Via Jim Henley, who has an adorable new pup, this TED presentation with Ian Dunbar is well worth your time:
Good stuff.
by John Cole| 25 Comments
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Excellent Links
Via Jim Henley, who has an adorable new pup, this TED presentation with Ian Dunbar is well worth your time:
Good stuff.
by John Cole| 88 Comments
This post is in: Artists In Our Midst, Excellent Links, Open Threads
I just got my prints that I ordered from the last time we had one of these (I got two nice pictures from 30fps), have them all framed up and hanging in my home office. They really look sharp.
At any rate, been a while since we had one of these, so I thought I would put another one up. If you are an artist and have wares for sale or stuff you just want to share, throw it in the comments section. Who knows- someone might be looking for what you have to offer.
Also, don’t worry if you go into the spam filter, there is no need to post twenty times. I’ll check in every hour or so and clear you out.
by John Cole| 19 Comments
This post is in: Excellent Links
Via Wonkette, you too can make your own Kenyan Birth Certificate.
by Tim F| 74 Comments
This post is in: Excellent Links, Media, General Stupidity
Tom Levenson gives McMegan’s latest far more time and space than her work deserves. Still, someone has to answer the nonsense, and Tom is an excellent writer. Go read and enjoy.
I don’t read McArdle much because I know she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and the glibness of her ignorance and the infantile quality of her ideology (that brand of libertarianism present in populations that include my nine-year-old and that can be summed up “you can’t tell me what to do”) piss me off. Why read annoying, uninformed –if glibly written — dreck?
But Andrew Sullivan, who is one of the most infuriatingly variable bloggers in the quality of his bullshit detector, pointed me to this post by McArdle, calling it a “must-read.”
Well, if I must, I must, and so I did.
McArdle’s upward trajectory would make less sense if Ross Douthat had not already shown that her mix of casual, right-tilting obliviousness and cheap moralizing has a paying audience in senior news editors. I guess that as long as respectable rags have to keep some sort of conservative on hand, glib and dense sells better than bitter and hateful. These days the rightwing bench isn’t exactly brimming with intellectual honesty.
***Update***
It is worth pointing out that many right-of-center writers exist who should be considered intellectually honest. Greg Djerejian and Daniel Larison come immediately to mind. Andrew Sullivan counts for relentlessly airing every reasonable perspective on an issue. Rick Moran qualifies better than any other rightblogger I can recall. These writers all consistently write ideas worth reading, and more or less to a man movement conservatism has written them off as hopelessly compromised (one could say impure). That’s not an accident.
by John Cole| 76 Comments
This post is in: Excellent Links, Military
I find stories like this fascinating:
The United States military has spent billions on hardware, like signal jamming technology, to detect and destroy what the military calls improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, the roadside bombs that have proved to be the greatest threat in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, where Sergeant Tierney is training soldiers to foil bomb attacks.
Still, high-tech gear, while helping to reduce casualties, remains a mere supplement to the most sensitive detection system of all — the human brain. Troops on the ground, using only their senses and experience, are responsible for foiling many I.E.D. attacks, and, like Sergeant Tierney, they often cite a gut feeling or a hunch as their first clue.
Everyone has hunches — about friends’ motives, about the stock market, about when to fold a hand of poker and when to hold it. But United States troops are now at the center of a large effort to understand how it is that in a life-or-death situation, some people’s brains can sense danger and act on it well before others’ do.
Aside from the fact that a certain individual kind of ruined the notion of going with gut feelings, I honestly do believe there is something to this. It is that little internal trigger that says “this is a bad idea” that every one of us has experienced.
by Tim F| 11 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Excellent Links, Politics, Torture
Glenn Greenwald: A torture inquiry that tasks a special prosecutor with looking exclusively at interrogators who overstepped John Yoo’s memo remains an awful compromise.
Kevin Drum: Ginning up public support for health care reform works better if you put some effort into selling it.
Back to grant writing.
Blog Posts That I Would Write If I Had Free TimePost + Comments (11)
This post is in: Excellent Links, Food
This thread over at TNC’s is all kind of win because it is such a ridiculous topic, but I find myself unable to avoid comment. Let it be known- mayonnaise is delicious, and miracle whip is a petroleum byproduct. I’ve thrown sandwiches from a deli out the car window after I have had a bite and tasted miracle whip when I asked for mayo.
Miracle whip is not a food product. It is a chemical.