Actually it’s the town, Clinton, not the senator. But, given all the recent pastor hysteria, the Google headline made my eyes pop for a split-second. She has absolutely no connection with this sorry affair whatever.
“We Are Clinton”
The best anti-Clinton ad since the 1984 parody. Chilling and fucking hilarious at the same time:
Your Race Or Mine?
Personal genomics meets facebook:
23andMe, a personal genomics startup in Mountain View, CA, is about to unveil a new social-networking service that allows customers to compare their DNA.
The View From Your Window
Nouakchott, Mauritania. 1.30 pm.
Ross And Sam
Ross dings Sam Harris over his characterization of T.D. Jakes and the prosperity gospel:
From the point of view of Christian orthodoxy, obviously, this sort of thing is deeply theologically problematical. From the point of view of a hardened materialist like Sam Harris, though, the sort of religion T.D. Jakes is selling is exactly the kind of religion that he ought to like.
The World Is Blind
Our global financial system has become so staggeringly complex and opaque that we’ve moved from a world of risk to a world of uncertainty. In a world of risk, we can judge dangers and opportunities by using the best evidence at hand to estimate the probability of a particular outcome. But in a world of uncertainty, we can’t estimate probabilities, because we don’t have any clear basis for making such a judgment. In fact, we might not even know what the possible outcomes are. Surprises keep coming out of the blue, because we’re fundamentally ignorant of our own ignorance. We’re surrounded by unknown unknowns.
When A Brain Scientist Suffers A Stroke
If you have time, this video lecture is stunning. Money quote:
"How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?. In the course of four hours, I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. On the morning of the hemorrhage, I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my life."
Bonus prop: a real human brain. And she survived to tell a riveting story. I came away with a powerful love of the right side of my brain. I’m so exhausted by the left right now.
Weimar Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe holds elections this Saturday. Inflation is at 200,000 percent:
A journalist friend I was traveling with, N., said that on Friday, he had lunch at a hotel in Harare, where a local beer cost 2 million Zimbabwean dollars (less than $1). He passed by the hotel after work the same day and the same beer was going for more than 4 million.
The Abyss Looks Back
What we are witnessing is a controlled experiment in modern campaigning: eliminate policy differences between two candidates; space out the primary schedule so that it remains empty for seven weeks, thereby creating a political-news vacuum in which the candidates and their supporters continue to give speeches, hold press conferences, or blog nonstop; and subject every word to the scrutiny and amplification of the twenty-four-hour news machine. The predictable result is that two appealing politicians will quickly start to lose their lustre, until, by the time Pennsylvania gets to vote, on April 22nd, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will seem like the smallest, meanest, dirtiest, lowest, most dishonest candidates ever to run for office in the United States.
What’s Happening In Iraq?
Beats me. Here are, so far as I can tell, the two most coherent explanations for what seems like a serious outbreak of warfare and violence:
a) the success of the surge, giving the Maliki government confidence to take on Shiite militias in Basra and Baghdad;
b) the failure of the surge, as the lack of any real political progress is leading rival Shiite forces to struggle for power as they sense the US draws down.
"Everyone’s still guessing now. And anyone who claims that they’ve figured out whether this is going to be good or bad already, I think, is guilty of wishful thinking or just premature analysis at best."
Cole‘s latest. I’m not sure anyone really knows. Here’s hoping Petraeus has more of an idea than the commentators.
(Photo: An Iraqi shopkeeper looks at his damaged shop in a market, burned during last nights clashes between Mahdi Army fighters and Iraqi forces, in the impoverished Shiite district of Sadr City on March 26, 2008 in Baghdad, Iraq. Clashes erupted between militiamen loyal to the Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and Iraqi and U.S forces in the Sadr city Shiite district. Four civilians were killed and many more wounded in the clashes. By Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images.)
