Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
Nice article on why the brain takes so much energy and what it does with it.
It’s worth noting that TSA screeners require far fewer calories than the rest of us

Roger Kaplan’s "argument" that we seize "the oil fields" in the American "Spectator" today is a whole "tree" full of presents for the connoisseur of meanness and "idiocy" on your "guest list." I particularly enjoy the unselfconsciousness that lets him include the following in his article:
Let the stupids talk to the stupids . . . [...]

Gareth Porter unredacts part of the classified war plans from late 2001 quoted in Doug Feith’s new book:
Rumsfeld’s paper was given to the White House only two weeks after Bush had approved a U.S. military operation in Afghanistan directed against bin Laden and the Taliban regime. Despite that decision, Rumsfeld’s proposal called explicitly for postponing [...]

I’ve got a couple new, campaign-related pieces on The Art of the Possible, including my Indiana and NC predictions, and a couple of older pieces way down below the monumental Glenn Greenwald interview Mona linked to yesterday. My plan this week is: I want you reading AOTP anyway; so between now and Friday, I’m not [...]

By Thoreau
The unstoppable juggernaut that is the Ministry for State Security is bound and determined to protect America from a dire over-supply of construction workers, for fear that any one of them might secretly be plotting to scam Osama Bin Laden.  (Only in America would that be a crime.)
However, they’ve run into a snag:  The [...]

By Thoreau
Even a TSA screener.
Look, it would be one thing if the only people able to get guns past the TSA were the super-secret ultra-skilled undercover inspectors (and I’m sure that they’re ultra-skilled because otherwise the feds would never, ever hire them!). But apparently getting a gun past the checkpoint is so easy that [...]