Monday morning roundup

I've got to side with the tortoises on this one, and not just so that people can photograph it. Turning it into a populist argument over the value of a local vs. a rare, endangered species is not going to get you anywhere.

A great turn of phrase from the People's Republic:

"In its announcement last week, Beijing said that state-owned groups would be reorganized to allow outside financing so that they could “live on their own rather than being attached to government departments as parasites.”"

Do billionaires, as a group, have a social function?

Have we definitively entered an era of scorched earth politics?