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Read 18 hours ago and current, but nothing has been published for 3 years.
I don’t blog (much) anymore; I have kids and a full-time job, and I don’t follow politics as a hobby much either. It’s all too pointless. But we are entering the nomination season, and I have some thoughts on the general knowledge problem that we face, and I wanted to share them. Welcome to the Fog Congratulations! You’re an American voter. You have been blessed with the enormous responsibility of…
The Bills/Chiefs game, the Patriots/Falcons Super Bowl, and the Patriots/Chiefs AFC Championship Game ended on an anticlimax. The outcome of the game was preordained by the coin toss: in all cases, if you watched the game, you knew what was going to happen: the team that won the toss was going to win. Forget "fair" in sports. Sports don't have to be fair; the ruleset is understood before the game,…
Filter: Contention Confidence Level Why I Believe This Updated mRNA vaccines are highly effective against covid. High Vaccines 7/10/2021 mRNA vaccines can produce myocarditis in younger people. Medium -> High Treatment 7/10/2021 Dexamethasone is a mildly effective treatment for severe covid cases. High This is the standing medical consensus at this point, and I think we've been solidly here for a…
In my ideal world, the Chinese government would have identified the risks of the virus back in December and instituted the protocols necessary to prevent its spread. But this is not that world. In my ideal world, world governments would have understood that the virus warranted more aggressive travel restrictions immediately, rather than being lackadaisical. But this is not that world. In my ideal…
On Facebook back in September 2016, I wrote the following: You don't have to convince me that Clinton is deeply flawed. The transfer of classified information over an unsecured email server--and the unconvincing efforts of her allies to downplay it--drives me insane. Her penchant for secrecy is downright destructive. She and her husband have used the halo of the presidency to enrich themselves far…
Why would John McCain have asked Barack Obama and George W. Bush to eulogize him, anyway? Bush and Obama have a couple of things in common, but one stands out above all: they were the two men who defeated John McCain in presidential campaigns--Bush did it in 2000; Obama did it in 2008. McCain's most avid supporters would probably cry foul about the way that those campaigns played out--both were…
Palm Sunday is one of the most important days of the Catholic liturgical year for reasons fundamental to the religion: it's about the condemnation and death of the Messiah. As a Catholic, I accept the theology of the whole thing. But for the last few years, I've returned to the same set of thoughts about why the liturgy is so powerful and important to me from a secular standpoint. The Catholic…
This one is straightforward: Thursday Night Football games are by and large trash: lots of penalties, sloppy play, big margins. And this makes sense: if Thursday Night Football games were consistently better, it would refute the need for practice and recovery weeks in general. So, with a hat tip to @rchatter29 on Twitter , this is the way to handle it: 1. Move to two bye weeks per team. That…
Joe Arpaio is the epitome of a dangerous sort of conservatism. I write about conservatism a lot from where I see it. I think of conservatism as a combination of a few things: respect for tradition, local preferences, apolitical spaces, the rule of law, epistemological modesty, bottom-up experimentation, and skepticism of both populism and technocracy. (I even wrote a bunch of rambling pieces to…
Take responsibility for your actions. A lot of people in America can get away with avoiding this one. The structures of American society are tilted at times, towards, among other folks, white people, rich people, and people who exercise the powers of the state. They are able to make mistakes or commit wrongdoing and use the criminal justice system, connections, public goodwill, or personal and…
