Matt Yglesias is one of those people who just ooze smug condescension. As an example there’s this recent tweet: If I understand the news out of Canada correctly, Ukraine could simply park a bunch of trucks along the key border routes and it would be impossible to clear them and...
Francis Turner
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We’re some 6 months into the Wuflu pandemic and science and medical research has taught us a lot about the virus and the disease it causes, but scientific research doesn’t move in a linear direction and findings get retracted, invalidated and so on. Hence, unless you are a...
The origin of the Wuhan coronavirus has always seemed a little underpants gnomes business-plan like with vagueness on some of the middle parts. I think it is fairly certain that the original reservoir from which the virus developed was a colony of horseshoe bats. And there seems little...
Somewhere on the book of feces I encountered comments that could be summed up by “Communism wasn’t that bad and the US is worse for those people at the bottom than communism was”. There was also mention of how under communism everyone had a job and housing was free...
Sometimes you have to feel sorry for Herr Hitler. The Fuhrer got a terrible rep as a genocidal tyrant but in terms of 20th century murderous tyrants he is—at best—in the top 3. The same in fact goes for things like ecological and economic mismanagement. Fascism a.k.a. National...
There’s a meme posted on the book of feaces about converting what Bob Cratchit in Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol” earns to current US dollars and comparing it with a worker on minimum wage today. That meme (image below) is in fact completely wrong. but I suspect the...
Berthold’s Brecht’s famous poem Die Lösung* (The Solution) suggests that the government should dissolve the people and select new ones. Until now, and despite regimes like Pol Pot’s Kampuchea, I had always assumed this was so obviously sarcastic than no actual government...
Some twenty plus years ago when I first passed my driving test in California the lady at DMV in San Jose pointed out that I hadn’t filled in the voter registration form that was part of the drivers license form. I explained to her that as I had (at the time) an L1 visa I...
There’s an interesting NY Slimes apologium for Clinton’s email disaster that claims that it is not actually worse that Watergate as certain people, e.g. A Mr D. Trump, have claimed. The piece is written by one of the watergate lawyers so there’s a certain amount of...
Everyone and his dog has theories on how Weiner got the Abedin/Clinton emails and what their significance is. I’m no different. Here’s my speculative take. What I suspect happened was this. Abedin had a laptop onto which she installed an email program (e.g. MS Outlook) that...