Yesterday PZ Myers threatened me with an attack by a zombie. Zombies are perhaps the movie monster that I find most compelling. I’ve actually had nightmares about zombies. As a child I was afraid of ghosts, and I am not afraid of zombies in the same way that I was afraid of ghosts, indeed, I […]
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MAS Protest
When Bolivia’s interim president, Eduardo Rodriguez, announced on June 9 that he would hold new congressional and presidential elections within six months, it was widely portrayed as the end of a month-long crisis that nearly spurred a civil war. But the political divisions besetting Bolivia didn’t begin this year — and they’re not likely to […]
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Judicial Review And Democracy I: Beyond the “Counter-majoritarian Difficulty”
I was interested to see Rosenfeld and Yglesias discuss Jeffrey Rosen’s article in last week’s Times Magazine, in which Rosen discovered that courts often tend to represent national majorities. Oddly, my co-blogger Dave and I presented a paper at the Law & Society conference on this very topic. The late Alexander Bickel wrote a book, […]
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Consumption and the Facts about our Oil Laden Food Chain
(This post is by Ianqui from The Oil Drum). That oil is consumed by public and private transportation and industry is a no brainer. However, another, perhaps more important reason petroleum is so vital to our economy, beyond transportation, is that it takes a lot of fossil fuel just to produce the food that we […]
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Fresh Air
This may seem like a weird time for progressives to feel optimistic, but a confluence of recent events suggests the faintest breeze of hope in the air. Granted, the winds of corruption and shortsightedness still dominate. More so than at any time in recent memory, high-level officials are indistinguishable from right-wing lobbyists, gutting government’s ability […]
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Understanding the Current State of Energy Supply and Demand
Scott Lemieux asked a very good question in the comments a couple of posts ago: “Roughly what percentage of energy consumption is taken up by the internal combustion engine, and what by energy production? The higher the latter, the more difficult the long-term problems (of peak oil) would seem to me, although perhaps it doesn’t […]
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Parting At The Crossroads
My apologies for stepping in Matt Holt’s territory, but I was preparing this quick post before Ezra’s intervention (which makes it even more relevant), so I’d thought I’d go ahead anyway. I wanted to strongly recommend Antonia Maioni’s superb book Parting at the Crossroads, which is a comparative study of the emergence of different health […]
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Pointer From Idyllwild
Ezra here. This post of Brad Plumer’s on different explanations for America’s strangely absent universal health system is fantastic, you should all read it. Moreover, I’d love to see [guest blogger] Matt Holt’s response. Alrighty-then. Back to vacation.
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Accountability Schmaccountability
Shakes here… As an appropriate follow-up to Durbin’s apology for calling out the heinous nature of abuses going on at Gitmo, the White House has rejected the proposed creation of an independent commission to investigate abuses of detainees held at Gitmo and elsewhere. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the Pentagon has launched 10 major […]
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Health care costs — what’s behind this inexorable rise
This is Matthew Holt, back with more on why health care costs so dang much. Health Affairs (the essential peer reviewed health policy journal) has an article from the very well respected Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC) which announces that the decrease in the increase of health spending has stalled (here’s the slightly […]
