This is pretty amazing.
Guess Spanish teachers all across the country now have to add “No iphones in class on test day” to their syllabus.
by John Cole| 39 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
This is pretty amazing.
Guess Spanish teachers all across the country now have to add “No iphones in class on test day” to their syllabus.
This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Glibertarianism, Get off my grass you damned kids
For fun, list the things you would rather do than watch this:
Check Out a Stossel Special Tonight on Politicians’ Broken Promises
Posted on December 17, 2010, 5:13PM | Nick Gillespie
Sweet fancy Moses! Christmas comes early to libertarians thanks to Fox Business and Fox News Channel!
First up, at 8PM ET is Freedom Watch’s Reason-palooza featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, and your humble narrator yakking with the great Judge Andrew Napolitano for an hour about what it means to be a libertarian.
I once watched about 3 minutes of a Bloggingheads episode featuring Althouse and Matt Welch before I attempted to strangle myself with my mouse cord.
by John Cole| 75 Comments
This post is in: Gay Rights are Human Rights, Military, Assholes
Apparently Manchin is still digging in:
Four key GOP senators who have announced their support for a “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal are prepared to join Democrats in voting to let the bill proceed, as long as Congress first deals with a measure to fund the government, aides to the four said Friday.
The aides said Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Lisa Murkowski and Scott Brown will vote Saturday to end debate on the ban on openly gay and lesbian people in the military if the Senate passes a stopgap spending bill, a continuing resolution to keep the government funded.
The four have previously said that bill must be approved first.
The Senate is currently working to craft a temporary spending bill, made necessary after Democratic leadership pulled a $1 trillion spending bill after Republicans abandoned their support of it.
The four senators’ support for the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal would ensure the 60 votes needed to clear the way for the bill toadvance even if Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, votes against it, as is expected.
I’m of two minds on this. The first is that the Manchin team realizes how stupid and ham-handed their initial response to their no-vote on cloture last week was, and that their public statements just made Manchin look like an idiot. “I need more time to gauge the opinions of WV” and that other nonsense just made him look like a rookie, and they know it. So now they have decided to latch on to the whole “we support repeal but not while troops are in the field” nonsense (seriously- when are American troops NOT in the field?), because at the very least that sounds like a principled argument. Like many in Washington, they’ve decided it is better to look stupid than weak, so they are sticking to their guns and this bullshit excuse rather than just admitting they had no argument and voting to end cloture.
The second option is that he’s just decided that sticking it to gay people is good politics in WV.
He might be right on both accounts. I don’t know.
Via twitter, I see that Steve Clemons was chatting with Manchin, and should have a story on that conversation soon.
by DougJ| 39 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
For Nick Gillespie.
Update. Sort of related, since there’s a music video here: Captain Beefheart is dead at 69 (h/t).
by DougJ| 165 Comments
This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute, We Are All Mayans Now
I’ve been hearing this stuff from the NRO crowd, most notably Chris Hitchens’ “tough-minded” orc-like understudy, Mark Steyn, about how Europe was turning into “Eurabia”, a Muslim-dominated continent. I had assumed there was at least a glimmer of truth to it, that the Muslim population might reach, say, 20% sometime reasonably soon. Turns out it’s all total bullshit:
The great sine qua non of Mr. Steyn’s argument is the idea that Muslims have more children than the rest of us. His article is based on a claim he has made repeatedly, including in a bestselling book, that Europe will have a plurality of Muslims, perhaps 40 per cent of the population, by 2020.
This number appears to have been plucked from space. Here’s the reality, which you can easily look up: Slightly more than 4 per cent of Europe’s population is “Muslim,” as defined by demographers (though about 80 per cent of these people are not religiously observant, so they are better defined as secular citizens who have escaped religious nations).
It is possible, though not certain, that this number could rise to 6 per cent by 2020. If current immigration and birth rates remain the same, it could even rise to 10 per cent within 100 years.
But it won’t, because “Muslims” don’t actually have more babies than other populations do under the same circumstances.
To repeat: there is some chance the Muslim population of Europe (where “Muslim population” includes secular, non-practicing immigrants from Muslim countries) might reach 10% within a 100 years but it probably won’t. And that’s the cause of this “soon they’ll have the whole of Europe” craziness on the right.
by John Cole| 97 Comments
This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Glibertarianism, Assholes
Jonathan Chait just makes the Fonzi of Freedom look like the fool that he is:
Reason.com editor Nick Gillespie has a response to my item gently pointing out his mathematical illiteracy and that of his co-author Veronique de Rugy. A good chunk of it seems to be tonal posturing whose purpose is to show that Gillespie is cooler than me. I’ll stipulate the point, because:
1. Everybody is cooler than me, and
2. Gillespie wears a black shirt and black leather jacket in virtually all his public appearances, and obviously you can’t get cooler than that.
As for the substance, Gillespie offers very little. Let me review my main point. He wrote an article, with de Rugy, suggesting that the federal budget could be balanced by 2020 without raising taxes from their Bush-era levels merely by cutting spending by 3.6% a year. He illustrated this with a video portraying the federal budget as a piece of pork (get it?) divided into ten slices, each slice representing a year. In the video, Gillespie slices off a small bit from each year, representing the tiny 3.6% of waste that would have to be trimmed.
As I showed, and Gillespie does not deny in his response, the claims he made in the video were false. The plan would require cutting the budget by 3.6% the first year, an additional 3.6% the next year, until the 2020 budget was 24% lower than it would be. In other words, Gillespie’s plan would not be slicing one little 3.6% off of each year. It would be slicing one piece off the first year, two pieces off the next year, three pieces off the third, and so on.
Reading Gillespie’s response, I don’t think he was being deliberately misleading. I think he genuinely does not understand the article he co-authored…
Too funny. The last I saw Gillespie, he was tweeting something about Net Neutrality being the greatest threat to freedom of speech EVAH. It’s completely distressing that anyone takes these clowns even remotely seriously.
And really- didn’t the House and Senate just prove once and for all with their votes on the tax cut bill that no one really gives a shit about the deficit?
*** Update ***
I need a cigarette after this:
I really advise Gillespie to confine himself to subjects he understands (motorcycles? picking up chicks with a snap of the fingers?) and find a fiscal writer who is able to make the libertarian case from factual premises.
Heh, indeedy.
This post is in: Get off my grass you damned kids
$1800.00 and one new head gasket later, I’ve been informed by the garage that the car ran fine in the shop, but then died on the test drive and they don’t know what the problem is- it isn’t leaking fluids, etc.
I’m debating going back to bed and spooning Lily, or drinking heavily. Or maybe the latter and then the former.