[updated] Okay. Last night I wrote a post complaining about what I saw as ‘epistemic closure’ on the left – on display here at Balloon Juice. Now I wrote this elsewhere and I wrote it because I was feeling a little defensive and worn down by a lot of the insults hurled my way over …
Galt’s goldfish
Sometimes I think that the fact I know what Tyler Cowen thinks of Megan McArdle’s take on Matt Yglesias’s rebuttal to Ezra Klein’s critique of James Joyner is a sign that I have too much time on my hands. Then I read New York Times articles like this: Her husband, Alan Wilzig, 45, a former …
In the year 2525
I’m struck by how long-term the projections are in Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap” balance the budget by 2063, and reduce Medicare’s expected share of the economy in 2080 from a projected 14.3 percent of GDP to a mere 4 percent. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for using CBO/JCT (I’m sure Megan McArdle would say I’m …
Education and Crime
[updated] DougJ makes a good point but I think he misses mine: parental satisfaction is not a very good indicator of education quality. I think that’s the take-away message from a survey which finds that most Americans approve of their own school but disapprove of the public school system at large. There’s a disconnect there …
Village 2.0
One of the reasons I no longer read any of the At Pack bloggers regularly (this includes any of the younger current and recent Atlantic bloggers as well as a few hanger-oners) is that they seem to have crushes on the people on the cover, in the same way that Villagers do (with McCain in …
Open Thread: Comment of the Day
From Batocchio: I thought all BJ commenters received a set of pearls to clutch. That’s the only reason I’m here. Hey, free pearls. And swine. What more does a blog need? Also, a commentor whose name I’ve misplaced linked to this, which I found entertaining as an example of how philosophical opposites, taken to a …
Replying to Erik
I spend a huge amount time of time bitching about how establishment media types go too easy on each other. So, without being too much of an asshole, I have to say that, while Erik made a lot of good points in his post (I agree that the gravel road stuff is more symbolic than …