[Up-Date (2009:07/17): Some time after this entry was posted, CoolShaving.com removed its fraudulent claims, which had been up since at least 19 July 2006.]

At CoolShaving.com, they claim

Believe it or not, a young man actually thought we killed badgers to get these bristles for our shaving brushes. Nothing could be further from the truth. The manufacturer of these superior quality brushes maintains a flock of badgers that are more pampered and coddled than any badger in the wild, or any domestic animal for that matter.

The page on which they advertise the line of shave brushes doesn't identify the maker in text, but on the handles one can see that these brushes are branded Col. Ichabod Conk.

The Conk brushes are manufactured by Progress-Vulfix Ltd and by Dovo.

Progress-Vulfix Ltd makes no claims about a flock of badgers[1] nor of not using the bristles of killed badgers on the page where they describe their brushes at VulfixOldOriginal.com nor on that at Progress-Vulfix.com. Neither the string cruelty-free nor vegan are found at VulfixOldOriginal.com, nor at Progress-Vulfix.com

The brush that Dovo supplies to Conk isn't listed on the page of brushes sold by CoolShaving.com. But, for the record, the strings ohne Grausamkeit [without cruelty], Grausamkeit-frei, cruelty-free, and vegan do not appear at the Dovo site.

CoolShaving.com is registered to Jim H. Hedgepath of 129 Minnie Fallaw Road, Lexington, SC 29073-8226.

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[1] A company of badgers is called a cete /sit/.

A pH change of .24 of the oceans is definitely cause for concern. However, the natural pH of seawater is 8.2, well into the alkaline range, and reducing that by something between .24 and .45 would mean that the ocean were still in the alkaline range (though quite worryingly less). So the headline here

and much of the rhetoric within the body of the article is just rot.

As to the suggestion that the pH will be lowered by as much as .35, it comes from the IPCC, so caveat lector.

Back in April, I noted that some advocates of the theory of global warming had modified their theory to allow for climate to actually cool for up to a decade (after which the ostensible warming trend would resume). There has been a further adjustment:

(Underscore mine.) So, now, for at least the next thirty years, no matter what the temperature data say, the theory of global warming isn’t to be taken as falsified.

As most or all of you have read or heard by now, the economic news for the the last quarter of 2008 was quite bad

and the news from the stock market has grown worse

Now the New York Times frets

Of course, if they believed the naïve Keynesian rhetoric that has come back into political fashion, then the claim would be that Obama's aggressive spending plans were insufficiently ambitious.

I'm wondering whether it's merely the so-far unpassed budget that is under threat. As I noted earlier, the stimulus bill is an enormous blow to the economy, and was passed only as a result of some combination of willful blindness, knavish exploitation of a crisis in which politicians did not actually believe, and desire to worsen things on the expectation that even greater expansion of state power could be achieved. In the case of all three of these motivations, one could expect some politicians to now regret what they have done in passing the bill; what seemed like a bearable amount of plunder may now seem like a grave miscalculation. I don't think that it's politically possible that the legislature would overtly repeal the stimulus bill, let alone that the Obama Administration would openly reverse itself. But subsequent legislation might implicitly pare some of the programmes, and a formula might even be found for the Administration to suspend some programmes without legislative action.

Of course, the Administration and the Democrats in Congress know that, if they repealed a significant share of the stimulus bill even obliquely, then their opponents would pounce on how this repeal demonstrated that it were not a stimulus bill. So those who supported the bill may have a tiger by the tail.

In The Eco Gentleman's Shaving Kit: Back to Basics by Rob Knox at Greenopia, there is a reference to a shave brush made of cruelty-free badger hair, linked to a listing at drugstore.com for a shaving kit from Baxter of California, which listing describes the kit as Environmentally Friendly and Cruelty Free.

However, a Google search for cruelty free at baxterofcalifornia.com produces no hits, and Baxter's own description of their travel brush (in that kit), and that of their other shave brush simply don't report how the badger bristles are harvested. It is hardly plausible that Baxter of California would fail to mention that the badger were spared death or injury, as this would repel few-if-any customers, while attracting many of those who would otherwise purchase high-end synthetic brushes.

(Mr Knox also declares old [straight] razors from junk and antique shops are perfectly suitable once cleaned and sharpened, but this is only true in cases where the straight razors were of high quality before they got dirty and dull. There are plenty of new straight razors, such as those from Zeepk, which aren't suitable, because they are badly manufactured.)

There is a myth (demonstrated to be false by economist Ronald Harry Coase about 50 years ago) that, before the state stepped-in to regulate radio transmissions, there was simply chaos, as one would-be broadcaster tried to over-power the signal of another.

Actually, what happened was that broadcasters who wanted to work in the same frequency ranges and in the same geographical regions as each other went to court, and the courts began to apply the principles of homesteading to broadcasting. The main questions, as with the use of land, was of who was there first. Basically simple (though there certainly could be nuances).

Now, I would acknowledge the point, made by Donald Clayton Hubin and others, that allowing someone to own the use of one part of the electromagnetic spectrum doesn't seem different a priori from allowing them to own any other, and the intuitions of many of us would be immediately alarmed at the idea that someone should own, say, red in the Columbus PMSA. But we are alarmed in the context of there already being meaningful use of red by everybody; given that use of red, we could conceptualize the existence of easement of some sort actually giving us each a right to its continued use. On the other hand, prior to the development of radio, people did not so much use those parts of the electromagnetic spectrum as accidentally generate such electromagnetic radiation. For important parts of the spectrum, that remains the case. And, in-so-far as such accidental generation may be long-standing and so forth, one could believe that there was an easement allowing such continued accidents, but otherwise impute a property right to broadcasters in the same ranges as the accidents.

There's also a bit of apparent oddness in the fact that broadcasting amounts to vibrating the surrounding area; this seems a use of the properties in the surrounding area. But, while it's certainly a use, we have to be careful about the issue of whether it is a use of the property of others. We tend to equate property with the object against which a property claim is made. For example, we would normally simply say that Thomas's house is Thomas's property; we would even normally continue to say this if Thomas rented the house to Richard. But the notion of property rights as distinct from use rights is incoherent, and the rental agreement transfers some of Thomas's property rights to Richard, even if only rights specific to a defined interval. So, backing-up, we need to at least ask whether the property rights of those otherwise owning physical things in the area surrounding a broadcaster included exclusive rights to vibrate those things, or at least exclusive rights to vibrate them other than in the aforementioned accidental manner.

The reason that the airwaves were declared to be public was not because there was no coherent model of private property in the use of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the declaration certainly wasn't to end chaos.

(Nor was it because there is a natural monopoly of some sort in broadcasting. Consider how few daily newspapers the typical city now has, as opposed to how many radio and television stations it has.)

The nationalization of radio broadcasting was to introduce censorship. People were broadcasting opinions that the state and its clients didn't want broadcast, such as attacks on the medical profession. Freedom of speech was the chaos that was stopped.

This brings me to the Fairness Doctrine, which was introduced in 1949 and prevailed until late-mid 1987. The doctrine ostensibly required broadcasters to present opposing views on important and controversial matters, in a fair and balanced manner.

Even if it had done this much, it would have been a gross violation of freedom of expression, much like forceably demanding that any of you reading this entry both speak-out on important and controversial issues and that you always defend, as strongly as practicable, views that you oppose. Operationally, you couldn't be a spokesperson for your own views so much as a reporter of what views were had.

But, in practice, the Fairness Doctrine was part of a system of disguising gross biases as balance. For example, the gentlemen's agreement (sans gentlemen) between the prevailing political left and political right has been that only both sides are represented, not the views of those who do not fit on whatever might be the left-right spectrum of the day, the Fairness Doctrine abetted the impression that no one (or no one who mattered) could have such views. Beyond this, the politicial left, for most of this period, was largely successful both in disguising their own views as neutral, and (when unable to do that) in selecting poor representatives of the political right to present opposing views; thus not even both sides were given the same opportunity to be heard.

The Doctrine fell because of pressure from those who opposed censorship in principle and from those who were given the short end of the stick (the political right) or given pretty much no end of the stick (everyone not on the left-right spectrum).

Once the Doctrine fell, the political right developed a counter-weight of a sort to the main-stream media. Against CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, and NPR, the right threw-up first a network of AM radio stations and then Fox Television. In terms of combined listenership and viewership, these countervailing broadcasters don't match the old main-stream, but it upsets the political left that there should be grossly biased broadcasting, when the gross bias isn't their own. And, in spite of their continued dominance in the more important medium of broadcast television, it hugely disturbs the political left that the right-wing has a larger presence in AM radio.

Parts of the left persuaded themselves that the right-wing dominated talk radio because powerful corporations were willing to sacrifice direct profitability in order to mold public opinion in favor of the political right, and therefore presented only personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, rather than what would be popular progressive (social democratic) personalities. Hence, Air America Media. But, in operation, Air America has not been profitable; it has been a meaner, dumber NPR, dependent upon subsidies.

So there has been increased interest on the part of the left-wing in a revived Fairness Doctrine. And even trial balloons about somehow applying it to the Internet. Therefore, I am pleased and relieved that the Obama Administration has declared that it does not support a revival of the Doctrine. I would really like to believe that this decision is based on a respect for freedom of speech, but the plain fact is that the present SCotUS has a majority bloc that could be expected to reject a Fairness Doctrine as unconstitutional, and the Court could well continue to have such a majority for at least the next eight years. (Justices Kennedy and Scalia are each about sixteen years younger than Justice Stevens.) But if just one member of that bloc were to leave the court then the Obama Administration would be faced with a new calculation.

As is its wont, the Beeb gets things quite wrong:

The race hasn't heated-up; it has slowed-down as a result of the CERN accident, giving Fermilab a chance to catch-up and possibly win.

Speaking of the Beeb getting things wrong (this time for lack of ethical bearings), here's and interesting (if somewhat lengthy) critique of Earth: The Climate Wars:

Calvin Woodward, at the AP, calls this an overstatement:

Most economists, almost unanimously, recognize that even if philosophically you're wary of government intervening in the economy, when you have the kind of problem you have right now … government is an important element of introducing some additional demand into the economy.

but it goes well beyond mere overstatement. It's an gross lie.

It's bad enough when people use consensus to argue for a proposition that ought instead to be tested by logic applied to brute fact. But this business of using counterfeit consensus is just actively vile.