That Mitchell and Webb Look: Homeopathic A&E That Mitchell and Webb Look: Lifestyle Nutritionists | Continue reading
Thursday, October 8, 2015 "So long and thanks for all the fish" I've fallen into this trap before. I'm driving down the road channel surfing the radio and I come across a snippet of something that sounds interesting on one of the NPR stations. I stop and listen long enough to sta … | Continue reading
There's a certain kind of "planning" that people indulge in when talking about things they know they will never do. It can be traveling to an exotic location, changing careers to a glamorous profession, or even leaving one's spouse for an attractive coworker. We've all seen peopl … | Continue reading
[Blogger is having one of its weird days, so the formatting on this post will be a bit... quirky.] Adam Something (a highly recommended skeptical YouTuber) recounted how, after doing a video on the Saudi Xanadu, Neom (which we discussed here), one of the paid consultants reached … | Continue reading
[written before the election, but it still seems valid] This pair of posts from almost nine years ago superficially would seem to have nothing to do with our ongoing discussion of the New York Times' catastrophic failures covering politics over the past few years. Other than a pa … | Continue reading
This is Joseph. I found this piece by Josh Marshall to be a really good reply to the waves of doom and gloom that I have been seeing lately. It's really thoughtful. I especially liked: Even the history isn’t as simple as you may think. It’s actually very hard to convert a democra … | Continue reading
A rare math nerd/transportation nerd twofer. From XKCD | Continue reading
Check out Steven Levitt's Wikipedia page. Steven David Levitt (born May 29, 1967) is an American economist and co-author of the best-selling book Freakonomics and its sequels (along with Stephen J. Dubner). Levitt was the winner of the 2003 John Bates Clark Medal for his work in … | Continue reading
[Picking up where we left off with our long neglected CSI:Mars thread.] The way we discuss and think about the future of space has come to be dominated by a nonsensical mixture of magical heuristics, sci-fi tropes, inappropriate analogies to colonialism and the "settling" of the … | Continue reading
Going through the draft folder, I realized we had left this thread half finished -- there's a lot to mock here -- but rather than just jumping back in, here's the start. I've done some googling and I still can't find any evidence that the Antarctica anecdote actually happened. Tu … | Continue reading
Nothing like going back and reading the original transcript. (Plus original comments) The wonderful thing about long-range predictions is that, by the time you can actually check them for accuracy, everyone has lost interest and is busy listening to your new round of long-range p … | Continue reading
I obviously have no special insight into what goes on in the minds of the rich, but I have to assume that in a society that bends over backwards to meet your every need, being told that you have to grow old and die just like everyone else must be particularly exasperating. Mark E … | Continue reading
Ten years ago at the blog we had a post on a trick for cooking banking metrics based on combining different data sources that mature at different rates. Four years ago I pointed out this example to Kaiser Fung who incorporated it in one of his posts, and I decided that would be a … | Continue reading
From the Financial Times: | Continue reading
Looks like it's time to wrap things up on the election. We have a few threads with some posts still sitting in the scheduled or draft folders. There's definitely more to say about what's going on at the New York Times and about Elon's misadventures as a political operative, thoug … | Continue reading
This has been a recurring theme of the discussions Joseph and I have been having about the election. When the question of how things were going came up in conversations with friends and co-workers, my standard response has been that there were plausible scenarios where either can … | Continue reading
Dharna Noor writing for the Guardian: Climate experts fear Donald Trump will follow a blueprint created by his allies to gut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), disbanding its work on climate science and tailoring its operations to business interests. Joe … | Continue reading
[From Wednesday, October 30, 2013] Just in case you don't know the story: The War of the Worlds is an episode of the American radio drama anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was performed as a Halloween episode of the series on October 30, 1938, and aired over the … | Continue reading
[Written 9/30/24] Just as the Nuzzi story started to deflate, Ben Smith managed to pump it back up I had hoped to avoid writing about last week’s big media scandal. We were scooped, to Max’s eternal regret, by Oliver Darcy’s excellent new newsletter, Status, after we ignored a We … | Continue reading
[I wrote this before the events in Springfield, but I think this piece has aged considerably better than Bender's so I'm running it as is.] One of the signs of dysfunctional organization is that incompetent people thrive as long as they are adept at being wrong in the right way. … | Continue reading
Obviously, anything having to do with the Ebola outbreak will take on an added significance given what happened a few years later, but the part that jumps out to me is that this wasn't early example of the Straussian breakdown and other trends in the GOP that would become the dom … | Continue reading
Mort Sahl Mocks The Presidential Candidates in The Upcoming 1968 Election | Continue reading
Mort Sahl Mocks The Presidential Candidates in The Upcoming 1968 Election | Continue reading
Highly recommended video from Tim Miller of the Bulwark. There are at least a couple of reasons you should watch this. First, the ads shown and discussed from the Harris campaign are among the most disturbing and provocative you've ever seen, and I mean that in the right way. The … | Continue reading
One of the points we have been hammering for a long time now is that much, possibly even most of the impact of the Dobbs ruling will come from its secondary and tertiary effects. For the moment, we are keeping the discussion very narrow and leaving out issues like rape and incest … | Continue reading
A quick google search shows that 2014 was the year that Andreessen went big on Bitcoin. Crypto wasn't on our radar at the time, but had we been paying attention, we wouldn't have been all that surprised that this guy was involved. Wednesday, October 22, 2014 "The skeptics are wro … | Continue reading
[Written 9/29/24] Mark Robinson posing for a photo next to a cardboard cutout of Trump and Melania. pic.twitter.com/ZMIsdP506Z — PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) September 28, 2024 Q: Are you going to pull your endorsement of Mark Robinson? Trump: I don't know the … | Continue reading
If you're interested enough in politics and history to read this post, you should definitely take a few minutes and check out this bit by Mort Sahl on the Hollywood Palace (sort of a poor man's Ed Sullivan Show, but not without its notable moments). Listen for the Reagan referenc … | Continue reading
Tesla finally had its robotaxi debut, the new product launch that was supposed to save the company. It did not go well. Hey Elon, Can I have my designs back please? #ElonMusk #Elon_Musk pic.twitter.com/WPgxHevr6E — Alex Proyas (@alex_proyas) October 13, 2024 (On a related note, D … | Continue reading
Hope he's okay. https://t.co/WGhGteFpjm — Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) October 15, 2024 Even for Trump, this was bizarre behavior and sufficiently erratic to be newsworthy. Three weeks before the election in a tight race, one of the candidates abruptly ends a swing state town ha … | Continue reading
This is a unique ad for a unique presidential election and I have to admit, I may have missed its larger significance on first viewing. Take a minute and watch this. It is very well done and, unless I'm missing an obvious counterexample, unlike anything we've seen before My first … | Continue reading
Michael Cieply writing in 2016. [Emphasis added.] Having left the Times on July 25, after almost 12 years as an editor and correspondent, I missed the main heat of the presidential campaign; so I can’t add a word to those self-assessments of the recent political coverage. But the … | Continue reading
Josh Marshall tweeted a recommendation for Johnson's monologue about the debate and it does justify the build-up. Pound for pound, though, I might be more impressed with the one he did for This American Life about a would-be right wing media racist troll who failed for the most u … | Continue reading
Instead of minting 35 one-trillion-dollar coins, we'll just have one 35 trillion-dollar cocktail napkin! I'm for it! Goodbye debt! https://t.co/RzNcALCp7X — Dan Froomkin (PressWatchers.org) (@froomkin) September 23, 2024 Today's [9/24/24] New York Times gave us an excellent case … | Continue reading
If you're trying to understand how the anti-abortion movement got this extreme, one of the key parts of the story fell in place in 2015 with a series of political attacks on Planned Parenthood, suggesting it was mainly in the business of harvesting fetal tissue. Below are our thr … | Continue reading
The typical reader never makes it past the front page for most stories. Words those readers will miss regarding this article: Trump; Vance; MAGA; Greene; QAnon; Loomer; far-right. To its credit, the New York Times ran a hard-hitting story about Donald Trump's cognitive decline, b … | Continue reading
We are already starting to see waves of revisionism with people who were giving what now looks like horrible advice going back and suddenly (and sometimes not so subtly) tweaking and selectively editing their former positions. In addition to being deeply dishonest and annoying as … | Continue reading
The publisher and editors of the paper record have told us ad nauseam how seriously they take the threat of a second Trump presidency and how conscientious they are about doing their job, but if you want to know what's really important to them, you should probably consider what e … | Continue reading
Quick recap. Almost immediately after the Dobbs ruling, a standard narrative formed pushed heavily by Politico and the New York Times which argued that the Supreme Court's decision would have very limited impact on the upcoming midterms and diminishing influence going forward. Wh … | Continue reading
Finally talking about Trump's speeches. Just to review, Saturday and Sunday Donald Trump gave a couple of speeches which draw all pretense of being a short of a cry for fascism. We talked about this Monday. Paul Campos also had an excellent post which included an appropriately ou … | Continue reading
In case you missed it, over the weekend former president Donald Trump gave a couple of speeches that were filled with racism, lies, violent fantasies, and calls for what would be considered by all but the most technical definitions, fascism. They were bizarre, frightening, and un … | Continue reading
Over the weekend, Donald Trump gave a pair of speeches filled with lies and violent fantasies, racism, authoritarian and sometimes overtly fascist proposals. That alone should make the speeches newsworthy. We also saw delusions, loss of focus, bizarre boasts and odd fixations, an … | Continue reading
WATCH: “This experience helped me see how Black women like me die needlessly… This is government and political interference in private health care decisions…” Kaitlyn Joshua testified powerfully about how Republican abortion bans almost killed her. #ForcedBirthNation pic.twitter. … | Continue reading
From our ongoing "why is this not a bigger story?" series: Breaking it down: People in Trump's camp give three primary reasons he's hitting the road less this time, Axios' Sophia Cai reports: He's a known quantity. The campaign feels less need to define him or his candidacy for v … | Continue reading
Always good to start with a joke. Since 2014... - Gawker, which did such a great job reporting on Stanley was killed by Peter Thiel. Thiel was then given the chance to defend himself in the NYT. - Stanley finally left and got what was probably a huge chunk of VC money to co-found … | Continue reading
Maggie Haberman tells NPR that there is an "industry" dedicated to "attacking the media" from the left for its Trump coverage, which is "undermining faith" in journalism. There is no such industry. Just a bunch of people who want better journalism.https://t.co/qviwtuln70 pic.twit … | Continue reading
I don't want to spend too much time on this – – it has already gotten far more coverage than it merits – – but while the story itself may not be that important, it has important implications. And let's be honest, it is a great deal of fun, a freshly baked and fragrant soufflé of … | Continue reading
[Added 9:41 pm] Like we said, the Harris team moves fast. New ad we’re now airing across North Carolina https://t.co/NrvGNqaAYo pic.twitter.com/ECIkYpc5w6 — Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 20, 2024 _______________________________________________ I was planning on doing an abortio … | Continue reading