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Monthly Archives: May 2014

Soylent? Really?

I make it a regular point to read the Times Tech Section, which appears every Thursday, the same day Apple posts a new free App on the App Store. Thursday must be a day favored by the tech gods. Anyway, today it took a while for me to decide that today's column by Farhad Manjoo […]

Things look up in Kentucky

Seems Mitch McConnell has a little problem; one many of us have seen coming for some time. The Kentucky version of Obamacare has been a huge and popular success there, so Mitch has to pass through the eye of a needle so small it would daunt the tiniest camel. He has chosen to do so […]

Yet another false equivalency

In wandering around the internet today I came upon an article that directed me to this quite able takedown, by David Shorr of TPM, of yet another pundit who blames our current political dysfunction on both parties equally. I couldn't resist some low hanging fruit left un-plucked by Shorr. He quotes John Schindler, the plague […]

Hey Joe, your 15 minutes are up!

Isn't it about time that the media let Sam Wurzelbacher slip back into the obscurity from which he came? Who cares what he thinks, and I use the word “thinks” advisedly.

Demagogues hard at work in Europe

This morning Paul Krugman warns once again about the rising of the right in Europe, the result of, ironically enough, conservative to right wing (in normal times) economic nostrums. It’s hard to imagine war in today’s Europe, which has coalesced around democratic values and even taken its first steps toward political union. Indeed, as I […]

It’s graduation time, and the pundits are whining

It's graduation time, which means graduation speakers, which means controversy about graduation speakers, which means inevitable claims that protest against graduation speakers somehow implicates the right of free speech. The example that provoked this post is here (Open Season on Free Speech), but its brothers and sisters are legion. The fact is that despite the […]

Well, that’s all right then

These people make Walmart look good. Yesterday the New York Times revealed that the people building NYU's campus in Abu Dhabi were systematically abusing the foreign workers doing the actual work: Facing criticism for venturing into a country where dissent is not tolerated and labor can resemble indentured servitude, N.Y.U. in 2009 issued a “statement […]

A typical case of American blind justice

Every once in a while you see a story like this and you wonder. I'd like to think it couldn't happen here, but this took place in Washington State, not Alabama: At the very end of last year, Shaun Goodman left a bar in Olympia, Washington in his Ferrari and led police on a high […]

Piketty

Blogging has been slow here, as I've been occupied making my way through Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, attending conventions (still not finished with those), and watching episodes of Doc Martin on Netflix. I finished Capital today. (*Doc Martin* will take a little longer) It's an easier read than one might think. No […]

25% normal

I’ve been busy lately, what with attending meaningless nominating conventions and such like. So, no posts of substance lately. You must, therefore content yourself with entertainment: excerpts from the Idaho Republican primary gubernatorial debates. So, one normal guy. That’s not too bad. Did you catch the look on the moderator’s face?