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These Taiwanese bros do a better analysis of our political situation than any Australian journos.

I loved this so much that I am posting it from a PC. Apologies if y’all have already seen it.

Back in 2004, Steven Levitt asked ‘Why do crack dealers still live with their moms?’. One of the most fascinating (and entertaining) TED talks of all time.

coketalk:

It takes a special kind of narcissism to celebrate ignorance by comparing one’s self to genius.

reblogged from coketalk

jamesnord:

Norway prime minister Jens Stotlenberg, stranded in New York after volcanic ash closed airspace overseas, governs the country via iPad.

reblogged from jamesnord

If you were to make a Venn Diagram of the issues Tea Party members care about, and the issues Tea Party members are confused about, you’d only see one circle. Steve Benen (via southpol)

reblogged from southpol

‘The Sarah Palin Network’

When Neil Armstrong took his small step from Apollo 11 and looked around, he probably thought, Wow, sort of like Iceland—even though the moon was nothing like Iceland. But then, he was a tourist, and a tourist can’t help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there. When Iceland became a tourist in global high finance it had the same problem as Neil Armstrong.

[Icelanders] inhabited their remote island for 1,100 years without so much as dabbling in leveraged buyouts, hostile takeovers, derivatives trading, or even small-scale financial fraud. When, in 2003, they sat down at the same table with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, they had only the roughest idea of what an investment banker did and how he behaved—most of it gleaned from young Icelanders’ experiences at various American business schools. And so what they did with money probably says as much about the American soul, circa 2003, as it does about Icelanders. They understood instantly, for instance, that finance had less to do with productive enterprise than trading bits of paper among themselves. And when they lent money they didn’t simply facilitate enterprise but bankrolled friends and family, so that they might buy and own things, like real investment bankers: Beverly Hills condos, British soccer teams and department stores, Danish airlines and media companies, Norwegian banks, Indian power plants.

‘Wall Street on the Tundra’ - Michael Lewis’s excellent Vanity Fair article on Iceland’s economic collapse

Like the debate over climate change itself, the debate over climate economics looks very different from the inside than it often does in popular media. The casual reader might have the impression that there are real doubts about whether emissions can be reduced without inflicting severe damage on the economy. In fact, once you filter out the noise generated by special-interest groups, you discover that there is widespread agreement among environmental economists that a market-based program to deal with the threat of climate change — one that limits carbon emissions by putting a price on them — can achieve large results at modest, though not trivial, cost. There is, however, much less agreement on how fast we should move, whether major conservation efforts should start almost immediately or be gradually increased over the course of many decades. ‘Building a Green Economy’, Paul Krugman in the New York Times

I don’t have a read [on Sarah Palin]. I try not to make, or set opinions about people that I haven’t had any substantive interaction with. … I think it’s wonderful to have strong female voices out there, but I don’t know her.

- Michelle Obama

I love the First Lady. It’s perfect: no irony, no snark; do not inflate or take the bait; neutralize and move on. Welcome to the adults’ table. (via savingpaper, southpol)

reblogged from southpol

[President] Obama may be personally very appealing, but he has positioned himself all over the political map: the anti-Iraq war candidate who escalated the war in Afghanistan; the opponent of health insurance mandates who made a mandate to buy insurance the centerpiece of his plan; the president who stocked his administration with Wall Street insiders and went to the mat for the banks and big corporations, but who is now trying to present himself as a born-again populist. Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted. He is creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it widens much more he won’t be able to close it. Bob Herbert, “Obama’s Credibility Gap”, New York Times

By whose authority do the Standing Rules of the Senate govern the Senate? By the Senate’s alone. But what is the Senate, exactly? It is part of a larger entity, the Congress, that expires every two years after the entire House and one-third of the Senate stands for election. We currently have the 111th Congress. In Jan. 2011 we’ll have the 112th. In Jan. 2013 we’ll have the 113th. And so on. The first step in exercising the nuclear option, then, is for the president of the Senate (i.e., Vice President Joe Biden) to state, in effect, “Previous Congresses can’t tell this Congress what to do. Senate Rule 22 has no force because it was never agreed to by the current Senate.” Biden would then state, “Under Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, this current Senate may ‘determine the rules of its proceedings.’ I say we change Rule 22 to eliminate the filibuster. A risky parliamentary procedure might get health reform through the Senate. - By Timothy Noah - Slate Magazine (via indefensible)

reblogged from indefensible

Not treating Americans as adults has costs. For instance, it became the official policy of our federal government to try to make America “a drug-free nation” 25 years ago. After spending hundreds of billions of dollars and imprisoning millions of people, it’s slowly beginning to become possible for some politicians to admit that fighting a necessarily endless drug war in pursuit of an impossible goal might be a bad idea. How long will it take to admit that an endless war on terror, dedicated to making America a terror-free nation, is equally nonsensical? From an excellent Wall Street Journal article titled ‘Undressing the Terror Threat’

How to choose a Vice Presidential Candidate: McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, spotted Sarah Palin while searching the Internet for possible female vice presidential candidates.

In public, Palin looked like the game changer McCain had wanted, but in private, the authors say she was struggling to learn too much too fast.

“Her foreign policy tutors are literally taking her through, ‘This is World War I, this is World War II, this is the Korean War. This is the how the Cold War worked.’ Steve Schmidt had gone to them and said, ‘She knows nothing,’” Heilemann told Cooper. “A week later, after the convention was over, she still didn’t really understand why there was a North Korea and a South Korea. She was still regularly saying that Saddam Hussein had been behind 9/11. And, literally, the next day her son was about to ship off to Iraq. And when they asked her who her son was going to fight, she couldn’t explain that.”

(via zoewithtwodots)

reblogged from zoewithtwodots

I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by [Fox News president] Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to. Rupert Murdoch’s son in law Matthew Freud, quoted in yesterday’s New York Times.