Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
I don’t have the energy to blog it play by play, and I guess it doesn’t matter because no pro-war candidate will win next November if US troops are still dying in Iraq. (And Ron Paul, who is anti-war, wouldn’t win anyway.) But I have to offer this observation:
How has Ron Paul [...]

By Mona
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Let’s say, hypothetically, that a certain she-blogger really wanted to learn how to edit text using her Microsoft 2000 version of Word. Let’s further stipulate that she is not an idiot in general, but gets most discombobulated with software instructions and greatly benefits from recourse to a human being as [...]

By Thoreau
As a scientist, I tend to be more practical than philosophical. But I started thinking again about the “ticking time bomb scenario.” Now, that scenario has been beaten to death, waterboarded, flogged, electrocuted, and subject to numerous other tax-funded treatments. But in thinking about my response to the scenario and the [...]

Wow. The NYT’s new public editor is the former Washington Bureau Chief of Knight-Ridder, the only folks who did any real reporting about Iraq before about 2005. Not everyone believes in public editors – Matt Welch is a prominent example – and the criticism might be that if the Times really wants to improve it [...]

Econometrics isn’t my field, but experts are invited to try to pick apart Dean Baker’s new study, The Economic Impact of the Iraq War and Higher Military Spending, new from the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
“It is often believed that wars and military spending increases are good for the economy,” said Baker. “In fact, [...]

Iraqi parliament plans summer vacation. Since it’s not clear to me that the Iraqi parliament does anything – the action is in the ministries and in Maliki’s back pocket – it’s hard for me to see what the harm would be. There is much tut-tutting that no laws on oil or sectarian “reconciliation” have been [...]