Les Jones

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If you need something to go with your giant Cheeto, why not an animal cracker that looks like a goat having sex with a hippo?

Congress is considering a law that would increase the SUV exemption to $100,000. It's currently $25,000. The law only applies to vehicles that weigh more than 6,000 pounds. A Honda Accord weighs about 3,000 pounds. So, if you buy a colossally huge vehicle, you can evade the laws that apply to car safety (such as crash-resistant bumpers), evade the laws that apply to car fuel efficiency (trucks are held to a lower CAFE standard), and evade taxes on a lot of income ($25,000 now, $100,000 if the bill passes). The law was intended to reduce taxes on industrial and construction vehicles, but now it's a huge tax and safety loophole. Expanding it makes no sense.

A new study found no connection between condom availability and teen sex rates.

Bob Geldof is praising Bush's handling of Africa:

"You'll think I'm off my trolley when I say this, but the Bush administration is the most radical - in a positive sense - in its approach to Africa since Kennedy," Geldof told the Guardian.

The neo-conservatives and religious rightwingers who surrounded President George Bush were proving unexpectedly receptive to appeals for help, he said. "You can get the weirdest politicians on your side."

Former president Bill Clinton had not helped Africa much, despite his high-profile visits and apparent empathy with the downtrodden, the organiser of Live Aid, claimed. "Clinton was a good guy, but he did fuck all."

A woman who converted to Islam has requested that she not be required to show her face for her driver's license photo. See Eugene Volokh's law blog for the legal background. Now The Smoking Gun reveals the woman's face reports that the woman was arrested for child battery following her 1997 conversion to Islam.

Michael Totten has a great photo essay on Portland's architecture and new urbanism:

A new consensus developed in Portland a few decades ago after our progressive governor Tom McCall had the courage to kvetch in public about the "unspeakable ugliness" being built and strewn all over the place. The urban design code was scrapped. We started over, promising to sin no more.

An Urban Growth Boundary was established to separate city from countryside. Urban sprawl screeched to a halt, and it hasn't moved since. Not for thirty years has Portland expanded outward even an inch. Instead of sprawling outward, developers had to fill in the unused or underused land inside the city. (Want to encourage slum-renovation without having to pay for it? There's your answer. Three decades after the establishment of the Urban Growth Boundary, Portland has revitalized 100 percent of its slums for the straightforward reason that inner-city land cannot be neglected any longer in favor of sprawl.)

All building have to be built to the sidewalk (just like in the Victorian era!), which effectively bans strip malls and "Big Boxes" (like Walmart) which surround themselves with parking lagoons. Buildings must have windows at street level so that pedestrians are no longer subjected to sinister blank walls along sidewalks. Buildings must be mixed-use, with retail shops on the ground floor and apartments above. This way, people can go downstairs to get their groceries or their lattes instead of getting in their car and driving three miles to a parking lot.

Evan Nisselson looks at how camera phones will change the photography industry.