Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
Some day, despite all the confiscated shampoo and all the groped breasts and all the tapped phones and all the butchered Afghans, a terrorist is almost certainly going to destroy an airplane.  It might happen tomorrow, it might happen 30 years from now, but it will almost certainly happen.  When that happens, a few [...]

By Thoreau
I am indeed white, upper-middle class, educated, heterosexual, cis-gendered, US-born, Christian, able-bodied, male, etc. etc. etc.  I am well aware that some commentators out there are not amused by those of my privileged cohort who have finally gotten outraged at the TSA.  In my own defense, all I can say is that I was [...]

By Thoreau
Random thought:  If the US spent several months negotiating with a guy claiming to be a Taliban leader, and gave him a bunch of cash, all because they believed him, and then he turns out to be a con man, how do they know that those wedding parties really are terrorists?  How do they [...]

By Thoreau
I have in my introductory lab a student who cannot interpret graphs and doesn’t seem to understand equations on any level other than plug and chug.
This student is a senior.  Majoring in math.  And planning to teach high school math.
America, your problems in a nutshell.  Me, I might have to change careers once this [...]

By Thoreau
I agree with most of what Matt Yglesias and Chad Orzel are saying in their latest posts on security.  Chad’s point about electronic devices is an especially important one:  It’s an idiotic rule that doesn’t actually have any point whatsoever, but because it’s In The Name Of Safety you can’t question it.  I have [...]

The Bryan Caplan Pinata goes up early for your pre-holiday-rush whacking needs. I’m starting to think he’s just trolling, though. Even Bryan Caplan can’t be stupid enough to notice none of the missing steps in his . . . let’s be generous and call it an “argument.” Plus, pinatas are a birthday tradition, and justifying [...]

By Thoreau
Booze, nuclear weapons, motel rooms, bar fights.  Sounds like one hell of a bachelor party!

By Thoreau
Salon.com is running a “top” 30 list of hack journalists.  So far it’s pretty amusing.

Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson is good on a lot of issues, but his belief that the privatization fairy will necessarily grant our wish for kinder, gentler airport security is childlike in its naivete. It’s even shockingly behind the best recent right-wing/libertarian thinking on privatization of government services.
Johnson offers a simplistic account of the [...]

Allie Brosh’s killer app is that she writes well. The cartoons are nice, but precision with language in the prose sections is what makes the chronicle of moving her two dogs from Montana to Oregon hilarious.
It’s odd that she has a real-life understanding of how a barking dog perceives being yelled at and nevertheless continues [...]