Do Not Get Out Of The Boat

Daily Kos has recently posted what may be the most eyeball-melting, brain corroding wingnut rap ever.  I’m not going to embed it here.  It’s that bad.  Don’t go watch it if you value any illusions you may yet possess about the possibility of the advance of civilization.  Any action you take from here — on [...]

“I knew I was going to take the wrong train….”

…”so I left early.” Thus sayeth that noted neutrino expert Yogi Berra, Bb.D. Because humankind cannot live by politics alone, here’s a bit of an off-angle reaction to the biggest news in physics since Big Al (as I thought of him through a decade of film-and-book making/writing on the good Dr. Einstein) looked out of [...]

Facts Matter (Education Division)

Kay over at Balloon Juice recently posted on Republican whining that our president thinks governing is actually something worth doing.  I agree both with her disdain for the president’s (and, in my view) our polity’s opponents, and her argument that in fact it is important to try to solve problems before they become crises. That’s [...]

Eine Kleine Sunday Light Reading

I’ve been uncharacteristically quiet the last several days, I know.  That’s what happens when a lot of years thinking about Albert Einstein brings one an invitation to the city of Medellin, Colombia to talk Big Al to the public. Medellin is a fascinating place, as it happens, though I didn’t get that much time to [...]

For rage and sorrow…

…You might want to check out Susan from 29′s diary over at GOS, in which she writes on the moral horror that was a Republican Presidential debate in which the audience cheered the death of an uninsured man — Susan’s brother, Steve Patience. I won’t say that the moment — or that audience — defines [...]

You Can Always Tell A Harvard Man (And Woman)…

…You just can’t tell how much damage they will do. The reality-based community took it on the chin again this week in a whole bunch of ways.  One that caught my eye came in this exchange, reported in TPM: “[I]f you want a role that has benefit programs for older Americans, like the ones we’ve [...]

Department of Cool: Housing Division

Not to go all MIT on y’all, but this piece from the news office hit my desktop today. The gist:  a design studio taught within the MIT Department of Architecture in 2009 posed the challenge of coming up with a house design that could be built for $1,000, with the idea that such housing could [...]

What Fallows Says

Here’s James Fallows on, as he puts it, the sexiness of infrastructure. The post gives a couple of examples of what it’s like to live with decaying infrastructure.  One of the cases Fallows considers is the possible role of a failure in the Russian air safety system in the crash this week that killed the Lokomotiv [...]

I Fired Dat Staff So I Could Hire Distaff

So — I have this great FDR/Eric Cantor post cooking, and another on some highly wonkish political science offering insight into the next election on the basis of analysis of 2008′s dinner dance, and much more good stuff besides, but… ….I’m sitting here contemplating (that’s a nice word) bourbon (descending steadily on the $/dram scale [...]

Why, Knock Me Down With a Feather: Megan McArdle is Still Always Wrong, Climate Science Edition

Warning:  This post is way too long.  I mean, really.  You have been warned. I’ve been off the McArdle beat for a while.  I find I need to take breaks if I’m to have any hope of (a) retaining sanity in the face of unanswerable questions implicit in our current media ecosystem, and (b) getting [...]