I see a lot of argument online about budgets and government priorities and so on. A lot of it confuses me because people are using things that look like math - but are actually just bad argument and yelling. I’m going to try to summarize what I understand of the rabid conservative financial worldview, but with no numbers. Forgive me if I leave ( Read more... )

That big chewy hairball of rage that I wanted to hawk up the other night - but was too jetlagged to choke out? Jim Wright nailed it. There’s plenty of profanity in there, as there should be. It’s appropriate to cuss. We’re dealing with a substantial minority of the electorate who are actively working for the destruction of the republic. Yes ( Read more... )

I want to work up a really pithy post on the ludicrous insanity going on on capitol hill. I really do. However, I am savagely jet lagged and waiting to get on a red-eye flight back to Boston. Under these conditions, I can’t trust myself to hold together a coherent argument.

I’ll let Paul Krugman do it for me. Please go read this and also this ( Read more... )

New post on the RI Atheist blog.

Check it out.

Originally published at chris.dwan.org. You can comment here or there.

After writing that last post about Libya, I find that my heart has hardened somewhat. A piece of it comes from further reading on the specifics of the situation in Libya, including Friedman’s excellent piece on the two sorts of nations we meet in that part of the world. I find myself having trouble believing that we can, or should, be picking ( Read more... )

I think that the US and the rest of the world are probably doing about as well as can be expected with Libya. There is no unconditionally correct answer here. No matter what we do, people will die violently and chaos will win the day for months and years to come. If we’ve learned nothing else from Iraq and Afghanistan, it must be that the “you ( Read more... )

I was an early adopter for 23 and me, got my first set of genome data back in April of 2008. Now, I’m nowhere near the real leaders in the field, but I was there when it started to get cool. Got the T-shirt, but not the tattoo.

So I just received the data from my v3 spit kit data. They made me pay this time around, but that’s cool. Soon enough ( Read more... )

I got to spend some time last week in the urban catastrophe that is Detroit. While I was there, I felt the usual sadness - seeing the skinny bones of a once rich and proud city. I find that words are inadequate to convey the feeling of fallen empire that I get when I drive south on Woodward Ave - down from Seven Mile to the core.

I can ( Read more... )

This weekend, I attended PAX East (AKA “bitch PAX”, in contrast to PAX Prime, which occurs in Seattle and is marginally older). PAX is short for the Penny Arcade Expo. It was created by the authors of Penny Arcade, a consistently funny and incisive comic strip about (mostly) video games. PAX is kinda sort of an industry event. There’s an ( Read more... )

I had the opportunity (ha!) to spend a few days at my grandfather’s house in Detroit this week. He’s been dead for years, and the care of the property has fallen to me. The house is a two family brick structure with independent street numbers. Three bedrooms, a dining room, a living room and a kitchen on each level. Current assessed value, ( Read more... )