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I detest every bit of legislation he has put forward and he openly loathes my entire political outlook. We had lunch last week; he’s actually rather charming. So commented a friend in the UK parliament. I assume similar sentiments informed Lexington’s analysis of U.K. versus U.S. cross-party relationships, which contains this acute observation:
Archive for September, 2011
September 15th, 2011
Category: Commerce and its discontents, Financial crises
One of the most annoying things about the troglodyte right is its celebration of “Tax Freedom Day” where supposedly you are no longer working for the government. As soon as they start saying that they don’t want to benefit from Social Security, Medicare, national security, food safety, environmental protection, education etc. etc. then we can [...]
September 14th, 2011
Category: MSM (mainstream media)
It’s gratifying when Ezra Klein quotes my work, since I admire what he and his colleagues Suzy Khimm, Sarah Kliff, Dylan Matthews, and Brad Plumer are doing at the Washington Post‘s Wonkblog. Wonkblog was relaunched and expanded this week. I think this is a particularly heartening development for the future of web journalism. (The Robert [...]
September 14th, 2011
Category: Britain, MSM (mainstream media)
The Telegraph really covered itself in glory last Friday by printing a few selected photos of the Cameron-Johnson tennis match on the front page with minimal text. The men and their styles have been compared in countless essays and news articles, but somehow all those words don’t convey as much as these well-shot and well-chosen [...]
September 14th, 2011
Category: Film
My preferred airline now has a channel of “classic films”, which included the Bond outing “
September 13th, 2011
Category: Uncategorized
Keith’s post raises important points so I’d like to add two thoughts. 1. An optimist would point to Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and say that the rise of the benevolent billionaires will fill part of the void. Such foundations will fund an increasing share of basic research. Are their grant officers “smarter” than their government counterparts? Can such Foundations [...]
September 13th, 2011
Category: Elections 2010 and 2012, Health and Medicine
When I began my training in pediatrics in the 1970s, most children diagnosed with cancer did not survive. Today, the vast majority of children diagnosed with cancer are cured. I pulled out and juxtaposed for effect the above two sentences, which appear at different points within the introduction to the latest issue of Stanford Medicine [...]
September 13th, 2011
Category: Uncategorized
OK. Sometimes an alert is a false alarm. Can’t be helped. But then you say, “We’re sorry to have over-reacted to what turned out to be nothing,” rather than “The public would rather us err on the side of caution than not.”