BatesLine Oklahoma headlines

BatesLine's choices in the 2008 election and links to other voter guides

Helps for Tulsa County voters including precinct locations and sample ballots

YouTube - Johnny Carson and Jack Webb

Sgt. Friday investigates the theft of clean copper clappers. (Via newsforme.)

V-22, CH-47 restarts after five-day hiatus

Sabotage is suspected at the Boeing factory in Philadelphia, where fuselages for the V-22 tiltrotor and CH-47 helicopters are built.

Businessweek.com: The 50 Top American Philanthropists

George Kaiser is 3rd at $2.377 billion, behind Buffett and Gates and just ahead of George Soros. Walton Family is 6th, T. Boone Pickens is 16th, David Koch is 25th, Charles Koch is 40th, and Henry Kravis is 44th. Depressing note: Most of the top philanthropists are very generous with left-wing causes and leftist approaches to solving problems. (Via Club for Growth.)

Hit & Run > Best Sports Stadium Name Ever? - Reason Magazine

The only two Republicans on the New York City Council want to rename the Mets' new stadium Citi/Taxpayer Field. Citigroup has a 20-year, $400 million naming rights agreement, but Citi's federal bailout amounts to multiple billions of dollars. (Via Club for Growth.)

Urban Review STL: Euclidean Zoning To The Extreme

Good discussion of the evolution of use-based zoning, from Euclid v. Ambler to the present, and why St. Louis needs a new land use code to go along with its new comprehensive plan.

Bloomberg.com: Worldwide: Taleb's `Black Swan' Investors Post Gains as Markets Take Dive

"Universa Investments LP, the Santa Monica, California-based firm where Taleb is an adviser, has about $1 billion in accounts managed to hedge clients against big moves in financial markets. Returns for the year through Oct. 10 ranged as high as 110 percent, according to investor documents. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index lost 39 percent in the same period.... 'The Black Swan Protection Protocol is designed to break even 90 to 95 percent of the time,' Spitznagel said. 'We happen to be in that other 5 to 10 percent environment.'"

Washington Times - BLANKLEY: Obama's health-care czar

Ousted Sen. Tom Daschle, expected to be appointed as Secretary of Health and Human Services, has written a book on how to nationalize health care stealthily. He also thinks medical technology is bad because it reveals health problems early enough that doctors can do something about it. And doing something about it is expensive. "Of course, for Mr. Daschle, the problem with such high-tech diagnostics is that it leads to treatment. He cites a study approving the proposition that there are too many angiograms being performed.... Cardiologists might think they were carrying out their responsibilities. But under the Daschle/Obama plan, political hacks appointed to the health board will decide whether your cardiologist is allowed to image your arteries, and if they find blockage, try to successfully treat it."

Project Liberty: What Is the Tytler Cycle? Where Is the United States In This Cycle?

An 18th-century historian identified 9 phases through which societies cycle: Bondage, Spiritual Faith, Courage, Liberty, Abundance, Selfishness, Complacency, Apathy, Dependence, and back to Bondage. Where is the US?

Beware the church of climate alarm - Miranda Devine - Opinion - smh.com.au

"But the real fear driving climate alarmists wild is that a more rational approach to the fundamentalist religion of global warming may be in the ascendancy - whether in the parliamentary offices of the world's largest trading bloc or in the living rooms of Blacktown.

"As the global financial crisis takes hold, perhaps people are starting to wonder whether the so-called precautionary principle, which would have us accept enormous new taxes in the guise of an emissions trading scheme and curtail economic growth, is justified, based on what we actually know about climate.

"One of Australia's leading enviro-sceptics, the geologist and University of Adelaide professor Ian Plimer, 62, says he has noticed audiences becoming more receptive to his message that climate change has always occurred and there is nothing we can do to stop it." (Via Alarming News.)

Children are born believers in God, academic claims - Telegraph

"Dr Justin Barrett, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford's Centre for Anthropology and Mind, claims that young people have a predisposition to believe in a supreme being because they assume that everything in the world was created with a purpose.

"He says that young children have faith even when they have not been taught about it by family or at school, and argues that even those raised alone on a desert island would come to believe in God." (Via Don Singleton.)