jfleck at inkstain

A few thoughts from John Fleck, a writer of journalism and other things, living in New Mexico

Remember Prop. 8

Breeders unite: [W]hat’s wrong with all the straight folk? Do you have something better do with with your Thursday night than all these gay people? I doubt it – I’m sure they’ve all got fabulous dinner parties to attend or those awesome bars to go on Castro St and I’m sure their tiny dogs need [...]

Canadian Economists for a Carbon Tax

Economists sometimes get a bad rap – the unfair belief that they worship at the alter of markets above all else, ignoring real problems as a result. In fact, a great deal of contemporary economics is focused on the opposite – understanding the places where markets fail, and helping craft policies that can make up [...]

Food

Food, according to the Economist, is now 10 percent cheaper than it was a year ago.

Tucson Water Wars

Tony Davis had a story last week on Tucson’s approach to meeting (or not meeting) the water needs of new developments on its perimeter: A city water policy that had been described as “trick-or-treat” for new developers has been replaced by a tougher stance in which City Hall has denied service to four projects in [...]

Thanks, Jim

Jim, your check’s in the mail: I often disagree with the Albuquerque Journal. Some say they kill good trees to make a bad paper. But frankly, I don’t know what I would do with out them informing me of real news every day. (Don’t worry, if you click through you’ll see I stripped out most [...]

Hillerman

Before I came here – before I even thought about coming here – I read Hillerman’s Fly on the Wall. It was my first introduction. After I got here, I used The Great Taos Bank Robbery as my formal introduction. We were a degree of separation apart, and I treasure the fact that the guy [...]

Don’t Celebrate That Cheap Oil

David Strahan in the Independent: A falling oil price has real short-term benefits. Petrol has dropped below £1 per litre for the first time in almost a year; domestic heat and power bills should eventually follow; food prices and inflation should also ease, giving the monetary authorities greater freedom to cut interest rates. But these [...]

The Rhetorical Attractiveness of “Energy Independence”

David Henderson on energy independence: [T]he case for being “dependent” on other countries for oil is the same as the case for being dependent on other countries for bananas or coffee. At some tariff-protected price, the United States could be self-sufficient in bananas or coffee. If the price were high enough, someone would grow bananas [...]

I Write About Iris

My friend Jim Belshaw, who writes a newspaper column and has long had a love-hate relationship with blogging, sent along an Atlantic essay by Andrew Sullivan about blogging. Sullivan was one of the first bloggers I read who deserved the label, as it has now come to be known. But before blogging was the thing [...]

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere

On the cost of nuclear power.

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