At Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Skippy objected to the term “blogosphere”, because nothing in the internet is truly “spherical”. I countered, with citations of “sphere of influence,” and “magnetosphere“.

Skippy still takes issue. But, as this point it is a digression from the main thrust of his (her?) thread, I thought we might take it up here. Oh, and BTW: anyone looking for a REALLY cool graphic of the magnetophere should go here: http://www.pparc.ac.uk/Nw/Magnetosphere.jpg

In a bit of intellectual disintegrity, right on the heals of declaring that government can seize the homes of private individuals, the Supremes pronounced that the cable lines of giant corporations are protected:

“Today’s ruling is bad news for millions of Americans who are overpaying billions of dollars every year in cable Internet service,” said Mehrdad Saberi, chairman of the California ISP Association. “The interests of American consumers and businesses have been sold out as the FCC and now the court have defined Internet service in such a narrow way that allows cable companies to escape proper regulation. Nearly every innovation in Internet service has come from independent ISPs. Now that source of Internet innovation, consumer choice and affordability is threatened with extinction as cable companies block the benefits of competition.”

Not that I really see this as a bad ruling, but I don’t see how the public is not better served by the lower prices and improved service that invariably comes from competition, than from a highly speculative community redevelopment project.

The two cases are No. 04-277, National Cable & Telecomm. Ass’n v. Brand X Internet Servs., and No. 04-281, FCC v. Brand X Internet Servs. I will be surfing the blawgs later tonight looking for other opinions on this.

Update: David Kopel at Volokh has an interesting post, in which he points to this policy study he did in 1999. He states that open access to cable systems would discourage cable providers from making improvements in infrastructure, as they would have to share the benefits of those improvements with companies which made no such investment.

I agree, and see an analogous situation with Kelo: Homeowners and small investors will be far less likely to make improvements and renovations in structures, particularly in less affluent areas most likely to be targeted for redevelopment.

After Timmer’s earlier post, I thought it might be enlightening to post some excerpts from the NYTimes’ David Brooks’ Sunday column:

Jeffrey Sachs, as you may know, is the Columbia University economist who has done more to put poverty in Africa atop the global agenda than anybody else. He has hectored and lobbied the developed world to forgive debts, set goals and increase aid to ameliorate the suffering of the extremely poor.

But Sachs is a child of the French Enlightenment. At the end of his new book, “The End of Poverty,” he delivers an unreconstructed tribute to the 18th-century Enlightenment, when leading thinkers had an amazing confidence in their ability to refashion reality so that it would conform to reason.

[...]

Sachs is also a materialist. He dismisses or downplays those who believe that human factors like corruption, greed, institutions, governance, conflict and traditions have contributed importantly to Africa’s suffering. Instead, he emphasizes material causes: lack of natural resources, lack of technology, bad geography and poverty itself as a self-perpetuating trap.

This gives him an impressive confidence on the malleability of human societies. Though $2.3 trillion has been spent over the past 50 years to address global poverty, without producing anything like the results we would have hoped for, Sachs is sure that with his insights, and most important, with more money, extreme poverty can be eliminated with one big, final push. “We can realistically envision a world without extreme poverty by the year 2025,” he writes. “Ending the poverty trap will be much easier than it appears,” he declares.

[...]

Instead of Sachs’s monumental grand push to end poverty, the Bush administration has devised the Millennium Challenge Account, which is not dismissed by Sachs, but not heralded either. This program is built upon the assumption that aid works only where there is good governance and good governance exists only where the local folks originate and believe in the programs. M.C.A. directs aid to countries that have taken responsibility for their own reform.

It has the faults of its gradualist virtues. I recently sat in on a meeting in Mozambique between local and American officials. It was clear that the program, while well conceived, has been horribly executed. The locals had been given only the vaguest notions of what sort of projects the U.S. is willing to finance. After two years of trying they had received nothing.

Nonetheless, the Bush approach, when reformed, at least builds on the experience of the past decades, while Sachs, as reviewers have noticed, repeats the 1960′s. If, à la Sachs, we assume money translates easily into growth, if we pour aid into Africa without regard to local institutions, we will do little good, we will exhaust donors and we will discredit the aid enterprise for years to come.

No, ending poverty in Africa will not be easy. There are entrenched interests there dedicated to continuing the impoverishment of the people. For Africa to prosper, those interests must be eradicated. And history tells us that seldom happens without the expense of blood, as well as treasure.

Packing the van and heading West until we leave cornfields and run into soybeans and ‘taters and sagebrush and mountains and jackelopes and huckleberries and fields of mint leaves and jerked elk and pans full of breaded croppie and sunfish.

I might blog while we’re gone, but don’t count on it.

Wow…Connors can happy dance…who knew?

This from OpinionJournal’s Best of the Web:

That Boy Ain’t Right, I Tell You What
You’ve heard of “South Park Conservatives,” those who lean to the right and enjoy the exuberantly obscene, and politically incorrect, Comedy Central series. (Buy the book here.) Matt Bai of the New York Times magazine is hoping there’s a counterpart, “King of the Hill Democrats.”

Bai interviews Gov. Mike Easley of North Carolina, who is “is so obsessed with the show that he instructs his pollster to separate the state’s voters into those who watch ‘King of the Hill’ and those who don’t so he can find out whether his arguments on social and economic issues are making sense to the sitcom’s fans.” Easley has a whole theory of main character Hank Hill’s political philosophy:

Easley told me that Hank would never support a budget like the one North Carolina’s Senate recently passed, which would drop some 65,000 mostly elderly citizens from the Medicaid rolls; Hank, after all, has pitched in to support his own father, a brutish war veteran, and he would never condone a community’s walking away from its ailing parents. Similarly, Hank may be a lover of the environment–he was furious when kids trashed the local campground–but he resents self-righteous environmentalists like the ones who forced Arlen to install those annoying low-flow toilets. Voters like Hank, if they had heard about it on the evening news, would have supported Easley’s ”Clean Smokestacks” law, which forced North Carolina’s coal-powered electric plants to burn cleaner, but only because industry was a partner in the final bill, rather than its target.

We’re pretty sure South Park conservatives don’t sit around trying to figure out what Eric Cartman’s position would be on tort reform or the Central American Free Trade Agreement. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Democrats take cartoons far too seriously.

As Hank Hill has praised both Ann Richards and George W. Bush, one must question what his political affiliation is.

Personally, I think Hank is a conservative learning to exist in an increasingly liberal world.