list of world’s most dangerous jobs, you might want to add: Iranian nuclear scientist. The New York Times is reporting that two Iranian nuclear scientists were targetted for assassination, by persons unknown, today Monday, Nov. 29 and one of them, Majid Shahriari was killed when a car bomb that had been attached to his moving vehicle was remotely detonated. Shahriari’s wife was wounded as was the wife of the second scientist Fereydoon Abbasi, whose car was also targetted. Abbasi survived. Read more »

The votes have been cast, the results are in, and your television just lost its last reason for existing. If there were a plug on your TV similar to the plug in your bathtub that could be pulled to drain out all the glamour and gooodness in life, then that plug would have been unceremoniously pulled last night when teen pregnancy advocate Bristol Plain was finally voted off the most important talent show in America: Dancing With The Stars. Despite being the best bad dancer in the nation who gets better with every show (but is still, on the whole, bad) a nefarious cabal of un-elected judges pushed Bristol aside and instead took it upon themselves to hand the prize over to Jennifer Grey, a Hollywood insider whose only redeeming virtue is that she’s a talented dancer. The star-chamber judges clearly did this because they hate Bristol’s mother Sarah, for not aborting her son Trig when she had the chance. Readers will recall that Palin instead rushed back to Alaska on a 3 hour flight from Texas as soon as her water broke and there was a danger that the child might suffer the indignity of being born in the “lower 48” –thus making him an “untouchable” according to Alaskan Separatist Party lore. At any rate, if you’re still with me this far: Gawker has video evidence of Bristol losing (which I can’t see at work because it’s blocked, but which I’m sure is awesome heartrending).

It is obvious to me that the Irish-British model is the way of the future, and the only question is when Germany and France will face reality: either they become Ireland or they become museums:

-Thomas Friedman, in 2005

Here is a staggering fact: right now, as I write this, every single citizen of the Republic of Ireland owes foreign creditors over $535,000.00.

How did this happen in a nation that free marketers from the CATO instutute to Thomas Friedman were just recently holding up as a model of 21st century economic development, and whose laissez faire policies were held in stark and favorable contrast with the Social Democratic welfare states of Germany and France?

Hery Farrell at Crookerd Timber thinks he knows: the genesis of the Irish economic catastrophe lies in the country’s corporate tax rate. More speficially, Farrell finds fault in Ireland’s low corporate tax rates: Read more »

Hey Everybody! The Pope has made the landmark decision that the Catholic Church now approves of the use of condoms:

when the sole intention is to “reduce the risk of infection” from Aids.

So, I’m going to celebrate this Saturday night, by putting on my first rubber and sexing a woman with it. Actually, I’m going to have sex with a needle-sharing gay African man, so that I can make sure I am reducing my exposure to AIDS and then I can still go to Heaven when I die.

This also means that the risk of exposing both Priests and altar boys to the disease will be greatly reduced. Party on, Pope!

Pope approves use of condoms in fight against AIDS [Telegraph]