Found this gem via Matt Taibbi: “With an absolutely straight face, Rand Paul compares public health care to slavery. He says that if everyone has a right to health care, that means that people can come to his office – Rand is a doctor, after…
Morning. A crew of painters is walking around outside the house. Two humans (Chris and Jen) and two cats (Maia and Minnow) are watching from inside and preparing for work. Chris: Who wants breakfast? Breakfast for cats!Minnow: (excited circling)Maia: (stony silence)Chris: Maia, do you want…
I saw a good talk by Jane McGonigal at PAX East. She spoke based on her book Reality is Broken, which is about how many of the traits developed in playing games (particularly video games) are terrifically useful to succeeding at life. One of her…
I rely you people to correct me when I screw up – and I made something of a howler in that last post. Fortunately, Krugman’s actual column today caught it. I claimed that the current debate is about how best to reduce the size of…
I got some good traction from a recent blog post by Krugman about the dangers of treating medical care as a commodity, sold by doctors to consumer/ patients. The thoughts this inspired just don’t seem to fit in Facebook’s ever shrinking comment window. Here’s the…
I see a lot of argument online about budgets and government priorities and so on. A lot of it confuses me because people are using things that look like math – but are actually just bad argument and yelling. I’m going to try to summarize…
That big chewy hairball of rage that I wanted to hawk up the other night – but was too jetlagged to choke out? Jim Wright nailed it. There’s plenty of profanity in there, as there should be. It’s appropriate to cuss. We’re dealing with a…
After writing that last post about Libya, I find that my heart has hardened somewhat. A piece of it comes from further reading on the specifics of the situation in Libya, including Friedman’s excellent piece on the two sorts of nations we meet in that…
I think that the US and the rest of the world are probably doing about as well as can be expected with Libya. There is no unconditionally correct answer here. No matter what we do, people will die violently and chaos will win the day…
I got to spend some time last week in the urban catastrophe that is Detroit. While I was there, I felt the usual sadness – seeing the skinny bones of a once rich and proud city. I find that words are inadequate to convey the…