In Which I Find Myself In Total (and Gobsmacked) Agreement With Jeffrey Goldberg

If you want to know why supporting Israel — in any meaningful sense of the term — has to be different from supporting Likud/Netanyahu, check this out from Goldberg.  (If you don’t think that supporting Israel in any context is a good idea — well, we disagree, but you can still marvel at the Netanyahu [...]

For A Good Time In Cambridge: TNC on Tuesday edition

Just to add to Ta-Nehisi Coates day at the blog, one last reminder:  any Balloon Juicers in the greater Boston area are more than welcome at Ta-Nehisi’s reading/talk at MIT tomorrow night — Tuesday, 29 November.  The festivities start at 7 in MIT’s building/room 6-120.  (Interactive map here.) Ta-Nehisi will be starting from his work-in-progress, [...]

“a bias toward knowing what I’m talking about”

That’s Ta-Nehisi Coates’ credo as stated in the post disembowling Andrew Sullivan that John linked to below. In that piece, Ta-Nehisi writes of his having mostly avoided the race-intelligence pit o’ fail, because he does not to his own satisfaction know enough about the technical arguments there.  As John says, that doesn’t prevent Ta-Nehisi from [...]

Mnookin and Me

Hey, all: This is just a reminder of tonight’s internet radio and/or Second Life* farrago, me and Panic Virus author Seth Mnookin in conversation.  Here’s Seth’s take on what we’ll be doing. For my part, the first goal is to get some distance into why it’s so hard to get scientific thinking — and not [...]

By The Way, David Brooks Is Still Always Wrong

I know this is already long since fishwrap, but amidst the many disembowelings of David Brooks discovery that he has always been at war with Eurasia   always  loved Mittens, I have to rage, rage, at the relentless, endless, fetishization of the deepest, most degrading fantasy of the right.  No, not that one.  Nor that one [...]

A Thought I Wish I Could Get Out Of My Head

I read in TPM that Herman Cain said this in the debate tonight: “I do not agree with torture, period,” Cain said to start the exchange. “However, I will trust the judgment of our military leaders to determine what is torture and what is not torture. That is the critical consideration.” Asked specifically about waterboarding, [...]

The Political Folly of the Middle

Jim Bales here, with my thanks to Tom for the loan of his soapbox. Megan McArdle has a new post up at The Atlantic, entitled “The Financial Folly of Fairness” that makes some important points, including: The solution to the problem [of the Great Depression] turned out to be throwing money at it: going off [...]

The Apostasy of Jennifer Rubin

Jennifer Rubin is one of those people one simply doesn’t need to read.  Not, or not simply because she’s never right; but rather because, almost always, she is boringly, predictably wrong –  in prose that saps one’s will to live, strung together into simulations of argument that one could lay out in advance  like squares [...]

I’m Shocked! Shocked To Find That There Are Neutrinos Going On Here

[Disclaimer -- sort of: I've been feeling the increasing need to think past the seeping pustule that is our media/politics fail lately, so I've been getting my head back to the stuff of my day job, science writing.  Of course, it's impossible to think about science in the US today without drifting onto political territory, [...]

Creeping Soshalism Watch, or Another Blow to the “Let Them Die” Approach to Health Care

First, the good news: President Obama will issue [has issued] an executive order on Monday that the administration hopes will help resolve a growing number of critical shortages of vital medicines used to treat life-threatening illnesses, among them several forms of cancer and bacterial infections. The order offers drug manufacturers and wholesalers both a helping [...]