• BBC News - Barclays: Cameron says bank faces 'serious questions'
  The bankers continue to look like a very undeserving bunch of recipients of free money. More and more I'm a fan of the Atrios approach: if there's a financial crisis, work out how much money might go down the pan, print that amount of money, and give it out evenly to everyone. ( Read more... )

Good article in The Washington Post about how Obama got the nomination. It turns out it was by understanding the process, mastering the details (eg winning the most delegates in Nevada despite losing the popular vote), and focusing on doing what needed to be done at the expense of showing off (choosing not to campaign in California, even when the ( Read more... )

Hendrick Hertzberg jokes (via Andrew Sullivan) that McCain and Obama should each pick the other as running mates. A game-changing move in contrarianism! The only place left to go after that is a suggestion that Obama should pick *himself ( Read more... )

I'm amused that Tony Blair, the Prime Minister who didn't care whether what he said was true so long as it sounded nice, has converted to Catholicism, the church for people who don't actually believe what their church teaches but like the smell of the incense. They're made for each other!

...Instapundit goes wobbly. To read some blogs today, you'd think that this was the 9th century, with camel-riding Jihadis ready to descend on helpless American towns, swinging unstoppable scimitars. It's not that way; it's more like the Ghost Dance or similar movements borne of frustration at losing, movements that do their damage all right, but ( Read more... )

John McPhee is a writer for the New Yorker with a particular focus on science and nature. His heroes tend not to be the pure scientists but the engineers, the doers. His 1987 profile of the Old River Control Structure, the enormously complex ( Read more... )

Harry Hutton's always had the right take on Instapundit (see: The Instapundit: a master of the bore's craft and Instapundit: failing the boring man in a pub test) and by and large, if Instapundit says it, it wasn't worth saying. But this (via Kevin Drum) is so amazingly wrongheaded... Of course, if we seized the Saudi and Iranian oil fields and ran ( Read more... )