Quotes of the day

Geithner should never have been appointed to anything. He's been wrong about just about everything for 15 years. Of course he's going to lose his job, because as Mr. Obama realizes that Geithner doesn't know what he's doing, he's going to look for somebody else because he doesn't want to take the heat himself. So he's going to look to blame somebody, and the obvious person is Geithner.--Jim Rogers

[The head of the UN's climate experts] responds to concerns about the peer review process being stacked by saying . . . all the work was peer reviewed. I am open to being convinced that I should not care about hacked information, and I am a confirmed believer in AGW. So why can't, or won't, the climate change community mount a more compelling defense?--Megan McArdle

Every time I hear of a scientist refusing to turn over his data set on the grounds that the critics are just going to search for flaws, my spidey sense goes off--all of the recent famous cases of academic fraud and misdemeanors involve exactly this behavior. By comparison, look at Levitt and Dubner, or even John effing Lott, who handed over their data to amateur critics like Steve Sailer, and got schooled over coding problems. That's how serious scientists act.--Megan McArdle

In 1939, the Retail Dry Goods Association warned Franklin Roosevelt that if the holiday season wouldn't begin until after Americans celebrated Thanksgiving on the traditional final Thursday in November, retail sales would go in the tank. Ever the iconoclast, Roosevelt saw an easy solution to this problem: he moved Thanksgiving up by a week.--Ethan Trex

The Dilbert Principle observes that in the modern economy, the least capable people are promoted to management because companies need their smartest people to do the useful work. It's hard to design software, but relatively easy to run staff meetings. This creates a situation where you have more geniuses reporting to morons than at any time in history.--Scott Adams

It was strictly Belichick's feeling Tom Brady would make 2 yards in that situation. I felt the same way. I felt they had an 80 percent chance to make it and run out the clock. That's why I was hoping they'd punt.--Archie Manning

Even the trivial salutation which the telephone has lately created and claimed for its peculiar use—'Hello, hello!'—seems to me to have a kind of fitness and fascination. It is like a thoroughbred bulldog, ugly enough to be attractive. There is a lively, concentrated, electric air about it. It makes courtesy wait upon dispatch, and reminds us that we live in an age when it is necessary to be wide awake.--Henry Van Dyke