Month: May 2010

The generic House ballot (sans Rasmussen):

Development expert William Easterly rides the lecture circuit:

I feel kind of like I am on a long personal intellectual journey trying to figure out how to reconcile my compassion for the world’s poor with my painfully honest realization that there is no reliable evidence on exactly what to do to end poverty. Each new public lecture is trying out a solution to the conundrum on a smart audience, and then they educate me some more to take the next step (which will be tried in the next lecture).

I am trying to convince people that rigorous skepticism is a creative force because most of the damage is done by overconfident people who thought they knew the answer when they didn’t.

Nige meets "four fine Wessex Saddleback pigs" … in London:

My heart leapt – as whose would not?

A Flickr stream here.

Hale Stewart crunches some numbers:

As a result of the increase in initial unemployment claims, the decrease in the euro and the decrease in the index of leading economic indicators, caution is warranted going forward.

TED passes along a wonderful talk about idealism and the potential of the human race:

In this rare clip from 1972, legendary psychiatrist and Holocaust-survivor Viktor Frankl delivers a powerful message about the human search for meaning…

A reader writes:

Sestak beats back the entire Democratic establishment supported only by the progressive netroots, guts and the people of Pennsylvania. In Kentucky, moderate Conway beats conservadem Mongiardo, netroots cheers. In Arkansas, Blanche Huds… er Lincoln, one of the left's leading villainesses this season, is forced into to a runoff by netroots hero Halter, who pulls off the neat hat trick of winning the conservative counties! In three marquee Senate primaries progressives beat back establishment Democrats, and arguably preferred stronger general election candidates.

And the big message the mainstream media gleans from the night? ,,,,Democrats must rush to the center, based on a race in a congressional district in Pennsylvania where they hand out tickets if you don't have a dead deer strapped to the roof of your car. Meanwhile, three big progressive victories are obscured by a very very shiny object, now setting off a somewhat painful glare.

Speaking of which, one might be tempted to ask Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers, "How's that Randy Pauly thing working out for ya?"

How David copied Tony (or the enduring triumph of British cynicism):

Aubade, by Philip Larkin

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
– The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused – nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels.

Continued here.

(Photo: Rain drops fall on a angel statue in Arnos Vale cemetery on April 29, 2010 in Bristol, England. By Matt Cardy/Getty.)

A reader writes:

I like what you had to say regarding Rand Paul straying "outside the media and political comfort zone." I guess my problem with Paul isn't what beliefs he holds (I don't think he's completely wrong about the Civil Rights Act, just naive). Rather, it's that, in the end, he went right back to the GOP talking points of Obama being "un-American," as if that's the only way a Republican can say that he disagrees with Obama's intervention in the private sector. An intellectual really ought to know better than that.

That's why Paul annoys me so much: a purportedly intellectual candidacy, one that is supposed to be based on everything that the current Republican leadership is not, still uses the same kind of hate-filled rhetoric to, as Obama himself put it, "put people down instead of raising this country up."

Paul is not immune to this — don't think for a second his calling Obama's BP reaction "un-American" wasn't at least a feint towards the birthers among the Tea Party supporters — and should be properly reamed for it. Additionally, whether or not his brand of libertarianism is ready for prime-time, it does him a great disservice to champion Rachel Maddow when she's being completely favorable to him, only to get all pissy when she stops lobbing softballs at him. I don't think Rand Paul is a racist; I don't even think he wants to re-open the Civil Rights Act for debate. But I do think that, for all the establishment-bucking bullshit that has been fed to us by his campaign, he still looks and sounds very much like a Republican, not an independent voice.