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We live in a hyper-technological age in which information is cheap and ubiquitous. I am no Luddite, and I have benefited greatly from social media, but we must remember that both cheapness and ubiquity are traits indicative of poor quality. Not only do our Twitter-fried brains have 140-character attention spans, but I am convinced that [...]
By the standards of American political discourse, the recent first-ever televised debate between Britain’s candidates for Prime Minister was a polite and muted affair. Gordon Brown bumbled through with his trademark style of dreary pragmatism, while the favored David Cameron stumbled badly due to his insistence on looking good and speaking with all the policy [...]
No matter your partisan persuasion, everyone agrees that the long-term fiscal situation for the USA looks pretty grim. Our parents – without a trace of malicious intent– have mortgaged our futures in their large houses, large cars, and their speculative stocks; our banks have peddled our stability away through risky lending; our Presidents (chiefly FDR, [...]
During George W. Bush’s presidency, liberals suffered from well-documented Bush Derangement Syndrome, a sort of foaming-at-the-mouth hysteria at anything(!) the brash and clumsy Texan dared to do. There were protests and pickets and widespread despair that the country had been irrevocably lost to a body politic comprised entirely of Pat Robertson’s brains and Dick Cheney’s [...]
At the current rate of Democratic decline, come November we may be ‘treated’ to a Republican-majority Senate, and evenly split House, and Obama. Incompetent Democratic leadership, general dissatisfaction over a lingering recession that would hurt any party in power, and a wave of intellectually incoherent, pseudo-populist Tea Party hysteria are all equally to blame. Without [...]
Last year I got a rather large and painful cyst on my neck. Since I didn’t have health insurance, I went to a Seattle walk-in clinic to get it checked out. The fee for the 10-minute appointment was $250. When I told them I didn’t have insurance and asked if I could pay cash, they [...]
Most people, myself included, occasionally adhere to two conflicting ideas simultaneously. But after reading an article in the New York Times today about my beautiful yet sometimes intellectually stunted hometown, I needed to comment on one recurring theme: the supposedly imminent currency collapse. My teabagger friends on Facebook often post about the guns they’re buying [...]
After the silliness of the past few weeks, I feel compelled to weigh in on the science and politics of climate change. Lately we’ve seen serious breaches of professional ethics, embarrassing retractions from the IPCC, and an epic snowstorm that delighted skeptics., among other things. The intellectual level of our public debate is depressing enough, [...]