There's no news here as holiday season continues. To fill in what could be a long blank before any new news is forthcoming, here's some links.
# Rolling tobacco is now a tenth of the price of cannabis, as the goverment excise tax reaches stupid heights. Unless you're a frequent flyer. Duty free for the flying suits. Tax is only for the poor. Thank you very much Maori Party. Mad stats lapped up by baby journos get a holiday kicking from Eric Crampton at Offsetting Behaviour.
# MacDoctor has the completely reasonable idea to make injuring a person with a firearm whilst drunk an offence. Hey, we do it for drink drivers. Why should drunk killers get a free pass? Now if there's only something we could do about the golfers...
# Team eXiled has launched a Media Transparency Project to out pimped journos and advertorial editorials. What with all the partisan hacks in this country giving each other back rubs and media skills training, we could do with a bit of that here too.
# Matt Taibbi gets all existential over the US election whilst looking at the Iowa primary. Can't say I blame him. I've almost stopped reading Andrew Sullivan out of ennui over the 2012 circus.
# And what to make of the looming merger of the NZ Business Roundtable and the NZ Institute? ManBearPig anyone? Arts & Letters Daily to the rescue with a think tank link.
# A&L Daily also links to two reviews of Alex Rosenberg's atheist manifesto. The antidote to this book seems to be the 1933 classic, Bertrand Russell's The Scientific Outlook. Scientific determinism is a dead end.
Anyway, back to eating the organic plums from the backyard orchard. That's the really great thing about childhood obesity and helicopter parenting. The neighbourhood kids don't climb the fruit trees.
