The Census Bureau estimates that the life cycle cost of the 2010 Census will be from $13.7 billion to $14.5 billion, making it the costliest census in the nation’s history.

“Do you mean he is taller than me am?” sarcastically barked Dr. Martin Rosenberg, my high school English teacher, to one of the students in our class.

John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, in an hour-long television documentary titled “Global Warming: The Other Side,” presents evidence that our National Climatic Data Center has been manipulating weather data just as the now disgraced and under investigation British University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit.

It’s not at all uncommon to watch a college basketball game and see that 90 to 100 percent of the players are black. According to the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport report titled “The 2008 Racial and Gender Report Card,” the percentage of black male basketball players in Division I was an all-time high at 60.4 percent. It was 45.9 percent in football and 6.0 percent in baseball.

Some expect Haiti’s 7.0 earthquake death toll to reach over 200,000 lives. Why the high death toll? Northern California’s 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake was more violent, measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale, resulting in 63 deaths and 3,757 injuries. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake measured 7.8 on the Richter scale, about eight times more violent than Haiti’s, and cost 3,000 lives.

Manmade global warming, for many, is an Earth-worshipping religion.

The essential feature of any religion is that its pronouncements are to be accepted on the basis of faith as opposed to hard evidence. Questioning those pronouncements makes one a sinner.

Here’s a sample of last week’s news reporting: “A new decade is about to start ...”, “What better way to start a new year and decade ...”, and “ABC ‘World News’ Decade Look-Back.” One would think that the first decade of the third millennium came to an end midnight Dec. 31 and the new decade began a minute after midnight.

Detroit’s (predominantly black) public schools are the worst in the nation and it takes some doing to be worse than Washington, D.C.

I’ve grown somewhat weary writing about the devastating effects of minimum wage laws but The Wall Street Journal’s “Black Youths Miss Out on Good Job News,” (Dec. 4, 2009) warrants another try.

Last year, my column “Global Warming Rope-A-Dope” (12/24/08) started out: “Americans have been rope-a-doped into believing that global warming is going to destroy the planet. Scientists who have been skeptical about manmade global warming have been called traitors or handmaidens of big oil.”

The ultimate constraint that we all face is knowledge — what we know and don’t know. The knowledge problem is pervasive and by no means trivial, as hinted at by just a few examples.

How many things in our lives would we like to depend upon the generosity and selflessness of our fellow man, and do you think we would like the outcome?

At Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Oct. 29 press conference, a CNS News reporter asked, “Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?”

Steve H. Hanke is a professor of Applied Economics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., and writes frequently for Globe Asia and Forbes magazine. Professor Hanke starts off his “Hu versus Sarkozy” article (Globe Asia, November 2009) with a warning.

According to Alfred Nobel’s will, the Peace Prize should be awarded to the person who: “during the preceding year, shall have done ... the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Americans are harder workers, more philanthropic, individualistic, self-reliant, anti-government than people in most other countries. We’ve turned what was an 18th-century Third World nation into the freest and most prosperous nation in mankind’s entire history. Throughout our history, United States has been a magnet for immigrants around the world. What accounts for what some have called American exceptionalism?

College education is a costly proposition with tuition, room and board at some colleges topping $50,000 a year. Is it worth it?

Rep. Diane Watson said, in praising Cuba’s health care system, “You can think whatever you want to about Fidel Castro, but he was one of the brightest leaders I have ever met.”

Former president Jimmy Carter said, “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.”

Michael Moore’s new film, “Capitalism: A Love Story” will be released next month. I’ve neither seen nor read reviews of the film, except for a short piece in the London Telegraph (9/6/09) titled “Michael Moore film calls capitalism evil.”

With the massive increases in federal spending, inflation is one of the risks that awaits us. To protect us from the political demagoguery that will accompany that inflation, let’s now decide what is and what is not inflation.

When parents plunk down $20, $30, $40 and maybe $50 thousand this fall for a year’s worth of college room, board and tuition, it might be relevant to ask: What will their children learn in return?

President Barack Obama won an unprecedented 96 percent of the black vote. That’s not much of a news story since blacks typically give their votes to the Democratic candidate.

“No one has a right to harm another.” Just a little thought, along with a few examples, would demonstrate that blanket statement as pure nonsense.

The U.S. Naval Academy’s PowerPoint display explains diversity by saying, “Diversity is all the different characteristics and attributes of individual sailors and civilians which enhance the mission readiness of the Navy,” adding that: “Diversity is more than equal opportunity, race, gender or religion. Diversity is the understanding of how each of us brings different skills, talents and experiences to the fight — and valuing those differences. Leveraging diversity creates an environment of excellence and continuous improvement to remove artificial achievement barriers and value the contribution of all participants.”

Here’s what I wrote in last year’s column titled “Global Warming Rope-a-Dope” (12/24/2008): “Once laws are written, they are very difficult, if not impossible, to repeal. If a time would ever come when the permafrost returns to northern U.S., as far south as New Jersey as it once did, it’s not inconceivable that Congress, caught in the grip of the global warming zealots, would keep all the laws on the books they wrote in the name of fighting global warming. Personally, I would not put it past them to write more.”

Last month, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed Senate Resolution 26 “Apologizing for the enslavement and racial segregation of African-Americans.”

Why did the founders of our nation give us the Bill of Rights?

The answer is easy. They knew Congress could not be trusted with our God-given rights.

Ward Connerly, former University of California regent, has an article, “Study, Study, Study — A Bad Career Move” in the June 2, 2009 edition of “Minding the Campus” (www.mindingthecampus.com) that should raise any decent American’s level of disgust for what’s routinely practiced at most of our universities.

“Live Free or Die” is the title of author and columnist Mark Steyn’s speech at Hillsdale College, reproduced in Imprimis (April 2009), a Hillsdale publication that’s free for the asking.