Thomas Gold vs Rachel Maddow
So, there was this pointer on the front page to a Rachel Maddow send-up of some conservative crazies (you know, once that wasn't redundant... or at least not so obviously so):...
View Articlebreakdown of upcoming Senate primaries
The electoral-vote.com website currently has a very thorough breakdown of what's going on with the Senate primaries, including dates of States with upcoming primaries, and write-ups of all the places...
View ArticleKrugman vs The New York Times
So, in Paul Krugman's latest he takes on Paul Ryan's latest: http://www.nytimes.com/...Krugman makes the point that Ryan pretends to have opinions backed up by studies, but doesn't really... Krugman,...
View ArticleTowards a smarter "we"
About a month ago, there was some discussion by the likes of Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman about Dan Kahan's work on what he calls "cultural cognition" (meaning something like "tribal bias"). This is...
View Article1% gets the 97%
So, you know that famous study that found that 97% of climate scientists are convinced that human-induced global warming is for real? It turns out it's famous only among a select few, which we might...
View ArticleA Not Pro-Israel Primer
It's easy to forget that not everyone has been keeping up with the Israel story, but the pro-Israel propagandists have been out of late, serving as a reminder, so here's my outline...
View ArticleA Not Pro-Israel Primer (revised)
This is a brief outline of the Israel story for people who haven't been keeping up.This is a revision to an older version, and in the event that this is HRed into oblivion, you can also find it here,...
View ArticleSimple Problems: The Middle East
On the Israel-Palestine issue I think it's easy for a casual observer to conclude from complexities of discussions about the issue that the actual issue is complicated, but arguably it is not at all...
View ArticleBoycotts of Israel
US public opinion is rapidly turning against Israel's military actions, but political candidates opposed to them are not yet on the menu of alternatives. There is however, a growing boycott and...
View ArticleIsrael's Original Borders: Defensible?
One of the excuses offered by Israel's government for it's continued occupation of territories outside it's pre-1967 borders is that this is necessary for the nation's security because the original...
View ArticleRebecca Bowe: Israel protest at Oakland port
The recent protest of an Israeli cargo ship at the port of Oakland was successful in part because of the cooperation of dock workers unions with the protesters...
View ArticleOstrander at the Nation in favor of GMOs
I feel like the millennium is at hand: The Nation is taking on the anti-GMO activists, with an article by Madeline Ostrander that asks the question Can GMOs Help Feed a Hot and Hungry World?, with the...
View ArticleWolves cooperate
Uh oh. In a recent issue of Science (August 22, 2014), Virginia Morell, reports Wolves cooperate but dogs submit, study suggests.You realize what this means, don't you?"Are you a dog or a wolf? Five...
View ArticleEarly Voting Starting: Iowa Senate Close
Today, over at one of my favorite political web sites,electoral-vote, they point out that early voting is already starting:While election day is two months away, North Carolina is sending out ballots...
View ArticleConsensus Worldview and Subversion of the Media
On the Israel-Palestine issue our political culture and our view of the world diverged from reality decades ago, and we are only now beginning to recover. One of the reasons this is happening now is...
View ArticleThe Climate Change Race: China vs US
A common conservative reaction to climate change issues has been "Oh, yeah, well what about China!", and sometimes you even see pundits hinting that us enlightened Westerners need to put some pressure...
View ArticleOakland Mayor: Siegel or Kaplan, please
Here in Oakland, CA we've got an important Mayoral race going on right now, with a good chance of ejecting an incumbent that deserves to be ejected. We're fortunate to use "ranked choice voting"...
View Articleanti-solar, in the anti-nuclear style
Inspired by a recent piece by Gregg Levine:If there was such a thing as anti-solar news written the way anti-nuclear news is, it might look like this...
View ArticleReasons to vote: California Secretary of State
If you live in California, and you haven't registered to vote yet, you can do it now, online.Note to 17-year olds: if you're going to turn 18 by the time of the election on November 4th, you can...
View ArticleThere's always a reason to vote
You may not be a person who needs to hear this, but there's probably someone in your life who does: there's always a reason to vote.If you don't know what the reason is yet, that means a lot of other...
View ArticleFrom outside the Overton Window.
It's a tricky businsess, writing persuasively about complex subjects where your conclusion puts you outside the bounds of commonly accepted opinion (at least for a big subset of the target...
View ArticleKrugman takes on Amazon. Can we boycott them now, please?
I've been doing an anti-Amazon rant for so long, I'm afraid it's not very fiery these days, but the spectacle of the Krugthulhu attacking Amazon's latest nasty maneuvering inspires me to go on...If you...
View ArticleInfluence of Religion on the Opinions of the Right
Dan Kahan (who is not to be confused with Daniel Kahneman, but good luck with that) has once again put some interesting data up on his blog at the Cultural Cognition project.At the dailykos we often...
View ArticleAllow me to explain feminism to you
Or something about feminism anyway.It's often observed that my fellow dick-holders and I are not shy about sharing our opinions. But the corollary is that the other gender out there is not speaking up...
View ArticleCandidates not named Clinton or Warren
Here are three suggestions for Democratic presidential candidates for 2016 whose names aren't Warren or Clinton...
View ArticlePresidential candidate ideas: Ambassadors
Continuing a discussion about potential female candidates for 2016, here's an idea for finding other possibilities: Raid the diplomatic corps. Few of us know the names of these people, but by my count...
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In the style of Conrad Veidt: Posner on Torture
This evening I propose that we all celebrate the release of the torture report by doing dramatic readings of great conservative intellectuals, in the style of Conrad Veidt.I suggest starting with some...
View ArticleChristian Torture
From a recent piece by D.C. McAllister in The Federalist, Yes, Christians Can Support Torture:“A bad man is worse than a beast, and is more harmful.” Aquinas’ words are definitely in line with how God...
View ArticleTPP: Obama against Warren, Reich, Baker, Krugman... but with GOP
There's been very little mention of what Obama's State of the Union speech has to say about the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty proposal.As Robert Reich has commented:If you haven’t heard much about...
View ArticleBoxer & Gillibrand Bills Address Campus Rape
Barbara Boxer was on Democracy Now the other day, talking about some bills to address the campus rape issue...
View ArticleMinimum Wage and Independent Bookstores and the Amazon Monopoly play
One more bookstore on San Francisco's Valencia Street (the second to last) is about to close, Borderlands Books, a Science Fiction bookstore with an attached cafe. The usual story in San Francisco is...
View ArticleThe Trade Deal That Isn't
The first thing to understand about the TPP is that it isn't about free trade: the trade barriers between these countries are already low.The second thing to understand is that we don't understand what...
View ArticleYou Can Be Too Cynical
Occasionally you hear people intoning that everyone knows that politicians say anything to get elected, but then once they're in office it's a different story. Paul Krugman often points out that this...
View ArticleThe ultimate Brooks popcorn moment
If you too perversely enjoy the David Brooks show, what may be the ultimate popcorn moment in the final endgame is racing towards us (sorry, that's more Tommy than Bobo):David Zweig, writing at Salon...
View ArticleBomb Weather: Radical Extremists of the 70s
A new book by Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage, very thoroughly covers the history of a style of violent radicalism that grew out of the 60s. It discusses groups active in the 70s (most famously, The...
View Article7 Ways You Can Use History Without Fucking Up
Neustadt and May's Thinking in Time (1984) is something like a business management advice book except that it's written for presidential committees who would rather not, for example, destroy the...
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Chinatown Tour
A visitor to the Bay Area I'd met said that they'd just gone to Chinatown in SF, and commented dispargingly that they found it "very touristy". I really didn't know what to say: yes, Grant Street is...
View ArticleThe Future of Global Warming from Ten Years Ago
This is a trilogy of Kim Stanley Robinson novels about how humanity deals with global warming: 40 Signs of Rain (2004) 50 Degrees Below (2005) 60 Days and Counting (2007)KSR is probably most...
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Going Nuclear on CO2
The argument in favor of nuclear power at this point is pretty obvious: global warming is bad news, so a major power source that doesn't emit greenhouse gasses sounds good, right? An odd...
View ArticleIn Praise of Ayn Rand. No, really.
Yeah, Ayn Rand was a crazy lady who wrote some pretty crazy books, but crazy is not necessarily a bad attribute for a book. This woman wrote some novels that became some of the critical, enduring...
View ArticleThe New Obamacare: the Clean Power Plan
You've no doubt heard about Obama's "Clean Power Plan", which if it survives legal challenges from our compulsively obstructionist friends on the right, "aims to cut emissions by 2030 to 32% below 2005...
View ArticleThinking Even Slower
Daniel Kahneman (who is not to be confused with Dan Kahan, but good luck with that) is the author of a book called Thinking, Fast and Slow which, among other things, discusses the way we all have two...
View ArticleSmall Fears: Micro-drones and overreactions
Consider this scenario-- which remains, as far as I know, science fiction: a United States president is assassinated by a tiny micro-drone.Now what happens?
View ArticleThe German Energy Transition: Renewables vs Nuclear
One of the things many environmentalists have seized on with excitement in recent years is Germany's announcements about phasing out nuclear power in favor of wind and solar.After beginning this...
View ArticleThe Two Gatekeepers
These days here in the "reality-based community", we like the idea of following the consensus opinion of scientific experts; but it could be argued that this is a form of the classical logical fallacy...
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Cosplay on the Carrier: Kraken Con Fall
This year the small local anime/cosplay/etc convention Kraken Con held a second event in the Fall, and in a rather brilliant move it took place on the USS Hornet, an aircraft carrier museum parked off...
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San Francisco Seals
The municipal trash cans on the streets of San Francisco come adorned with the official city seal, the symbol of the city. It's the only place most citizens will ever see this symbol, and then only if...
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We Own You
It used to be a standard design goal for computer software to give the user the feeling that they're in control. The trend these days is in the opposite direction: they want you to know who's boss....
View ArticleAnti-Nuclear Amory vs Atomicrod, and Other Fun with Credentials
We all use credentials (and more generally, reputation) as what I call a "first stage filter", a quick way of doing triage on the cacophony of different voices competing for our collective...
View ArticleTrump trump trump
Trump.Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump.Truuuuump! TrRUUMMMPppp! TRUMP!Trumptytrumptertrumpoidaltrumsteramatrumpoverit. TERUMP!!!Trump.And but Trump!
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