Paul Campos

Like Frankie Five Angels I don't have your head for “big deals,” so someone explain to me exactly why the Democrats should bail Mike Johnson & Company out of this mess. And if the answer is, because the Democrats will get blamed, I don't think that's how this kind of thing works. As fas as the moron public is concerned, Donald Trump is already president.

Video of drunk Magnus Carlsen taking over blitz game against a top rated player and finding a solution to an initially bad position in 20 seconds, while singing an Usher song:

This stupid country: Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) suggested Elon Musk serve as Speaker in a Thursday morning post on X following contentious debates over the continuing resolution (CR).

Murc's law is named after the insight of the eponymous LGM commenter that, in American politics, only Democrats are assumed to have agency. Republicans are like rocks rolling down hill or perhaps sharks eating seals: they do what they do because that's just what they are, so there's no point in holding them responsible for anything, since they could not do ottherwise.

A group of high-level managers at the Louisiana Department of Health walked into a Nov. 14 meeting in Baton Rouge expecting to talk about outreach and community events.

Mmmm . . . Here's a nice early Christmas present: The House has voted to pass a stopgap funding bill just hours before a midnight deadline to avert a federal government shutdown.

This piece about Vladimir Putin's successful campaign to make it illegal in Russia for people to express negative views on childbearing is a reminder that a key aspect of the authoritarian destruction of legal values is sheer vagueness: if the law is written in such a way that no one can have much confidence about what it means, that creates a huge zone of uncertainty in which the tyrant has the freedom to punish enemies and reward friends via inconsistent enforcement:

Rickey Henderson has died , four days short of what would have been his 66th birthday.

With final numbers now in, it's possible to calculate fairly precisely how many Americans bothered to vote in the 2024 election, and how many couldn't vote for one reason or another.

Andrew Gelman makes an important distinction in this post between the statistical evidence for a proposition and the ultimate truth of the proposition. The reason this distinction is so important is that politicians and other policy makers have to make decisions not just on the basis of statistical probability, but on the basis of moral judgments regarding what ought to follow as a matter of policy, given what's known about the relevant probabilities.