Yes, eight years after the invasion of Iraq, the country has been liberated from a corrupt and brutal one-party dictatorship, so that it can enjoy a new political system in which the people cast votes for their government, and then other people murder the officials of that government. And then still other people murder more people in reprisal. It’s sort of like instant-runoff voting, only in reverse, and with bullets.
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7 May 2011
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15 April 2011
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3 April 2011
Here’s another theory: the reason you see stories about the math-and-physics whiz kids, rather than about literary prodigies, is that the majority of American journalists and readers of journalism are so slack-jawed in their ignorance of math and physics that it seems plausible to them that a 12-year-old might be about to disprove Einstein, but they do consider themselves competent to judge whether a 12-year-old’s writing is a work of genius or not.
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30 March 2011
Fine. Let’s say they never get shot down. So: why did one crash? Each F-15E Strike Eagle cost $42.2 million in 2011 dollars. It’s kind of embarrassing to think that a ragtag dictatorship could shoot one out of the sky, but isn’t it more alarming for it to fall out of the sky on its own?
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29 March 2011
And this is how, in the course of 30 years, our political system has migrated so far in favor of corporate handouts that Ronald Reagan is now beyond the far left fringe of acceptable tax policy.
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9 March 2011
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2 March 2011
This approach to handling the illness of poor people is incoherent and irrationally expensive—the amount spent on ambulances alone is staggering—but it comes from a series of moral decisions. We do not believe people should be left to die without medical care.
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16 February 2011
When people do that kind of thing in other countries, taking up weapons in support of their particular causes, we tend to refer to them not as “activists,” but as ‘militants.’.And then when they use the weapons to murder somebody, sometimes we call them ‘terrorists.’
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8 February 2011
Someone will come up with a better SEO-gaming content farm. Someone always does.
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31 January 2011
Invoking the liberal position on Hosni Mubarak is about as relevant as invoking the Wiccan position.
