Serous Journalism from the Times this morning:
I haven’t seen a grey lady’s attempt to be relevant fail so spectacularly since the Clinton campaign:
No one’s expecting you to be young and hip, Hillary, they’re expecting you to be a smart, savvy, highly-accomplished corporate crony. No one goes the Times to read listicles or do a survey to find out which Minion they are. Stay in your lane.
Every time a cop unjustifiably1 kills someone, you can count on a statist talking head to explain that he was a bad apple. They never seem to grasp that the whole expression is “One bad apple spoils the barrel;” the idea being that isolated instances of bad behaviour can become endemic if not prevented or immediately excised. Even that expression misleads in this context, because police violence isn’t primarily caused by isolated bad actors, but instead is the product of a system which encourages violent responses to a large amount of harmless behaviour and then protects the perpetrators of the violence from scrutiny. Plus systemic racism. Continue reading “Bad Apples”
Among the many insanities set forth by my fellow pontificator in his predictions about the threats of a Trump presidency, he hid this modest gem of accepted and completely wrong political wisdom: Continue reading “Man Date”
To help get everyone in the mood for this leap year’s special present–one extra Monday in the year–California gas prices shot up on Friday as “refineries switch from the winter blend of fuel to the more expensive state-mandated summer blend.” So the weekend started badly and ended worse. Continue reading “California Gets the Gas Face”
Running with the theme of taking cheap shots at Australia from afar, I turn now to a popular but short-sighted proposal to cap ATM fees in Australia. Continue reading “Get your money for nothing, get your votes for free”
This is a post about racism in Australia, and before I launch into that, I want to make two things pretty clear:
1) I am Australian, and
2) I am not black.
On this morning’s Diane Rehm Show,* discussing shortages of pediatric oncology drugs, Capt. Valerie Jensen of the FDA let slip the FDA’s apparent position on how to fix pharmaceutical shortages in the US:
We would love to be able to tell companies how much to make and what to make. It’s just not in our authority. Continue reading “And we would have gotten away with it, if it wasn’t for that pesky 13th Amendment”
Legal issues are in the news a lot these days, which is frustrating for a lot of lawyers because most people know squat about the law. It’s additionally frustrating because a lot of the people talking about the law on the news should be better informed than their statements reveal them to be. Continue reading “NPR, Planned Parenthood, and Legal Ignorance”
