Stable Genius Liberal

We need a 5th Geneva Convention

The first step to ending the Global War on Terrorism should be a Geneva Convention that defines what a terrorist is, what states can and can not do to fight them and what rights they have when captured. Until there is an agreed upon standard definition of terrorist, states are free to declare almost anyone… Continue reading We need a 5th Geneva Convention

House of Un-Representatives

This Republican House is almost like a parallel government, sitting in for some fantasy nation created in talk-radio land.

Sad and true. Worth a read.

Krugman: Not Everything Is Political

in practice it turns out that many conservatives are unwilling to concede that Keynesian macro has any validity to it, or that you can sometimes run the printing presses without unleashing runaway inflation, because they fear that any such admission would open the doors to much wider government intervention. But that’s exactly my point! They’re letting their views about how the world works be dictated by their vision of the kind of society they want; they’re politicizing their economic analysis. And that’s why they keep getting everything wrong.

This is why we can not have a policy discussion. Because one side doesn’t care about how the world actually works, only the kind of world they wish to live in.

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Bush brought an unprecedented level of systematic dishonesty to American political life, and we may never recover. Think about his two main “achievements”, if you want to call them that: the tax cuts and the Iraq war, both of which continue to cast long shadows over our nation’s destiny. The key thing to remember is… Continue reading Untitled

Why I wish my daughter had been vaccinated

until she caught pertussis – which turns out to mean whooping cough. Which turns out to mean months of pain. It is a highly contagious disease that comes in stages, but that horrible, hacking cough that kept her up all night went on for so many weeks that she was prescribed an inhaler. She was past her first birthday, so unlikely to die of it, like newborns can, but it’s disgusting to watch your child needlessly suffer like that. My parents had to come to help us, and then we grownups all succumbed to the revolting condition too. Of course, having wanted to avoid filling her body with chemicals, I ended up giving her all the medicines I could find.

This is just sad. Convinced of grand conspiracies and alternative health, she keep her child unvaccinated and that results in months of suffering and pain.

Conservatives Had Better Hope George W. Bush Was a Dummy

if conservatives want us to believe that the United States blundered through a major terrorist attack, two major failed military adventures, dismal economic performance, and then finally an epic economic collpase all while under the watch of a very bright and attentive leader then it seems like a much deeper failure of the movement.

What’s the Best Way to Help the Long-Term Unemployed? Full Employment.

Worth a read.

Keith Hennessy on Bush and the financial crisis.

One of my students asked “How involved was President Bush with what was going on?” I smiled and responded, “What you really mean is, ‘Was President Bush smart enough to understand what was going on,’ right?”
The class went dead silent. Everyone knew that this was the true meaning of the question.

I used to joke about someone explaining the collapse of Lehman to Bush and him asking how big a tax cut do we need to save Lehman?

Moore’s Law and the Origin of Life

As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law. Now geneticists have extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by this measure, life is older than the Earth itself.

Queue the creationists claiming this as proof of divine intervention.

Yemeni Tells Senators About ‘Fear and Terror’ Caused by U.S. Drones

For the first time, the Senate heard from someone who lives in a village where U.S. drone strikes are believed to have killed civilians