There is no objective “world around us.” There are only attempts to represent that world, whose attributes and flaws vary. I am a writer. I believe in being “on the ground.” I believe in “seeing things.” But part of “seeing things” is that if you actually are seeing as much as possible, you understand the limitations of your eyes. It would ward you against the notion that counting yard signs, and not even counting them but relying on other unnamed sources to count them, is a valid way of discerning what will happen in a state in which millions of voters are eligible.
Wonklife
Momma said wonk you out
![sunfoundation:
Revealing All the (512) Possible Paths to Reach the White House
512 Paths to the White House [nytimes.com], designed by Mike Bostock and Shan Cartner from the New York Times Graphics Department, shows all the possible paths to victory available for either presidential candidate.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mczl1fbHke1qhn3smo1_500.jpg)
512 Paths to the White House [nytimes.com], designed by Mike Bostock and Shan Cartner from the New York Times Graphics Department, shows all the possible paths to victory available for either presidential candidate.
One Wall Street Democrat, who has held big jobs in Washington and at some of America’s top financial institutions, told me President Barack Obama had alienated the business community by speaking about “the rich.” It would be best not to refer to income differences at all, the banker said, but if the president couldn’t avoid singling out the country’s top earners, he should call them “affluent.” Naming them as “rich,” he told me, sounded divisive—something the rich don’t want to be.
Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
Wise words from Peter Diamond
What do we know about the people who retire at 62? On average, shorter life expectancy and lower earnings than people retiring at later ages. If anyone stood up and said, “Instead of doing uniform across the board cuts, let’s make them a little worse for people who have shorter life expectancies and lower earnings,” they’d be laughed at.
And yet, in DC, these folks aren’t laughed at. Instead, they’re seen as very serious people making the hard decisions.
(Source: Washington Post)
In terms of happiness, sex is better than money, and having sex once a week instead of once a month is the “happiness equivalent” of an extra $50,000 a year.
Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Princeton University, has done some fascinating research on the responsiveness of U.S. Senators to the policy preferences of voters, broken down by income level. The above graph shows what happens when candidates have to spend so much of their time plying high-dollar donors for big checks to fund their increasingly expensive campaigns. As The New York Times noted today, Mitt Romney and President Obama have both held more fund-raisers than they have public events over the last seven days.
(via Princeton University)
(Source: upwithsteve)
I think that some public leader, some time, will recognize the technological, emotional, and even spiritual payoff in setting our sights on goals as ambitious as those of the space program. Maybe Newt is not going to be the guy, but I admire him for trying.
asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form.
The House That Hova Built - The New York Times
Guys. This is Zadie Smith profiling Jay-Z! I don’t have enough enough exclamation marks.
For another (and this is an astonishing thing), for the first decade of the nuclear age, the people in charge—from the White House to the Pentagon to the Strategic Air Command on down—had no interest in limiting the damage. As late as 1960, this was the official U.S. war plan: If the Soviets launched an attack on Western Europe or some other part of the Free World, even if they did so only with conventional armies, even if they didn’t fire a single atomic weapon, the United States was to unleash its entire arsenal of nuclear weapons against every target—civilian and military—in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. This amounted to 3,423 nuclear bombs and warheads, totaling 7,847 megatons (or 7.8 billion tons) of explosive power, against 654 targets (a mix of military bases and urban-industrial factories), killing an estimated 285 million people and injuring 40 million more in the Soviet Union alone.
The Congressional Budget Office has released its latest long-term budget outlook. You can read the whole thing here. More commentary here. (via The budget outlook in one graphic - The Washington Post)
