I forget where I found that image (ok, reader reminds that it was our friend Vanderleun)
The Retail Death Rattle Grows Louder
Can homeopathy 'work' even when there's no evidence?
The Rise of the Master’s Degree
Packing your kid for camp for $1000
From Williamson's The Cloud in the Machine,Or, you can never have the same traffic-jam twice.
Our political discourse assumes, sometimes implicitly but often explicitly, that there exists a predictable, linear, straightforward relationship between the formal enactment of a given policy and the real-world outcomes that will be experienced as a result of it. This is a convenient fiction, and sometimes even the authors of that fiction roll their eyes at their own work, as when the Congressional Budget Office scored the Affordable Care Act and then added the caveat that its analysts did not believe that the policy would be implemented the way the law’s authors intended and the White House promised, thereby communicating that its report should be consumed only in saline solution.
Politics is mostly words about words, but it has real-world consequences, and death is not an uncommon one. The truth, which in Washington is an unspeakable truth, is that almost the entirety of our conversation about politics is predicated on a fundamental error in our understanding of reality. Unlike a certain Entity with Whom presidents and senators sometimes seem to confuse themselves, politicians cannot speak reality into being. (“Let there be . . . health care.”) The situation at the VA should not surprise us; what did we expect, having no way of even knowing what we should have expected? This outcome was at least as likely as any other, and certainly more likely than one in which reality matched policy through some obscure divine office unknown to us.
Ben Carson on Progressive Tolerance: 'Only Works in One Direction'
Rethinking Tax Benefits for Home Owners
European elections 2014: This is one peasants’ revolt that Brussels can’t just brush aside
Thailand: Economic growth is not enough
The Muslims’ War Against Fun Is Killing Them
Coyote:
...climate scientists are trying to create some kind of weird world where model results have some sort of independent reality, where in fact the model results should be trusted over measurements when the two diverge. If this is science -- which it is not -- but if it were, then I would be anti-science.
