OVER THE TOP. Commentator Paul Craig Roberts has a tendency to the hyperbolic, particularly on matters involving race relations. Eugene Volokh has a good takedown of a recent Roberts column on Trent Lott.

"I'M STILL HAVING FUN". Brett Favre decides to continue with the Packers. Fan sentiment tends to be favorable to the team, despite its losses the past two weeks. Favre's attitude is correct. When any job loses all elements of fun, it's time to quit.

PHATIC DRIVEL. Peter Kaminski reports that Words-L are looking at methods of attracting new meebers (er, members), possibly including weblogs. Notionally, the list is the English Language Discussion Group, but that's way down on the list of topics. Do have a look.

SHRIMP WILL LEARN TO WHISTLE. The SCSU Scholars have some suggestions for their administrators. Alas, all require administrators with some backbone.

PUBLISHED, BUT PERISHED ANYWAY. Professor Newmark found coverage of the Modern Language Association job meetings in New York. (Does the Modern Language Association schedule like the American Economic Association, with the job meetings alternating between an Acela Express city one year and a touristy destination elsewhere the next?) Most accurate quote: "Most dissertations are badly written." Why people insist on referring themselves as "Doctor" on the basis of a learning experience escapes me. Least accurate quote: "The famous line about the M.L.A. is that you’ve never seen a convention where people drink so much and f*** so little." The economists have the literary types beat, folks.

INTERESTING SPORTS ANALOGY. Here's the Left Leaner on shocking upsets: "This sort of thing happens all the time. We constantly see scenarios in which one competitor is cast by the pundits as enormously inferior or unqualified, when the fact of the matter is the discerned differences between the opponents are more hyperbole than reality. And then the so-called underdog wins, and crow is on the menu. The Dems learned this in 2000 and apparently decided to eat leftovers last November.

Did Karl Rove watch the game?"

Perhaps the Miami Hurricanes had Bill Daley as defensive coordinator? Good on the Big Ten, by the way. The Badgers were able to beat Colorado in much the same way that they beat Northern Illinois.

FIRE OSAMA'S APOLOGIST. No. 2 Pencil discovers a site called Conservative Pagan that provides inter alia a link to a petition calling for Senator Patty Murray (Idiotarian - Washington) to resign.

DISCRIMINATING FOR EQUALITY? The SCSU Scholars point to back-from-vacation No. 2 Pencil's skepticism about actually existing affirmative action, where she gets right to the heart of the matter: it's the feeder schools that are the problem. There will not be comparable performance of university students from different school districts until the school districts are comparably effective, beginning with kindergarten.

TEN WORST CORPORATIONS. The Multinational Monitor's list is up, with program notes. The list isn't particularly coherent: would Caterpillar not be on the list if the Israeli Defense Forces purchased Terex 'dozers, or got some on sale from Belarus? Some companies are on the list for lowering prices, and others for raising prices. 'Twould be nice if there were some coherent basis for judging whether corporate plunder involved plundering the suppliers or plundering the customers.

PAUL KRUGMAN, WARHAWK? Professor Krugman applies a bit of game theory to the North Korean unpleasantness. "Let's be clear: North Korea's rulers are as nasty as they come. But unless we have a plan to overthrow those rulers, we should ask ourselves what incentives we're giving them." Is Krugman suggesting that there is in fact no such plan? Scroll down ... "So here's how it probably looks from Pyongyang:

The Bush administration says you're evil. It won't offer you aid, even if you cancel your nuclear program, because that would be rewarding evil. It won't even promise not to attack you, because it believes it has a mission to destroy evil regimes, whether or not they actually pose any threat to the U.S. But for all its belligerence, the Bush administration seems willing to confront only regimes that are militarily weak.

Can I interpret this in any way other than as an assertion that the Bush administration is being pusillanimous?

"The incentives for North Korea are clear. There's no point in playing nice — it will bring neither aid nor security. It needn't worry about American efforts to isolate it economically — North Korea hardly has any trade except with China, and China isn't cooperating. The best self-preservation strategy for Mr. Kim is to be dangerous. So while America is busy with Iraq, the North Koreans should cook up some plutonium and build themselves some bombs.

Again: What game does the Bush administration think it's playing?"

So, Professor, what is the dominant strategy?

FASTER THAN PEER REVIEW. Atlantic Blog discovered a particularly inane George Monbiot attempt at economics and checked some of Monbiot's numbers. Meanwhile, Indiawest got into the act, observing that Samizdata's didn't exactly have to fisk Monbiot, "simply quoting Monbiot was enough." (The comments section at Samizdata offers links to others who have weighed in, do go there.) Mindles Dreck opted to provide a fisking, and points to yet more analysis at Layman's Logic.

DINNER IN THE DINER, NOTHING COULD BE FINER. Amish Tech Support weighs in on the proposal by airlines to sell food to those who wish to buy it rather than issue rations to everybody. His preference: brown-bagging it. That used to be the reality on the railroads. Any number of trains running from South to North earned the nickname "Chicken Bone" account the favored finger food of coach passengers. Railroads were OK with that, in fact the dining cars tended to offer expensive, albeit good food, and the traditional placement of the dining car was between coach and first class (Pullmans on overnight trains, parlor or club cars on day trains). It's difficult for a number of reasons (imagine carting all that unoccupied space around at takeoff, for openers) to provide a dining section on an airplane, although such a configuration might make loading and unloading easier (I despise the practice of boarding first and business ahead of everyone else, then compelling the coach passengers to make their way through those sections, where beverage service is in progress and blocking the aisles. A dining section at the vestibule, with first forward and coach aft, would provide for better traffic flow while allowing the suits to have their pre-takeoff libations undisturbed by traffic.) The custom of providing food on airlines used to be a dimension of competition: if it is illegal to compete in price, nonprice competition breaks out. The International Air Transportation Association (the cartel for the transatlantic services) once had to have a meeting to define 'sandwich' to serve coach passengers, after the Scandinavian Air System got aggressive about putting things on bread. With deregulation, there's price competition and less incentive to offer better (or any) food.

UPDATE: See this entry at The Corner.

COMPETITION IN SPACE. Amish Tech Support notes the Chinese space program and offers a prediction: "Also, when they build their own space station it will be designed to be manned with enough of a support staff to allow lab experiments without some idiot Chinese Space Administrator cutting the budget of the emergency escape vehicle. They've been learning from all of our mistakes, and it'll be interesting to see mow many countries will throw support to the Chinese after declaring the ISS a camel-with-three-humps failure." There's learning by doing, which involves making mistakes, and there's bureaucratic inertia. It's been thirty years since Apollo 17. Has the development of space exploration progressed anywhere near as rapidly as aviation from 1927 to 1957, or home computing since 1980?

CREDIBLE COMMITMENTS. Lenghty Den Beste post on the limitations of bargaining and arbitration. It even touches on a topic I used on a recent final exam: why are there posted prices in U.S. stores, for items that sell at negotiated prices elsewhere?

THERE ARE LIMITS. Critical Mass reports on a potential breach of contract at the University of Maryland, College Park. A disappointed student has lodged a protest at No Indoctrination, complete with citations of relevant catalogue language.

WORKING ON THE RAILROAD. Sixteen feet of subroadbed in place from Monday night to Wednesday evening. Ballast board and track to follow. There's no dismantling the tracks when the Christmas decorations come down around here.

TWENTY MOST ANNOYING CONSERVATIVES give or take a few ties. These are Pandagon's picks (via Cal Pundit.)

THREEFER? African state, democratic government, offshore oil for sale. More here.

THE FATAL CONCEIT and how Professor Bunyip killed it.

THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET OF THE TRANSGRESSIVES. "Why in order to be serious, do things have to be ugly?," is the topic for Charlie Sykes today. Doesn't have to be that way. Consider the Norfolk and Western Railway's steam locomotives. Definitely serious, but not ugly. Artists and intellectuals, take note.