The italian idiom for a low blow (also for an unexpected blow) is “un tiro mancino” literally a left handed blow. Manchin hit all the other Democrats with a tiro mancino yesterday. Notably “mancino” means left handed so, hard as it is to believe, he had ancestors who were lefties as in left handed. Aside […]
I am mainly linking to this fairly important article by Dan Diamond in The Washington Post. Diamond quotes many people arguing that the US really should do more to get everyone in the world who is willing to take the vaccine vaccinated. I am going to move on quickly to how this could be done, […]
There is an interesting discussion about a topic where I know especially little: K-12 education. Within it, there is a narrow discussion about whether it makes sense to try to teach statistics to people who don’t know calculus. This is a clear question. However, it seems that the people who discuss it skip a much […]
Senate Republicans are being dispicable as usual. They manage to combine bad intent and pathetic incompetence in a display which must delight all right thinking people. The issue is the debt ceiling. For months Mitch McConnell has asserted both that the debt ceiling shall and must be raised and that he plans to blame Democrats […]
One non horrible effect of the Covid 19 epidemic is that people have become interested in immunology. I am pleased by this, but have the sense that journalists over-simplify. Roughly they act as if the immune system consists of circulating antibodies and killer t-cells. I think this post might be of some interest to some […]
Many months and many mutations ago, I argued that one shot of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was enough to protect against the original Sars Cov2. Since then delta. It doesn’t especially evade, but is more generally fit and I thought (and probably didn’t post) that two shots are needed given delta. Now omicron. Pfizer just claimed […]
I think every word of Matthew Yglesias’s post on Omicron, Omar Bradley, and why the hell aren’t we investing in pandemic prevention is brilliant. I think it is publicly available (I didn’t pay) and advise just clicking the link. For those who ignored the above advice, I would like to focus on two main points […]
“Slow Boring” is Matthew Yglesias’s substack. I don’t subscribe. It’s about the money. I can afford it, but I don’t like the fact that Matthew Yglesias makes so much money. I am extremely envious. I admit it. I think this is a very very common problem. Many people have asked Matthew Yglesias how he makes […]
“tlon Uqbar orbus tertius” is an excellent story by Jorge Luis Borges. In it, he imagines a world in which all that exists are minds and ideas. He refers to the assertion that we live in such a world made by the Reverand George Berkeley. In Borges’s wonderful Obis Tertius, objects can be multiplied if […]
As always, I am bloviating on a matter where I am not expert. I do sometimes wonder what the hell we should do with the strange human invention called intellectual property. It can be argued that it was a brilliant invention. For example the US Constitutional Convention wrote “To promote the Progress of Science and […]