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I don't know how I missed this, from April 16. Our Energy Secretary, Stephen Chu, a Nobel Prize winner in physics and therefore presumably one of the smartest people in the world:

You read stories in Europe where there are in small apartments zero-net energy consumption apartments. There is--you know, body heat keeps a lot of the apartment warm. You can't do this in a big apartment with a few people.

The story of civilization, of course, is the story of escaping situations where we have to depend on one another's body heat to stay warm. Read the whole thing yourself to see if I have taken him out of context.

The things that pass for knowledge I can't understand.

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From Canada's National Post:

OTTAWA -- The Carleton University Students' Association has voted to drop a cystic fibrosis charity as the beneficiary of its annual Shinearama fundraiser, supporting a motion that argued the disease is not "inclusive" enough.

Cystic fibrosis "has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men" said the motion read Monday night to student councillors, who voted almost unanimously in favour of it.
...
The motion was forwarded by Donnie Northrup, who represents science students. Mr. Northrup did not respond to a request for an interview. (Emphasis added.)

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From Reason Online, citing The Weekly Standard:

Legislators stampeded the new House appropriations website yesterday with their requests for earmarks, causing it to crash. Roll Call was there. While I'd favor a first-come, first served, it's-not-my-fault- you-missed- the-deadline,- pal approach, the House Appropriations Committee has decided to extend the deadline for submissions until next week:

In a sure sign that earmarks remain as popular as ever, an overload of pork requests clogged the House Appropriations Committee’s Web site Wednesday, forcing an extension to the request deadline to next week.

The committee extended its deadline for earmark requests until 11:59 p.m. on March 24 after a “massive influx of requests” caused “unavoidable access and processing delays,” wrote Rob Nabors, staff director for the committee, in a memo to Member offices.

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From Bali Discovery Tours (hat tip: Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters):

Tempo Interaktif reports that Angkasa Pura - the management of Bali's Ngurah Rai International Airport are concerned that the large number of additional private charter flights expected in Bali during the UN Conference on Climate Change (UNFCCC) December 3-15, 2007, will exceed the carrying capacity of apron areas. To meet the added demand for aircraft storage officials are allocating "parking space" at other airports in Indonesia.

The operational manager for Bali's Airport, Azjar Effendi, says his 3 parking areas can only accommodate 15 planes, which means that some of the jets used by VIP delegations will only be allowed to disembark and embark their planes in Bali with parking provided at airports in Surabaya, Lombok, Jakarta and Makassar.

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The wonderfully terse Czech president Vaclav Klaus, on Al Gore's sharing of the Nobel Peace Prize:

"The relationship between his activities and world peace is unclear and indistinct. It rather seems that Gore's doubting of basic cornerstones of the current civilization does not contribute to peace."

Source

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From the property-is-freedom file, and the obituary of Baron Guy de Rothschild at The New York Times:

After the fall of France in 1940, the pro-Nazi Vichy regime seized the family bank, which had been moved from Paris to the small southern town of La Bourboule in the Auvergne region. The next year, the baron slipped away to New York and then to London, where he joined General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces.

History repeated itself some 40 years later, when, in 1981, the newly elected Socialist-Communist coalition of President François Mitterrand nationalized the bank that the baron had reclaimed and built up again after World War II.

History often repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as socialist sanctimony.

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From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, remedial economics division:

Gov. Jim Doyle's top deputy insisted today that Wisconsin can levy a new $272 million tax on oil company profits over the next two years and stop them from simply passing it on to consumers by raising pump prices.

"We will make it absolutely clear" that oil companies who simply boost gas-pump prices to offset the tax will be prosecuted, State Administration Secretary Mike Morgan told legislators who opened their review of Doyle's 2007-'09 budget.

"You will not manipulate markets," Morgan said, referring to statements from Republican legislators who said oil companies will simply find one way or another to raise pump prices by up to 5-cents per gallon to offset the tax.

"We will fight them here, in the federal courts and in Washington," added Morgan, who is an attorney. "The governor will not allow big oil to defeat a very good policy."

Since everyone knows oil companies have a bottomless pit of money just waiting for the people's representatives to find and put to good use, it is natural that passing a law prohibiting such a thing will be sufficient to prevent the Governor's new tax from being passed on to consumers, or indeed to have any resource-allocation effects whatsoever.

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The leader of the Socialist movement in the French legislature thinks that the best way to guarantee freedom of speech is to have the government subsidize failing newspapers:

"The disappearance of Libération would be a black day for the movement of ideas in our country. Helping the press is a task for the state because it is the guarantor of the freedom of expression."

(This is my primitive translation of the French, the original version of which can be found here.)

Libération is a newspaper of the left (the extreme left in American terms, but mainstream in the French context) founded by Jean-Paul Sartre in the late 1940s.

Hat tip: ¡No Pasaran!

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From the sad-irony files:

PARIS, Sept 29, 2006 (AFP) - French anti-terrorism authorities Friday opened an inquiry into death threats against a philosophy teacher who has been forced into hiding over a newspaper column attacking Islam, legal officials said.

Robert Redeker, 52, is receiving round-the-clock police protection and changing addresses every two days, after publishing an article describing the Koran as a "book of extraordinary violence" and Islam as "a religion which ... exalts violence and hate".

Source: AFP